Page 29 of Run for Her Life
She almost dropped her phone. “What? You havefoursiblings?”
He shrugged. “Why are you surprised?”
“I just assumed you grew up in a mental institution,” she quipped. She caught him almost smile before his face became hard like granite. “Anyway, coming back to this, Jackie was obsessed with the fire. Do you think that has anything to do with our case?”
He narrowed his eyes at the files. “I want to say no. It’s not surprising she was obsessed. She’d lived here all her life. I imagine a lot of people here are fascinated by it. But it will be useful to understand what happened.”
Zoe licked her fingers clean, much to Aiden’s horror, and divided the files between them. “Let’s get cracking.” She flipped through the pages, quickly absorbing the details. “Wow. So much here is handwritten. How many people do you think had carpal tunnel in the 1980s? November 1. Dispatch Center received a 911 call at 23:42 hours from an unidentified caller reporting ‘bodies’ at Fun House. Patrol units were dispatched at 23:44 hours. First officers on scene at 23:58 hours. EMS and fire personnel arrived at 00:07 hours. No survivors located.”
“I got the medical examiner findings.” Aiden read out from the file and his face fell. “Jesus. These kids range from the ages of fifteen to seventeen. They went through a ringer, Storm. Before the fire started, they were running around in total darkness, tripping over things and bumping around, trying to get out. They have physical injuries antemortem.”
She cracked her knuckles, pushing aside the images trying to pop up in her mind. “It’s hard to believe thateverythingwent wrong in a haunted house. They have so many elements—fog machine, lighting rigs, automated circuits, mechanical props. How do all of them fail?”
“This was the 1990s. Safety wasn’t a priority. And this Fun House was only three years old. More parts mean more failure points.”
“I suppose.” She scanned the notes and pictures. The skeletal remains of the haunted house structure, half-collapsed, with blackened wood and melted plastic. Props or animatronic figures fused into grotesque, half-melted shapes, their faces distorted. Floorboards with deep charring in streaks. She didn’t dare to look at the pictures with bodies. Her blood curdled. “So this is what everyone in this town is obsessed with.”
A deep frown marred Aiden’s face as he focused on something, his eyes narrowing behind his thick glasses. “Do you see this?”
Zoe followed. There were faint impressions of something scribbled in the footnotes. “Someone partially erased their notes.”
He picked up a pencil and began shading it, then he turned it over and read the words out loud. “Multiple ignition points. Charring underneath wooden floorboards. Downward fire pattern.”
“They could have been just jotting down their thoughts before finalizing the report,” she suggested but pulled out herphone and researched the observations. Surprise flickered on her face. “Interesting. These are indicators of arson.”
His eyebrows shot up. “A deliberate act? Engineered to look like a malfunction.”
“It’s hard to say. Maybe they were just preliminary observations and whoever wrote this erased it, realizing their mistake.” She glanced at the pictures again, trying to decipher if what was written was true. “We should try to verify this.”
“There are a few people listed here as part of the expert panel. I’ll get a handwriting analysis done to see whose writing this was.”
She drummed her fingers on the table. “I can believe there were no witnesses and no one heard them, but what about the staff? There must have been at least one operator.”
Aiden nodded, turned a page, and recoiled. “There was only one person on shift during this incident. David Harrington.”
NINETEEN
“Jim, if you want to be a man in this town, you have to get used to violence. You have to know the smell and touch of blood.” His father hugged his shoulders, pointing at the fallen deer on the ground. “Take the knife and make the first cut. Be a man.”
The sound of a mediocre local band playing classic rock music drowned out his father’s voice. Jim took another swig of his bitter beer. He didn’t even like beer. He didn’t like alcohol. It made his head swim and make the demons louder. But wasn’t he supposed to like beer? Wasn’t it manly to drink?
“Hey, Jim,” the bartender said in his usual gruff voice. He gave him a nod. “How’s it going?”
“Same old, same old.”
“Going anywhere anytime soon?” He threw a rag over his shoulder and twisted open a bottle of rum.
Jim swallowed the bitter liquid, despising his weakness. “There’s a gaming convention in Seattle in a couple weeks.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “I didn’t know you were into video game designing now.”
A hot flush crept up his face. He didn’t correct him. He didn’t have a job. He wasn’t into video game designing; he was into playing.
The bar wasn’t exactly pumping on a weekday at this time. The few patrons were haggard, aging with vacant, dull eyes. Jim felt restlessness come over him. Is this what he’d become? He pulled out his phone to mindlessly scroll the Internet.
Somehow he ended up on LinkedIn, where all his buddies were announcing their new jobs and promotions. They all had fancy job titles and did important things. He was more qualified than most of them. And here he was rotting away in a bar, planning a video game excursion while his wife paid the bills.
His father must be turning in his grave.
