Chapter 15 - Abduction
"You're kidding," Annabelle exclaimed over the phone. "Kaydee is—"
"Shhh!" I interrupted. Gabriel winced too, trying to split his attention between driving and reacting to Annabelle, who I had put on speaker.
"Isn't it lunch right now?" he asked. The general bumble of cafeteria noise was audible in the background of the call. "Keep your voice down."
I didn't think Annabelle heard his warning at all. She was muttering to herself, and then likely relaying our information to Jules, who also exclaimed half of the statement loudly before Annabelle shut him up.
"I honestly," Annabelle continued, dropping to a low whisper now, "did not see this coming. It would be Douglas', right?"
"I think that would be why he had a copy of the ultrasound in his locker," I replied drily. "Do you see them in the cafeteria?"
The line rustled as Annabelle took a look around. "Yeah, the both of them are at their usual table," she reported. "They probably haven't noticed anything amiss yet."
They probably hadn't realised that I had their black duffel bag on my lap, and Gabriel was driving us en route to the police station.
"I can't believe you didn't let us go with you," Jules grumbled, his voice becoming loud as he leaned into the receiver on their side. "Thanks for giving me the slip, Kingston."
"It was safer," Gabriel insisted. I brought my phone closer to him so he didn't have to shout. "The school has probably already noticed that Luca and I aren't there. If all four of us were missing, Douglas would be sprinting to his locker right now to check the bag."
And at the moment, it seemed that we would get to the police station before Douglas could notice anything. We needed to save our own asses from claims of murder, and frankly, I didn't care if Douglas and Kaydee had a sob story about this bag of money. I wanted the town to know that I didn't kill Maire Reeve, and I wanted them to know now.
Gabriel pulled into the parking lot of the police station.
"We'll check in later, okay?" I said to Annabelle. "You and Jules need to act normal."
"Easier said than done," Annabelle sighed. "Text me updates. Buh-bye."
We hung up, and Gabriel and I slid out from his car, marching towards the station with the bag swinging from my shoulder.
"I bring news," I shouted the moment I crossed the threshold into the main area. "Douglas Louws and Kaydee Merchand are the people on the footage. Here is the proof."
I dropped the heavy duffel bag onto a nearby table with a loud thud. It was only then that I looked up, and startled, saw that Gabriel's parents were in the station too, sitting in front of Dad's desk.
"Mom? Dad?" Gabriel was, understandably, extremely confused. "What are you doing here?"
Mrs. Kingston blinked at him. "Shouldn't you be at school?"
Dad turned around. He didn't even look surprised to see us—only weary. "I would second that question, but I've just learned not to ask."
He gestured for all the nearby officers to get back to work, since our entrance had drawn their curious attention. I noticed with a breath of relief that thankfully, Officer Louws wasn't here. He was likely on patrol around the island, otherwise he wouldn't have let my declaration go unchecked.
"No, really," Gabriel said, lowering his voice. "What are you doing here? Did something happen?"
"I hope not," the Mayor replied.
This seemed to be a thing that his parents did all the time—simple questions never got direct answers. They still hadn't actually clarified what they were doing here. Instead, it was Dad who closed the folder on his desk, and said, "We were discussing if you two needed lawyers, since we're getting nowhere with the footage. I'm curious as to what evidence you think you have discovered."
Dad sounded extremely skeptical, as if he already knew I must have brought in something circumstantial. Wordlessly, I pulled the duffel bag open, and showed them the money inside.
"What—"
"This was in Douglas' locker," I interrupted. "Is that enough evidence?"
Dad snapped his gaze from my face, to the money, then back to my face again. "You—" He was torn between praising me for my successful meddling and yelling at me for meddling.
"Tony," Dad barked instead.
Tony stumbled to his feet from a few desks away, looking as if he was shaking himself awake. "Sir?"
"Go grab Douglas and Kaydee from the high school and bring them to the station."
"Yes, sir!"
