In the center of the table is a pile of jewelry.
At first, she can’t believe her eyes. But as she gets closer, it becomes impossible to deny. There’s a tangle of gold chains and bracelets, with a couple of rings set with gems glimmering atop the pile.
Laura’s hand is faster than her mind. She grabs the jewelry without bothering to look closer or trying to untangle it all and shoves the whole mess in the pocket of her coat before she can think that it might be some kind of trap or something equally sinister.
A creak, coming seemingly out of nowhere, catches her unaware.
In a cold sweat, Laura spins around. The light of her flashlight dances across the thick logs that comprise the walls. The space is empty—or at least it seems that way. Her heart rate begins to slow down when suddenly, an ice-cold drop lands on the back of her neck, making her jump. Her hand flies to her neck where it clasps over the drop as if trying to capture something alive, but there’s only the wetness. She pulls her hand away and looks at it. In the weak light, the liquid looks black, but when she shines the flashlight on it, she can see that it’s a deep burgundy red.
Panic washes over her. Before she can think better of it, before she can gather her wits and hightail it out of here, run and run and run without stopping until she’s back in the town center, her head snaps up. The beam of the flashlight follows, albeit a touch slower.
From the beam that supports the high ceiling hangs a dark shape that Laura thinks at first is a child. Hundreds of flies, disturbed by the sudden direct light, lift off it and swarm everywhere, all around her. In the millisecond before it descends upon her, she sees the shape clearly: hooves, spindly legs that hang lifelessly. A lamb.
The flies are all around Laura. They brush against her face and get behind her collar. It seems to her that her scream, when it does tear free, is muffled by their myriad bodies and buzzing wings.
She spins around wildly, her arms flailing as she swings uselessly at the flies—she might as well be swinging at the wind itself. She drops the flashlight, which rolls across the floor, its beam pointing ahead, miraculously, at her salvation. She follows it near blindly, stumbling toward the door and out of it. The thin light of the cloudy day is too much to handle. Her vision swims with white. She doesn’t stop on time, and her foot meets emptiness when she misses the top stair.
Laura goes tumbling head over heels, the edges of those steep stairs cutting painfully into her ribs and spine until at last she hits the soggy ground, gasping.
For the first few moments, which feel like forever, she can’t move. She gasps for breath, filling her lungs with humid air that smells like mold and rotting leaves. All she can see are the tops of trees, their bare branches swaying against the backdrop of the white-gray sky.
Just when she thinks she might be able to roll onto her side and get up, she hears rapidly approaching steps. She has no time to react when someone leans over her. A face, sparse facial hair and acne scars, a sneer.
“And what do we have here?” asks Tony Bergmann.
FIFTEEN
2017
“Mom,” I snap.
Laura barely looks up from her breakfast. In fact, she seems more interested in savoring every bite than she did before. She hardly acknowledges me.
“You made me miss that,” I fume.
Laura shrugs, infuriatingly. “If it’s so important, she’ll call back.”
“You don’t know that!”
Laura measures me with a look. “You know what I think? I think you should let go of this Michelle Fortier thing. It brings all sorts of kooks out of the woodwork. People love to run their mouths. They’ll do anything for attention, especially to be on the internet.”
“You don’t even know the first thing about what I do!” I explode.
“Why, of course I do. You think that because I spent my entire life in Marly, I’m inferior.” There’s a wry smile on her lips, and it’s not phrased as a question. “You may have your prejudices, Stephanie, but I don’t live under a rock. I know what a podcast is. You’re exploiting other people’s dead relatives for an hour in the spotlight. Not even an hour—you’re lucky to get five minutes these days. There’s always something more gruesome a few clicks away.”
I hate, hate, hate to admit it but this is actually kind of an astute observation on her part. And didn’t I find this out the hard way last time? The reason my podcast failed was because I simply couldn’t drum up enough morbid crap to interest my audience.
“The police are on it,” Laura is saying. “Let them do their job.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask tartly. I’m feeling contrarian today. “And do you think they’ll be able to figure it out?”
Laura shrugs. “After this long, does it matter? The guilty party probably died of old age by now.”
“It’s been forty years,” I say. “Not a hundred.”
But once again I can’t shake the feeling that she made a fair point. The guilty party, whoever he is, probably had time to live a whole life. He probably had time to get peacefully old, surrounded by loving family. And the whole time, Michelle was decomposing inside a basement wall, with no one to find her or bury her, let alone give her justice.
“Anyway,” I grumble, “do you have any idea who it was that just called? Did you maybe recognize the voice?”
“How the hell should I know who just called?” She resumes eating, shoveling forkfuls of egg into her mouth.
“Maybe I should listen to the message again,” I say, and lean over the prehistoric answering machine. How the hell do you operate this thing? There’s a big button that says REPLAY in faded letters, so I press it.
Laura is suddenly back on her feet and by my side in a heartbeat. “Don’t touch that,” she says. There’s a burst of static from the machine’s speaker, and the first message starts playing. To my disappointment, it’s not the right one: A strident female voice says, loudly and obnoxiously, Hello, the message is for Laura O’Malley. She speaks with a strong French accent and mangles the English-sounding name deliberately: Omalé.
“That’s enough,” says Laura over my ear. She reaches out and presses STOP. The message comes to a halt with a loud click.
“Hey!”
“No matter how many times you listen to it, if she didn’t leave her number, there’s not much to do,” says Laura. “She’ll call back.”
Grumbling, I go back to my seat. The coffee has had time to grow cold.
“I had my theories about Michelle, you know,” I say.
Laura follows me and settles back into her chair in turn. “Yeah, yeah. That her parents did it. That’s not going to get you much of an audience, Stephanie. It’s unoriginal, not to mention probably untrue.”
“You don’t know that,” I say. She’s not wrong about the first charge. But considering Occam’s razor and all that, it still seems like the most likely answer.
