Page 18 of Like A Moth To A Flame

“But he said it wasn’t as bad as Tammy described.”

“Not surprised,” he snorted. “She’s always been a drama queen.”

After sitting for a few more minutes, we stood from the porch and made our way inside. I beelined for the kitchen, giving the old phone a sideways glare as I made my way to the coffeepot. The lack of sleep was starting to get to me. I could feel the fog rolling into the corners of my brain, and I fought a yawn as I reached into the dish drainer and grabbed a couple of cups.

“You alright?” Barrett asked, and I nodded.

Leave it at that. He didn’t need to know what was going on. He would freak out and overreact.

Or was I under-reacting?

Who knows?

I poured us each a cup of coffee, reaching into the fridge for the French Vanilla coffee creamer my dad kept in the door. I handed Barrett his mug, and he thanked me.

“Any idea where to start?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“The den, I think. Dad’s got a ton in there.”

“He practically lived in that den. Especially when he was working.”

I snorted. It was true.

We quickly finished our coffee and made our way upstairs. My dad’s den was the last door on the left, right across from his bedroom. Reluctantly, I pushed the door open.

The desk sat in front of the window, facing the door. As a kid, I asked him a couple times why he didn’t face the window. He’d given me the quintessential cop answer; so no one could sneak up on him while he was working.

Along one wall, a floor-to-near-ceiling stack of evidence boxes ran the length of the wall. Along the other wall, there were trophies I’d won in high school, more pictures, a few file cabinets, and the gun safe.

“Boy, you weren’t kidding,” Barrett said with a sigh. “Where do we start?”

“The evidence boxes,” I said, pointing. “I don’t need them. Doubt it’s even legal for me to keep them.”

And so, we got to work. Barrett carried the boxes alone, stating with a puffed-out chest that it was ‘men’s work’, and I should work on the file cabinets. I laughed at him but thanked him for giving my back a break.

Still, my brain was a million miles away. All I could think about was the phone call this morning, the letters, and the shadow on my porch last night. They had to be connected, right? They had to be—

I gasped and pulled my hand out of one of the filing cabinet drawers. Something sharp and not very nice had met my thumb with a painful reminder that I should look before I go sticking mydigits into the darkness. Distracted and sleep-deprived wasn’t the right mindset for all this cleaning.

“Son of a bitch,” I grunted, getting to my feet. As I got to my feet, I noticed a gash about an inch wide that I had sliced into the pad of my thumb, just beneath my thumbnail.

“What’s up, buttercup?” Barrett asked, stepping across the room.

He looked down at my thumb and then down at the cabinet drawer. Gently, he reached in and pulled out a broken picture frame.

“Of course,” I grumbled, turning out of the room and making my way into the bathroom. I flipped on the tap and stuck my throbbing thumb under the icy cold water. The pain began to die down almost instantly.

Why the hell would my dad have a broken picture frame stuck in a drawer somewhere? Why the hell would he do something like that?

“Okay, seriously,” Barrett said, stepping up behind me. This time, when I jumped, he sighed. “What’s up with you? You’re distracted.”

“I told you,” I said, looking up and catching his eyes in the reflection in the mirror above me. “I didn’t sleep.”

“And why not?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “After all the work we did yesterday, it should have knocked you the fuck out.”

It was my turn to sigh, my brain moving in lazy, disjointed circles. I shouldn’t tell him. I knew I shouldn’t, but either the pain, thedesperation, or the sleeplessness wouldn’t let me keep my damn trap shut.

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