Tony ran out of the station, creating a breeze that flicked my hair into my mouth. I spat it out.
"You two, come with me," Dad sighed. "Bring the bag." He turned to Gabriel's parents. "We'll have to resume this—"
"Oh, no, no," the Mayor cut in. He was rolling up his sleeves. "We need to be here for the interrogation too."
Gabriel raised a gossamer blond eyebrow, a feature he had inherited directly from his father, and an action he had probably learnt from him too. "Do you really?"
"I'm sure there's a law somewhere that says parents can sit in when police are interrogating the culprits pretending to be their kids on incriminating footage."
Gabriel turned to me, pulling a face that said Can you believe this?
I shrugged helplessly. To be fair, the Mayor was probably right.
Dad didn't lead us into an interrogation room at the back, but rather, into a meeting room along the side of the station: one with a window that overlooked the parking lot. He sat in the chair at the head of the table, folded his arms, and watched the window, waiting for the police cruiser to return from the high school. I dumped the duffel bag into the corner of the room.
"What did I say about staying out of this case?" Dad asked when I sat down, his eyes still stuck on the window.
I shrugged again. "Oops?"
"Should we start worrying about your grades?" Mrs. Kingston, meanwhile, was asking Gabriel. "What with how often you seem to be out of school."
"Mom, I feel as if we should be worrying about whether or not I can stay out of jail before we look at my grades," Gabriel replied tiredly. Before she could respond, he continued, "But my grades are perfect."
I coughed. Gabriel kicked my foot under the table.
Dad swivelled suddenly in his chair. "They're here."
We waited, listening as the police cruiser pulled up. I heard Douglas' grumbling from the moment he was escorted out of the car, and he was still grumbling when he appeared in the meeting room's doorway. Kaydee remained silent, though she looked tense.
"Where's my dad?" Douglas barked.
He and I were more similar than I thought. We both seemed to spit out the exact same line when faced with the prospect of being hauled into a police station unwillingly.
The only difference was that his face didn't match his tone. He squirmed under Tony's grip, hissing about his rights as he was shoved into a seat, but there was a sort of resignation in his eyes. I didn't know if I was imagining it, but even though Douglas worked himself up announcing his dad wouldn't be happy to hear about this, his searching eyes and relaxed frown exhibited relief that Officer Louws wasn't presently here.
Was it pride that caused such a reaction, or fear?
"I can't believe we're being dragged back here because of them again," Douglas hissed when Tony slammed the door shut, escaping to return to his work.
"Honestly," Kaydee said coldly, "the first time was forgivable. I'm starting to think you just have it out for us."
I made a phlegmy, disgusted noise at the back of my throat, and got to my feet.
"I have it out for you, you say?"
I retrieved the duffel bag from the corner of the room, and took far too much pleasure out of watching the blood drain from their faces. They hadn't noticed it when they entered the room.
"We must have it out for you so much," I continued, almost enjoying myself as I dumped the money out, watching each stack spill over one another, covering the entire table in notes. "As much as thousands, would you say?"
I wasn't even done. When my mean streak came out, it was out. Their faces were already pale, but when I dug into my pocket and chucked the ultrasound onto the table as the cherry atop the cake, letting it land perfectly in front of Douglas and Kaydee, they could have been statues. Only then did I sit down again.
"Talk," I demanded.
Stunned silence. Dad and Gabriel's parents were craning their heads to look at the ultrasound, astonished. Kaydee's arm curled around her stomach at the sight.
"You broke into my locker?" Douglas thundered.
Gabriel folded his arms across his chest. "We broke into your house too." At that, the Mayor smacked a defeated hand over his forehead. "Are you going to talk?"
A silent stare-down occurred over the mounds of money.
"Fine," Douglas finally snapped. "What do you want to hear? That we're keeping our kid and we needed money to leave this wreck of an island? That the day we got back from a mainland hospital, we were contacted by a blocked number offering us thousands in cash if we met them in an underground tunnel that we didn't even know existed? Is that what you want to hear?"
