Chapter 3 - Decode
My phone was vibrating with an incoming video chat request, breaking the tense silence that I had been working in.
"Hello?" I answered, tapping the green button.
Annabelle's pixelated face appeared, her concern taking up the entirety of the screen.
"Are you watching the news right now?"
"Let me guess," I intoned, shuffling a few papers to the side. "It's video footage of me and Gabriel leaving the house of Maire Reeve, who has just been found murdered."
Annabelle gaped at me. Her jaw had dropped open, and she didn't seem to notice. "It's not you, right?"
"Of course not," I sighed. "Gabriel and I were in Greenfield. Then, the police station, being arrested because of that footage, then we got let off because it's flimsy evidence, and now I'm looking through Maire Reeve's case file trying to figure out who wanted to frame us, of all people."
I had to gasp for air after that sentence.
"Why didn't you text me?" Annabelle exclaimed. She had a hand pressed over her cheek in disbelief. Her eyes were fixed onto something above her phone, probably still following the news. "This is really bad."
By tomorrow, there would probably be people giving statements to the local news saying they always knew there was "something off about me." I wondered if we were going to get reporters boating onto the island again.
"I'll worry about who's trying to masquerade as me later," I muttered. "Look at what I have here."
"Hold on, hold on, let me turn this thing off so I can actually hear you."
While Annabelle grabbed her remote, I flipped around the photo in my hands, holding it up to my phone. When Annabelle settled on her couch and really looked at what I was showing her, she appeared to turn green even through the poor quality of her front camera.
"Is that—"
"Maire Reeve's strangled body floating in her pool?" I finished. "You bet."
While it was kind of mentally scarring to be looking at this file, in its own way, it was calming too. There was no argument to be had with these crime scene photos—no hidden angles or distorted perspectives. Everything was out in the open, and if I looked hard enough, perhaps I could piece together what each detail meant.
"Geez, Luca," Annabelle winced. "Should you really be looking at that stuff?"
"What's it going to do?" I asked dryly. "Give me PTSD?"
Annabelle furrowed her eyebrows, not amused by my sarcasm. "It could worsen it, which is the last thing you need when you've been doing so well."
I waved her off. "I'll be fine. Now listen—preliminary results show asphyxiation to be the cause of death, but they're prohibiting an autopsy. Wanna know why?"
Annabelle made a face as if to say Go on...
I held up another glossy photograph to the camera. "Isn't this bizarre?"
The entirety of the crime scene had been left spotless. Apart from the obvious problem of Maire's dead body floating in the pool at the back of the house, one would think that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred through the photographs that had been taken.
There were no signs of a struggle, no items that were out of the ordinary to be collected into evidence bags—except for one very small note on the bedside table, written with the very typewriter in Maire's bedroom, printed on thick and waxy sheet paper that Maire stocked on her vanity table. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine the killer calmly re-entering her bedroom after the murder, sitting on Maire's antique chair and tapping out their deranged message:
Don't cut up the body, or someone else dies.
"Maybe an autopsy would show that she died a different way?" Annabelle suggested, squinting at the picture. "Asphyxiation by strangulation is the go-to with that nasty mark on her neck, but she could have drowned too."
"That's what I'm thinking as well," I said. "I just can't figure out why it matters." I stared at the picture, tuning out the loud, dragging chirps of the cicadas outside my window and the ceramic clangs of dishes being washed at Annabelle's house.
I rubbed my tired eyes, trying to shake myself out of the lethargy swarming around my limbs. Of all requests the killer could have left, it wasn't for the police to stop digging, or to mislead them further along my framing. The one clue left behind was for the police to not cut Maire's body up? Why?
My phone buzzed noisily.
I wasn't paying much attention as my gaze flicked over, absently reading the incoming message along the notification bar before resuming my perusal through the file. It took three whole seconds for the words to register in my brain, for me to freeze, and then scramble for my phone viciously.
"What the hell?"
Annabelle brought her face close to her front camera again, curious. "What? What happened?"
"I just got the weirdest text," I answered slowly, moving her face into a small window at the bottom of my screen with a flick of my finger. I pulled open my messages, where there was a new, unread thread from an unknown number.
"What does it say?" Annabelle asked, her eyebrows moving closer and closer together. If she was here, her hand would be rapidly tapping my arm to get me to hurry up and verbalise my thoughts.
"Open your eyes, Luca," I read aloud. "What does that mean?"
