Page 58 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth
She turns. “What?”
I raise my phone to show her the smashed glass. “My phone’s broken. I left it here last night because I don’t have a signal. I left it plugged in even though I know it wasn’t charging. Habit, I guess.”
She leaves the hearth and joins me at by the couch. “That stinks.”
The charger is still plugged into the wall outlet, the cord dangling loosely.
“I don’t even understand how it fell off the desk. The wind maybe?”
She gives me a strange look. “The wind didn’t blow your phone halfway across the room through a closed window. Maybe you bumped it with the bags when you were walking through?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I packed up my desk first. Then I got the food from the kitchen and put on my coat. I didn’t go this way. I came down the hallway.” I point to the hook where my coat was hanging.
She follows my finger then her eyes cut toward the front door. “And you’re sure you locked the door when you left?”
“I’m positive.”
Our eyes lift to the ceiling, and I know we’re both thinking the same thing.
She stands and gestures for me to follow her upstairs. I hold up a finger. Wait. Then I creep out to the kitchen and grab a knife from the block on the counter.
When I return to the living room clutching the knife, she whispers, “I’ll go first.”
“Or we could leave?” I whisper back.
She raises an eyebrow and shoots me a look. I sigh. It was worth a shot.
As we tiptoe up the steps my heart thumps. I brace for the creak or squeak that will give us away, but we’re as silent as thieves. My left hand on the banister is slick with sweat. I clench the handle of the knife more tightly in my right so I don’t lose my grip.
We reach the second floor and she moves quickly from room to room. I’m a step behind her. The rooms are empty.
“There’s no one here.”
“Anymore,” I say.
She gently removes the knife from my shaking hand. “The simplest explanation is usually the right one, Emily.”
She heads for the stairs and I follow her, not willing to let it go.
“Do you honestly think the simplest explanation is I somehow wandered from the hallway to the desk, accidentally knocked my phone to the ground hard enough to break it without noticing, and have a false memory of locking the door when I left? That might be the most convenient explanation, but it’s certainly not the simplest. The simplest explanation is after I left, someone broke in and smashed my phone.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
She turns and looks at me from the bottom of the steps. Her expression is one of genuine curiosity. “Why would someone do that? And, more to the point, who would do that?”
We go into the living room. She sits on the couch. I take the chair near the desk and try to gather my thoughts. I didn’t expect her to believe me. I was prepared for her to dismiss the idea the way Tristan tried to get me to believe it was an animal, not a person, in Lashina and Ty’s garden. But she’s just watching me, waiting for me to answer.
“I don’t know why,” I begin slowly. “But it’s happened before. In the weeks before Cassie was murdered, I kept thinking someone had been in our apartment. Things were out of place. Nothing was ever missing but just things weren’t where they belonged; they’d been moved.”
She draws her eyebrows together and her face takes on this pinched expression. Then she says in a quiet voice, “That happened to me, too. It started a month or so before I was attacked. It got so bad I worried I had a cognitive impairment.”
My pulse is a jackhammer and my mouth goes dry. “And the smell?”
She blinks. “Smell?
“There was this distinctive scent—kind of spicy, kind of sweet. Sandalwood. It’s used in cologne, perfume, candles, all sorts of stuff. I smelled it everywhere—in our apartment, in my car, empty classrooms. Then after Cassie died, it went away.”
