"I don't know."
The officer gave me a perplexed look, as though he had finally noticed the desperate frustration in my voice.
He then began to lean in closer, for what was probably the third time in the past two hours.
"Don't feel like you have to lie for anyone; this is a safe place. No one can hurt you here."
"No one has!" I slammed my hands on the table, my words slicing through my lips and the space around me. My voice croaked through gasping sobs. "I swear --I don't know how he got there, or who--whatever did it."
Officer--I think his name was Williams-- let out a quiet sigh and rested his face in his hands for a few seconds. He then proceeded to grab a pristine-looking tissue box from somewhere beneath his desk, a long-overused wooded piece of junk that I assumed was being held together by all of the dust and grime that was caked upon its surface. All in all, the desk was, in an odd kind of way, beautiful. However, the bright snow-color of the tissues within the box made it a rather odd object to find within the old thing.
Should I really use one of those tissues? Who knows how long they've been in that thing.
My mind began to drift off into space.
Hmm...
Now would the desk be beautifully disgusting or disgustingly beautiful?
I decided that it was probably best for me to just go ahead and grab some of the tissues before I let thoughts like those get to my head; that was the last thing I needed.
An abrupt shuffling of papers on the dust-grime mosaic pulled me back to the real world.
"Well Jessica, I think it's about time for you and your family to go home--" He paused suddenly, as though he had said the wrong thing. "Oh--um, unless--"
"No, home is fine."
Just fine.
YOU ARE READING
The Unknown
Mystery / ThrillerJessica thought that she was done with all of the suspicion after the first time it had happened, when her father had died in an accident just six months earlier. When a neighbor of hers is found dead in her family's yard, in a way that was clearly...