"It doesn't really sound threatening," Annabelle said, sitting back in relief. "A disgruntled reporter?"
"Maybe," I muttered. I typed back a response, asking Who is this? but I didn't expect a reply. I swiped the screen back to Annabelle.
"Anyway," I continued, trying to remember what I was talking about before the text came in. "They're taking the threat seriously. Her body is going to be kept in storage with high security until the police are sure that no one else is in danger."
"So the only way to work out how she died is with that?" Annabelle pointed at the photos in my hands.
I nodded. There wasn't much to work off. It was a case that could be anything, open to interpretation at this point—was Maire killed for money? For vendetta? Just to frame me and get me charged with murder? Nothing at the scene spoke of any intent.
"There's only one other thing I've noticed that doesn't seem quite right."
"Apart from the dead body?"
"Yes, apart from that," I said. "Look at her hand."
I showed Annabelle another picture, one that was enlarged enough to see the individual lines and pores in Maire's skin. While most of Maire's recently deceased limbs had gone slack, floating almost leisurely in the water, her left hand was clenched tight. She made a fist that throbbed with anger even after death, though her index finger was stick straight, extended from the rest.
"She's pointing," Annabelle realised. "What is she pointing at?"
I shrugged. "There's nothing in the pool with her. I checked the surrounding photos."
Annabelle mulled over that thought. I could pinpoint the exact moment that the thought occurred to her.
"So it's likely that—
"—she wasn't killed in the pool," I finished.
I found a picture that was zoomed out enough to include the entirety of her body. Maire had been found floating in what appeared to be her pyjamas—a loose cotton dress that dropped below her knees and billowed around the water like a fishing net.
"Dumping the body into water is certainly a way to mess up DNA evidence," Annabelle mused. "She could have gotten into a struggle with her killer. Clawed them in the face or something and gathered skin cells under her nails."
"But the entire house is so clean. If a struggle occurred..." I scanned through the transcripts in the file, trying to make a rough timeline of the day. "Where did it happen?"
Maire was seen through the security footage to have come home at 5:13PM. Unless she jumped a back fence and left, she was definitely killed inside her house, not brought home after she was dead. The lookalikes of me and Gabriel ran out at 6:34PM, though they were never seen entering—at least, not by the one camera at the front door. A cleaner entered the house and found Maire's body around 7:20PM, making the emergency call at 7:23PM.
They were all such big windows of time. Anything could have happened between 5:13PM and 6:34PM.
I voiced as much to Annabelle, and she made a thoughtful noise. "Show me the picture again."
I held up the zoomed out picture to my phone. Annabelle's frowned deepened.
"This might seem too obvious to be right," she said slowly. "But those are her pyjamas, no?"
"I mean, I think so," I answered. Knowing Maire's high-end fashion and stiletto heels, I didn't think she would ever venture out into the public in a loose cotton dress that looked like it came from the 14th century.
"When you're Maire Reeve, 6 o'clock is a little early to be in your pyjamas," Annabelle continued. "What if she went to bed early that day?"
I blinked. "And what if she was attacked while she was trying to sleep, groggy and slow to react?"
Energised by Annabelle's revelation, I shuffled through the photos until I found the one of her bed. The sheets were ever so slightly rumpled, completely normal out of context, but perhaps not so much when it came to Maire Reeve.
"Annabelle, you're truly a genius," I said.
I held my thumb up to the photo, measuring the proportions. I grabbed a nearby marker, knowing that the police probably had multiple copies of these photos, and drew a hasty sketch of a person. When I extended its left arm, and followed the lines that Maire could have been pointing along, there was only one target in sight: a small stool near the bed, stacked with what appeared to be magazines.
"Magazines?" Annabelle repeated when I flipped around the image. "Why would she use her dying moments to direct us to a stack of magazines?"
It didn't make sense to me either, but there was no doubt that this was what she was pointing at—everything else was too far or too out of view.
"Let me see if I can find an enlarged photo of the stool," I muttered.
Fortunately, some officer had taken it upon themselves to photograph a pair of shoes that Maire had tossed beside her bed, and in the background, each spine of the magazine stack was legible.
"What is it?" Annabelle prompted as I stared at the picture. "You've gone pale."
I lifted a hand to my face. "Have I?" I asked absently. "We found what Maire was pointing at."
At the very bottom of the magazine pile, there was a thicker book, lined with gold. The spine was printed ALTSWOOD HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK 2009.