Douglas collapsed back in his chair, fuming. Kaydee placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.
"Douglas, all we want is an explanation that doesn't make you Maire Reeve's killers," Dad said evenly. "If you're admitting to being on that footage, you realise what it looks like now."
"We didn't kill her," Kaydee said. Her voice was quiet, but the tilt of her chin was defiant. "We didn't even know her dead body was in that house when we ran out of it."
"Then start from the beginning," Dad prompted. "Tell your side of the story."
Douglas and Kaydee exchanged a glance, silently determining how much they should say. Kaydee nodded. Douglas thinned his lips, preparing himself.
"The first text came in a week before Maire Reeve died," he began slowly. "It contained instructions on how to access the abandoned pool tunnel beneath Altswood High—the one that was decommissioned a few years ago."
Dad and the Mayor were nodding. The existence of the pool tunnel was old news to them. Mrs. Kingston, meanwhile, turned to her husband and gave him a bewildered look.
"A week before?" Gabriel muttered. He tilted his head curiously at me, but we didn't interrupt. We were thinking the same thing: our notes had said that Maire died for failing to find the killer's identity, and so the task passed to us. However, by this account, the planning for Maire's death was already happening a week prior. How did the killer know Maire was going to fail? Could they have planned to kill her all along?
"We waited for the next text, and when that came in, we went into the tunnel," Douglas continued. "We found a metal door that we couldn't get through, so we waited, and waited, and when we turned to leave, the door opened."
I leaned forward, expecting him to tell us who had come through, expecting him to give us an identity to end this mess. I should have known it wouldn't be that easy.
"We don't even know if they were a man or a woman," Kaydee said, carrying on when Douglas seemed to be struggling. "They wore oversized clothing, a mask under their hood, gloves on their hands. They even had a speech modifier clipped to their collar, so everything they said came out as a computer-generated monotone."
I caught Dad's grim expression. This was the same person who had picked up the wig from Delilah's mother.
"You couldn't pick out skin colour, hair colour?" Dad asked half-heartedly. He already knew the answer.
Douglas and Kaydee both shook their heads.
"It was already dark down there. The person only stayed long enough to give us clothes and wigs, and that bag of cash." Kaydee nodded at the duffel bag. "They told us there would be more if we continued following their instructions. They slammed the door in our faces after that."
That was why Kaydee had then tried to break through the door. She wanted answers just like us.
"What were the instructions?" I asked.
"I think the person didn't want to speak too much, so it was kept simple," Kaydee said. "At 6:30PM that day, we needed to enter through the back of Maire Reeve's house and leave through the front door in costume. Then, we were free to just go home."
Which meant the whistling that Gabriel and I had heard in Greenfield wasn't Douglas or Kaydee, and they hadn't left the rope behind either. Though the sharp, piercing whistle had sounded male, now that we knew this killer had a speech modifier, it could have been anyone.
"You went through the back door?" Dad repeated. "As in, the kitchen entrance? How did you not see Maire's body in the pool?"
"We didn't think to look," Douglas scoffed. "It wasn't as if they told us they were going to kill Maire. We found out she died that night on the news as well."
"But was it because you didn't notice," I asked slowly, "or was it because Maire wasn't dead yet?"
I couldn't fathom how someone would fail to see a floating dead body in the pool as they passed. The back door had only one path, and that went alongside the pool.
Kaydee squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think. "I don't know. We honestly had bigger things to worry about, and our minds were occupied. The body could have been there already, or maybe it wasn't there at all."
"Hold on," Mrs. Kingston interrupted. "It's not possible that Maire Reeve's body wasn't in the pool. If she was alive still, she would have heard these two traipsing through her house."
It was a good point.
"Either the killer hid her dead body inside the house at first," Dad muttered, "or that puts her time of death between 6:30 and 7:20. At least we're narrowing something down."
The window of time when Maire Reeve died was narrowing, but it didn't help much with what we didn't already know.
