Leave Her Hanging: A Noir Thriller

Chapter Six

I put them back and opened the next drawer. T-shirts and tank tops, mostly. Nothing unusual. The next drawer down was full of school skirts and white polo shirts. And the bottom one was just jeans and skirts and jumpers. No hidden notes, no violent drawings, no razor blades, no drugs. Nothing.

I went to close the drawer, and then I stopped. The diary. I was an idiot. I should’ve thought of that first. She wrote everything in that damn book. If there was any sign of what had driven her to do what she did, it’d be there.

I took hold of the bottom drawer, pulled it out of the dresser as quietly as I could, set it down on the floor. My heart hammered. I got down on my knees, stuck my hand into the space where the drawer had been, felt around, and found…

…nothing. I got down prone on the carpet and shone my phone into the space. All it illuminated was the bottom of the dresser. The diary was gone.

I sat back on my heels and rubbed my forehead. This didn’t make any sense. I’d seen her write in that diary a few more times in the time we’d been going out, and she always put it back in the same spot. Did she throw it away when she decided to kill herself? No, I couldn’t picture it. That diary was her life. It was the most important thing she owned. I didn’t believe she could ever destroy it.

But then again, I couldn’t believe she’d kill herself either, or that she’d do it by strangling herself. Did I really know so little about her?

I got down on my stomach again, checking the dresser once more, not believing what I’d seen the first time. Still no diary, but I noticed something else, something I’d missed because I’d been looking for a black book, not a little slip of white paper tucked away in the corner, almost invisible against the painted wood of the dresser. I reached in, wrapped my fingers around it, pulled it out. It was just a tiny scrap of paper, torn out of the corner of an exercise book by the look of it. I sat up and held the paper to the light of my phone. There were no words on it, just numbers. Ten digits. A mobile phone number.

“Spade,” someone whispered behind me.

I spun and got my hands up, adrenaline washing through my system like a flood. But I lowered my fists when I saw it was just Max slouching in the doorway in his pyjamas.

“Sorry,” he said, coming into the room and closing the door behind him. “Did I scare you?”

I forced myself to breathe. “I think my heartbeat’s gonna wake up your mum.”

“Nah. She’s been taking sleeping pills. Nothing wakes her up before noon anymore.” Max looked at the drawer and frowned. “What are you doing?”

“Do you know what happened to Ella’s diary?” I asked.

He sat down on her bed and made a face. “She had a diary?”

“Yeah. A little black book, about this big. She hid it here. You know it?”

He shrugged and shook his head.

I rubbed my chin. “Did the cops come?” I asked. “When you found her?”

Max kicked his feet back and forth. “Yeah. I got up in the night, Sunday night, like five in the morning or something. I had to pee. I tried to open the bathroom door, but it wouldn’t open.”

“You mean it was locked?”

“Nah. It felt like there was something pressing against it. I was half asleep, and I thought Ella was playing a joke on me. So I pushed on the door, and it started to give. I could hear something sliding along the bathroom floor. I got it open enough to squeeze in. And…and she was there….”