***
That night, I had a vivid dream for the first time in years.
I was twisting and turning in my covers, my head underneath the blanket to soften the feeling of complete silence that had settled over the house, when—
the sky darkened into a shade of violet too otherworldly to exist anywhere else.
I was in the forest. I was alone. I wasn't alone.
I spun on my heel, panting, though I didn't know why I couldn't catch my breath. Movement—east, west, there, duck!
I broke into a run, passing tree after tree. The outer layer of bark on each trunk curled and pulled away from the base, a synchrony of shedding skins. The bark formed little bony fingers that tried to grasp at me as I tried to get away, fingers with claws that were desperate to sink into my skin.
One managed to hook onto my sleeve, and I cried out, unable to tear free. I stumbled onto my knees, only for squirming, electric roots that resembled long worms to curl around my ankles and hold me down. A light mist of rain started to fall from overhead, or it could have just been the tears falling from my cheeks, pitter-pattering onto the forest floor in rapid motion.
With a scream that split my mouth wide open, the roots startled in fright and receded back into the earth. I was free to go.
"Luca."
I scrambled upright again. I started to run. My hands were turning purple like the sky. They ached, throbbed—useless at my sides.
"Leave me alone!" I screamed. Another hiss of movement, to the left, then right behind my neck, a hot breath huffed onto my cold skin.
I hurtled towards the cliff, and without pausing to see if my pursuer had caught up, I leaped off, closing my eyes before I hit water.
But I didn't. I had landed on a bed that was not my own.
Immediately, I knew I was in trouble.
"Help—"
My cry had not even finished before there was a weight on my face, turning my entire world pitch black. The evenly distributed pressure blocked my every method of breathing. I bucked and writhed, but someone was trying to suffocate me with a pillow.
Suffocating.
I was suffocating.
"This is how you should have gone," a soft voice whispered into my ear. I could feel them sitting on me. Holding me down with the weight of their hips. "This is how it should have ended."
Their words were familiar. Their voice was familiar. In some gasp of strength, I pushed the pillow to the side, and blinked up at myself, blinked up at my own pointed face staring down in distaste.
The me-that-wasn't-me snarled, showing blunt teeth. Then, my mirror image became static, a momentary silhouette of nothing except white noise, until she shifted and contorted and transformed into Joshua Koi.
My fingers turned from purple to red to deep, deep ash grey.
"You can't run from me," Joshua said.
He had a gun in his hands, pointed at my chest.
"You'll never run from me. You'll never escape me. You'll never—"
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
He shot his gun, over and over and over again, each cataclysmic sound shattering my eardrums further and breaking the bones in my body into a hundred tiny pieces. Melted steel burrowed its way into my flesh, and then I was screaming, dying—
and waking up with a world-ending terror.
I bolted upright into the remnants of a fading echo, an echo that, paired with the dull ache in my throat, told me I had truly been screaming in my sleep. When the door to my room didn't fly open, I figured Dad still had not returned home, despite my blinking bedside clock telling me it was well past 3AM.
I stumbled out of my bed, shaking at the thought of touching my pillow again. Each time I blinked, the dream replayed in brief flashes underneath my eyelids, still as fresh and pulsing as a new wound.
I must have miscalculated how strong my legs were, because the moment I stepped onto my floor, I crumbled to my knees, collapsing like my puppet strings had been snipped free.
"Breathe, breathe," I whispered to myself. I stared at my hands—my small, pale hands. They were clean. My hands were clean. I focused on them as if they were my life raft, until the images and bright, flashing colours raving beneath my pupils disappeared.
Until it was just me in my dark bedroom again, panting into silence.
"You're okay," I told myself, getting to my feet slowly. My knees were still shaking. "It was just a dream. It was just—"
I stopped talking to myself, listening very carefully instead. Had I moved from night terrors to auditory hallucinations? Or was there truly—
I cracked open my bedroom door, and as the muffled brrring-brrring turned to a piercing shriek, I realised I was hearing correctly.
The house phone was ringing. Tucked into a little corner of the kitchen, we had a pale yellow landline, adorned with the cutest rotary dialler as if it had come straight from the 50s. When you picked up the receiver, sometimes the dialler would light up, depending on if you lifted it the right way.
Brrring-brrring, it continued, unrelenting.
It probably flashed with pulsing lights right now, signalling for me to pick it up.
There was only one problem.
We never set up our landline.