"So you went home, watched the news," Gabriel said, "and decided it was alright for me and Luca to burn for a crime we didn't commit."
"We didn't even know that we were framing you," Kaydee shot back. "I didn't see Luca at school that day. I didn't know I had been given replicas of her clothes until the media was identifying the people on the footage."
"By then, it was too late to turn back," I muttered.
Kaydee nodded. "Once it became clear that we meddled with a murder scene," she said bitterly, "the texts that came in evolved into blackmailing us. They offered more cash as long as we kept quiet and continued threatening Luca and Gabriel." Kaydee looked up then, stirring with the first signs of guilt. "The more scared we could make you, the better, they said."
I bit down on the insides of my cheeks, inhaling deeply to control the shudder that tried to possess my body.
"It was all you, then?" I asked, tapping my fingers on the table. "The creepy texts, the notes in our lockers and bags, the mannequins in the school, the message on Livana's garage, the message on my window."
As my list went on and on, Douglas and Kaydee's alarm increased.
"No," Douglas said slowly, horrified. "We only ever left the paper notes and the newspaper article, and we didn't even compose those messages ourselves. We were texted the exact phrasing we needed to use."
I didn't want to believe them, because it meant more questions going unanswered, but they had no reason not to take ownership of the other threats.
The Mayor heaved a colossal sigh. "You should have sought help," he said. "Douglas, your father—"
"My father is exactly why we got roped into this," Douglas cut in.
I sat up straight, intrigued. "He refused to help you?"
"Officer Louws doesn't know," Kaydee said quietly. "He wouldn't approve. It's not part of the plan."
"The plan?" Gabriel repeated.
"The plan where I stay on Bottle Island for the rest of my life and become a law enforcer just like Dad," Douglas said, with so little emotion he may as well have been asleep. "Why do you think I've been acting like a dumbass all these years? I didn't want to qualify."
Suddenly, Douglas' entire dual personality made sense. Still, no matter how badly they needed the cash to begin a new life, it didn't account for scaring the heck out of me.
"Well, this has been fun," Mrs. Kingston said, folding her hands in her lap. "We really should hold a press conference—"
A knock came on the door, three brief staccato raps before Jolene poked her head in. She was carrying a package in her hands, a small parcel that she handled curiously.
"This was left at the front desk," she reported, placing the box in front of Dad.
"A tip about the case, perhaps?" Mayor Kingston said.
"Or maybe another threat," I said darkly, half-rising in my chair.
Dad sighed, using his keys to pierce through the tape. "Even a threat will get us somewhere," he said. "Jolene, can you direct Douglas and Kaydee to—"
Dad paused, taking a step back from the parcel. I didn't realise why he had moved so suddenly, until I brought my head closer, and saw a small mist of white drifting up from the slit he had created.
"What the hell?" he demanded. "Who brought this in?"
The mist was rising, becoming thicker as more of it managed to crawl out from the package. The hissing sound that I was hearing led me to believe it was being released out of an aerosol can.
Jolene coughed, trying to cover her face. As a smoker, she was probably more sensitive to whatever the mist was.
"I didn't see," Jolene answered, her usually husky voice rising.
Her voice.
A smoker.
My head jerked up. "There was cigarette ash at the scene," I declared. "Was it you?"
Jolene blinked at the bizarre new topic, but she didn't have a chance to respond.
Something inside the box gave way with a crackling sound. The thin line of gas became a huge mushroom cloud that enveloped the entire room.
"Hold your breath!" Dad exclaimed. He was somewhere amidst the mist. I could see nothing except a thick cloud of white now. "Everyone out—out of the room!"
It was too hard to hold my breath. In a moment of panic, I breathed in, and my lungs tingled with a prickling sort of lightness—a mix between consuming something too hot and consuming something intangible.
We never made it out of the room.
A thump sounded across the table. Another. Two more.
