Page 101 of Long Gone

I was too freaking old to be scared of the attic. I needed to get ahold of myself.

First, I needed to deal with the lighting situation. I didn’t really need the overhead light. I knew where to access the stairs. All I needed was the flashlight on my phone so I could see the pulldown cord. It took me less than three seconds to find the cord and give it a good tug. It budged a little, but the metal hinges felt stiff. I suspected it hadn’t been used in years. I gave another hard tug, and the stairs barely missed my head as they fell to the floor.

I put a foot on the first step, testing it to make sure it would hold. My father outweighed me by a good fifty pounds, and he used to climb up and down every year to get my mother’s Christmas decorations, but he’d moved them to a storage unit several years ago. I made it up the stairs without more than a few groans from the stairs and then reached for the light switch in the beam of wood at the top. I flipped it on, and two bare lightbulbs in the ceiling lit up, revealing stacks of boxes sitting on pieces of plywood spread over the attic beams. About a third of the attic had plywood flooring. The rest was uncovered insulation.

I stood upright and scanned boxes, trying to figure out where to start.

The space seemed smaller than I remembered, but I hadn’t been up here since before Andi’s murder. Some of the boxes had been here so long they’d sunk in on themselves.

I went to the end of the plywood floor on the side closest to the stairs. Some boxes had labels written in black marker with my mother’s neat handwriting, but some were bare. The top box on the end stack was unlabeled, so I was unprepared for what was inside when I opened it and started riffling through the contents.

It was full of photos and newspaper clippings. I took me a few seconds to realize it was all from my sister’s kidnapping. Some of the papers were the local Jackson Creek paper, but quite a few were copies of the Little Rock Gazette. It was my first time seeing the articles featuring headlines calling the Jackson Creek Police Chief incompetent.

Even though every part of me wanted to go through this box, it wasn’t the reason I was here, so I set it aside and opened the next box, this time finding neatly folded girls’ clothing. I knew they weren’t mine, because at least half of them were dresses.

These were Andi’s clothes.

Tears stung my eyes, and I sank to the floor, bringing the box with me. Why hadn’t I considered the possibility that my mother would have kept all of Andi’s things? She’d finally turned Andi’s old room into a guest room about ten years ago, so putting her things in the attic was the logical next step.

After Malcolm had killed the Sylvester brothers, I’d done a fairly decent job of not thinking about my sister, but with the clippings and photos, and now her clothes…there was no escaping it.

I pulled out a sweater and pressed my nose into the fabric, hoping to catch a whiff of her, but it only smelled musty.

Andi was dead. I wasn’t going to find her in a box.

Leaning my head against a support beam, I closed my eyes and clutched the sweater. I was tired, so utterly exhausted. I felt like I’d spent the past five months fighting someone or something, and I was tired to my core.

The doorbell rang and my eyes popped open. Who would be ringing the doorbell at eight at night at my mother’s house? Definitely not one of her friends.

Then a terrifying thought hit me. What if the police were at her doorstep to deliver bad news to her next of kin? I went light-headed. Could that actually be happening? I didn’t think I could deal with one more horrible thing.

But it might not have anything to do with her at all. It might be James Malcolm tracking me down. I didn’t want to answer the door for either possibility, but I was curious nonetheless.

There was a small octagonal window in the attic facing the front side of the street, so I got to my feet and walked on the exposed studs, grabbing the rafters to keep my balance as I made my way to it. I didn’t see a police car parked at the curb, thank God. In fact, there weren’t any cars parked on the street.

Maybe they’d left.

The doorbell rang again. Was a neighbor at the door? Or maybe it was my father, and he’d parked in the driveway. I pulled out my phone, but there were no missed calls or texts from him. If it was him, was he here to check on me or get the contracts?

The doorbell rang a third time, and my theory that it might be my father dissolved away. He had a key, and he knew my mother wasn’t home. He would have let himself in.

I walked back over to the ladder, deciding to tell whoever was at the door that my mother wasn’t here, but then I heard a man say from inside the house, “Let’s make this quick.”

My heart skipped a beat. Someone had broken into my parents’ house. I hadn’t locked the back door, but they were at the front, which was surely locked.

But my mother kept a spare key out there too.

If I’d had my gun, I would have confronted them, but I was weaponless.

What were they after? It seemed too big of a coincidence for it to be a random crime. This was connected to my investigation into Hugo Burton, and possibly my father’s ties to him.

The stairs were still down, so I leaned over and grabbed a step and slowly pulled it up. The bottom half started to fold in. My biggest concern was that the stairs had tight springs that sometimes twanged, so I made a silent prayer to any deity listening that I could close them without alerting the home invaders that I was here.

I got it closed without making much sound, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying anymore. Their voices had been reduced to a rumble through the ceiling and insulation. The sounds seemed to be coming from Dad’s office, so I scooted on the rafters over to that area and squatted, leaning my head down in the hope that I could make out some of their conversation. I heard a few words like drawer and bastard and some slamming of cabinets and doors. The sounds headed down the hall, toward my parents’ room, and there was some door slamming and plenty of cursing.

The noises stopped and then they were in my old bedroom.

Shit.

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