Page 112 of Entangled

Scooting down to the floor, I start to lay the photographs out around me. Ordering them by what part of the room they catalog. Starting with the corners of the room and putting them the farthest away from me before working my way in until it’s as if I’m standing in the center of it all. I place the last photograph at my feet and turn in a slow circle, seeing the dizzying multitude of gruesome images staring back at me. The horror of them presses against my skin, but I force myself to mentally check out, to shut down my emotions and pretend that this is someone else’s mystery I’m solving. To only care about what story the blood has to tell.

I turn in circle after circle after circle, until I’m dizzy and feel like I’m losing my mind. Because it’s exactly like Sheriff Reynolds said, obvious what had happened here, but something keeps nagging at me as I turn round and round. Each circle I make causing my nerves to spike higher and higher until I’m damn near turning like a spinning top.

But, what, is the question.

I sit down and heave a shaky breath, head pounding as I stare at the photographs of my father and mother. Hating this instinctive feeling that I’m missing something. Like all the pieces of the puzzle are floating right there in front of me but I’m blind to the right one.

What are my eyes seeing, my intuition understanding, that my brain hasn’t caught up to yet?

I sit utterly still for so long, eyes burning from lack of sleep until I’m pretty sure I’ve been trailing my eyes between my father and mother for the past hour. Looking at the way their bodies are splayed out prone on the floor, seeing the way his head was turned toward her, eyes open, seeking her even in death. And she…

Her eyes were on the doorway.

He was staring at her, even in death, and her eyes were turned to the doorway.

Why would she be looking out the doorway in her last moment of life?

Fear for me? Or something else?

I quickly grab up every photograph I have of the doorway, swiping my hand across the floor to clear a space before laying them out in neat lines. Heart thundering with fear and excitement as my eyes jump from one picture to the next. Trying to figure out what she was looking at. All the pictures show the doorway as open except for the second to last one.

In that photograph, the door was almost completely closed.

The faint spray of my mother’s blood misted across it and the wall to the left.

But there’s a bloodless space there, hidden at the edge where the door meets the wall, starting a bit below the doorframe and continuing on to the floor. As if…

As if someone was standing there, turned to the side, so that only the faintest impression of them was left behind.

And my father couldn’t have been in two places at once.

So who else was there that night?

I flick my eyes between the photographs of the doorway again, looking for any other trace of evidence and find a coppery-haired young woman pushing the door open in one photograph.

And then standing in front of it in a few of the others, face turned down and away from the camera.

To keep it open. To hide the blank space within the blood.

I stare at that photograph of Leah Reynolds, trying to reason with myself to not jump to conclusions, but every instinct in me is screaming that I’m right.

“For a minute there, I thought it was Nadia’s ghost when I saw you.”

Her words ring through my mind. That humorless laugh that left her mouth.

My mother’s ghost, haunting not only me but her too.

She fucking knew. She knew someone else was there that night. And for whatever reason… she covered it up.

I snatch up the photographs of her at the door and the one with the blank space in the blood spatter, staring at them in my hands as I coil tighter and tighter with tension. And when I hear Tiff’s voice in my head, bitching to me at the bar one day about how she still lived with her mom in the blue house on Mulberry Lane… I snap.

Keeping the photographs grasped tightly in my hand, I march over and snag my phone and keys off the arm of the couch before walking right out the front door. Too worked up to even stop and lock it behind me. Let Kyle and Kurt try to come for me right now.

I’d fucking eviscerate them.

I jerk open Franny’s door, throwing myself into the car and placing the photographs on the passenger seat. My breath comes quick as I open up my phone and search for Mulberry Lane. I trace the route through town with my eyes, quickly memorizing it and seeing that it’s only five minutes away, which puts my estimated arrival time at a minute past four a.m.

Perfect.

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