"Luca." That was Gabriel, somewhere to my right. "Luca, where are you—" His voice faded to a weak whisper, right before he, too, folded down on himself and landed on the floor with a loud noise.
I couldn't keep my eyes open for any longer. I was stumbling, stumbling, and then I was pitching onto my side, succumbing to the mist.
***
It was a struggle to return to the waking world, but the pounding on the door was certainly helping me along.
"Officer Fern?" a voice outside the room shouted. It sounded like Tony. "Sorry to interrupt but you've all been in there for hours now. We're getting worried out here. Is everything alright?"
When there was no response, Tony gave the door another shake, jiggling the knob to no avail. These doors auto-locked when the button inside was pressed.
My head was throbbing, my limbs were as heavy as lead, and when I tried to cry out, my throat felt entirely coated over with powder.
I pushed onto my elbow, trying to stabilise my spinning vision by blinking rapidly. When my sight stilled, I saw a body collapsed beside me.
"Gabriel?" I rasped. I reached out, closing my shaking hand around his arm. A breath of pure relief left my lips. His skin was warm under my fingers; he was undoubtedly alive. "Gabriel. Wake up."
As he stirred and lifted his head, I staggered to my feet, a difficult task when my hands seemed to morph into vortexes of colour in front of me. Upright, the first thing I felt was a breeze.
My vision settled again. I turned around, and found the window behind me to be wide open.
I stared at it, dumbfounded. Not only had it been closed before, but now it was showing an orange sky—hues that were nearing sunset.
What?
"Dad?" I called. In a swirl of confusion, it slowly occurred to me that Dad wasn't in the room. There was only Jolene slumped by the door, and then the prone forms of Kaydee and Douglas lying nearby. "Dad!"
Gabriel's parents were gone too.
I stumbled towards the door then, flinging it open. Tony peered his head in, eyes wide. He clearly hadn't been expecting to see his fellow officer slumped on the floor, and had to do a double-take at the sight.
"Jolene?" he exclaimed. "Where's the chief?"
Tony had been in the main station area. If he didn't have answers for what had happened, that meant the open window was how three people had left the room.
I didn't think they left by choice.
"What happened?" Gabriel croaked. He clambered to his feet before he had adjusted himself. As a result, he immediately started pitching forward again. I rushed to his side, holding him up just in time.
"The damn parcel," I answered, sounding like my throat had been torn apart. "It was sleeping gas."
Tony stared at me like he didn't believe what I was saying. Then, he glanced down to Jolene again, swore, and started yelling for the attention of all the other officers in the station.
Meanwhile, Gabriel was blinking rapidly. His vision still hadn't regained its focus by the way he kept glancing around, but he had noticed the lack of bodies in the room.
"Where are our parents?"
A groan came from the floor. A cough from Jolene. Douglas was waking up as I staggered towards him, dropping to a crouch and giving his arm a tough shake. I was most worried for Kaydee, but she looked like she had already settled onto the floor before she dropped.
Her eyes opened slowly.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
Her hand went to her stomach immediately, but she didn't seem to be in pain, only discomfort. She turned onto her shoulder, and nodded.
"Luca," Gabriel called.
I rose, rubbing my eyes to clear the last traces of the filmy white dust that obstructed my vision. "Yeah?"
He was looming over the parcel—the half-opened time-bomb. Keeping his face angled away, Gabriel pulled the rest of the flap open, letting out its last remaining puff of gas.
"Oh, god."
I rushed over, almost tripping over my own feet as I hovered over Gabriel's shoulder. "What? What is it?"
Gabriel pulled out a piece of paper at the bottom of the box. It was folded in thirds like a letter that would arrive in an envelope, printed on the same sort of paper that had been found at Maire's crime scene. Its typeface was identical to the message that demanded no one cut up her body. This message was just as ominous.
Gabriel unfolded the piece of paper, revealing the words in its entirety.
FIND OUT WHO I AM, AND YOU CAN HAVE YOUR PARENTS BACK.