Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71312 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71312 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Only…it is because I haven’t gotten a name yet.
“Should we get out of here?” Keith asks.
“No.” I shake my head and let Ethan pull me to my feet. “I’ll cast a circle he can’t cross.”
“Who can’t cross?” Ethan asks.
“I didn’t get his name, but he’s the one who murdered Allison and Marissa. He got away with it, didn’t he?”
“He did. Can I tell you what happened now?”
“Yeah. Tell me everything.” I sit on the air mattress and hold out my arm, letting Ethan dab it with an alcohol pad.
“Nothing eventful or historically notable happened in the house until the late eights. 1988 to be exact, as you already said. Allison Fox and Marissa Musgrave were found dead in their apartment on April twenty-first. The coroner placed their time of death to be roughly two days prior. When Allison didn’t show up to her shift as a nurse, her boss got concerned and had the landlord check on her.”
“Were there any suspects? Maybe a name will stick out to me.”
Keith gets his folder from his bag. “Allison’s ex-boyfriend was the prime suspect but there was never enough evidence to convict him of anything. The girls had a bunch of friends over the night before they were murdered, and the police supposedly interviewed who they could. Having that many people in the house made it hard to get fingerprints. This was back in the day before TikTok CSI was a thing and no one had Ring doorbells.
“Were the official details of the murders released?”
“All I was able to find was that the girls were strangled and possibly drugged. But I did track down someone who used to rent here back then and she said it was pretty gruesome and supposedly the murderer disfigured the girls. I don’t know how.”
“He cut out their tongues so they couldn’t ask forgiveness, even in death.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” I blink and see it play out again, watching through Allison’s eyes. She was drugged, and now I understand the feeling of sleep paralysis. “And then he marked a cross on their head with their own blood.”
“Details that specific probably weren’t released to the public,” Ethan says, wrapping a piece of gauze around my arm. “That way the police can weed out copycats or anyone who falsely confesses.”
“Makes sense,” I say. “Anything else?”
“Nothing worth noting. News spread about the unsolved murder and no one wanted to stay here. Then the house was rumored to be haunted and it’s had what appears a cursed business history since then.”
“So…now what?” Rene asks.
“Now,” I start and look at my friends. “We solve this cold case.”
“I cannot fucking believe you didn’t tell me there were remains under this shed.” Keith wraps his arms around himself, staring at me with wide eyes. It’s the next morning, and we saw no reason to stay and keep up the ruse of living in the house. The spirits already revealed themselves and I know how to trigger the murderer. I’ll definitely enjoy toying with him before I send him on, where he’ll go straight to hell.
But I can’t cleanse the area yet and risk Allison going as well. I need her to tell me the name of her murderer. And I hope that is enough for her to cross over on her own.
“I didn’t want to freak you out and I had to go home for dinner.”
“You would have been freaked out.” Rene gets down on her knees, shining a flashlight at the base of the shed. “The wood is rotting.”
“This thing is supposed to be torn down,” Keith tells us. “The outbuildings are the last things on the list to take care of.”
“That’s probably good, for the time being,” I note, watching Hunter sniff around the overgrown grass. “He just picked up the scent.” The shed appears large enough to have been lived in at some point. Some kind of shitty cottage we’d call a “She Shed” if it was new and fancied up. Now it's just a falling down eyesore that might be covering up dead bodies.
“I still have a hard time wrapping my head around him,” Rene confesses. “I mean, I fucking love that dog, but he’s not a dog. Yet he can sniff out cadavers like a dog? It’s a little confusing.”
“I suppose. I just don’t think about it too hard.” I shrug. “Because I can’t really explain it either.”
We wait in silence for another minute and then Hunter comes back around, letting me know the rotting body is a cat that most likely went into a rabbit burrow, got stuck, and died. There are dead baby bunnies under there as well, but hey, at least it’s not a person, right?
“It’s animals,” I tell my friends but then Hunter picks up another smell. “But also human hair?” Hunter leads us to the door of the shed. There’s a single step to get up into it, and something is buried under there. He’s picking up the smell of several people.