Page 72 of No One Can Know

The car pulled back into the drive. Emma returning. She walked back toward the house, stopping to look toward the carriage house. Emma tried to remember what she’d been feeling, but her grief was superimposed over it. When she tried to remember looking at the carriage house, what she felt was desperate agony, the need to go inside. She willed the Emma in the video to turn. To walk over there and knock on the door.

But instead, the Emma on the video walked into the house.

Stillness. Seconds streamed by, minutes ticking over. Then an hour. Emma would have been in bed by now, grateful for once for the fatigue that dragged her so inescapably into sleep each night.

Then, suddenly, Nathan veered into the frame again, moving at comical speed, and vanished inside. It happened so fast that he was gone before Emma could scramble to pause, rewind, slow the footage down.

When she played it back at regular speed, he came jogging toward the house with an intense expression on his face, and he was carrying something. Holding it up like he’d been examining it.

“Is that a flash drive?” Gabriel asked, squinting. Emma’s stomach dropped. She rewound frame by frame and paused on the clearest image. The object was the length of a thumb, squared off at the end like a USB drive. The resolution wasn’t good enough to see anything better than that.

“I think so,” Emma replied. She tried to keep her voice neutral. There was no reason it would bethatflash drive. And no reason that if it was, it meant anything, she told herself.

“That’s interesting,” Gabriel said.

Emma thought of Nathan’s laptop, all his gear splayed out across the table. The compressed air. The USB adaptor. “I think he was trying to see what was on the drive.”

“Sure. That makes sense. Find a weird flash drive, the first thing you want is to know what’s on it,” Gabriel said, nodding. “It just seems a little odd that he would act so urgent about it.”

Whathadhappened to the drive that night? It had been in her pocket, and then…

It hadn’t been there later. She was sure of it. But how had it ended up in the carriage house?

Nathan was inside for almost an hour. When he emerged again, he had his phone out. He was calling someone. Putting it to his ear. He looked agitated. His hand rubbed the back of his head. Then he nodded.He hung up and went back inside. The conversation had lasted less than two minutes. He was inside for another three, and then emerged, the flash drive in his hand again, his phone sticking out of his back pocket. He walked toward the carriage house and out of sight.

“It looks like he found something on the drive,” Gabriel noted. “Who did he call?”

“I have no idea,” Emma said.

Gabriel reached over to speed up the footage yet again, but the time flew by and Nathan never emerged. There was no more movement at all. Not until the sky lightened into morning and Emma walked out of the house. Emma went to stop the recording, but Gabriel restrained her with a gentle hand. “The woman who helped you,” he reminded Emma.

The footage kept playing. Emma walked into the carriage house.

Now Emma shut her eyes. She tried not to play it in her mind again. Stepping inside. Walking forward, knowing what she was going to find, thinking that knowledge somehow made it impossible. That what she feared couldn’t come true. She was anxious. She was paranoid. Her fears were not supposed to be real.

“Damn,” Gabriel said. Emma’s eyes popped open. She was looking at an empty courtyard.

“What is it?” Emma asked.

“Here, look.” Gabriel rewound, and Emma watched as her mirror self appeared at the edge of the frame, supported by a woman in a baggy teal shirt and black leggings. They skittered backward, the woman lowering Emma to the ground before gliding back out of the frame. Gabriel played it forward, and Emma watched the scene unfold properly, with the woman helping her to her feet and up the stairs.

“You never see her face,” Emma said. “Maybe when she comes out?”

But when the woman emerged from the house, her face was turned slightly away and down as she dug in her purse. Then she walked across the drive, out of the gate, and out of sight. Emma sat back with a sigh.

“Maybe someone in the neighborhood would recognize her,” Gabriel suggested.

“Maybe.”

“Hold on,” Gabriel said, frowning. He reached over and pulled the laptop toward her. His fingers tapped on the keys and the touch pad. “There. Look.” He spun the laptop around so Emma could see the screen again. It was paused on a view of the courtyard. Empty. The time stamp indicated that it was right after Emma left for the bar.

“What am I looking at?” Emma asked.

“There, on the street,” Gabriel said. He pointed. There was a woman on the sidewalk, walking by with a terrier at her heels.

“That’s the same woman,” Emma said. “Okay, so we know she has a dog and she likes to go on walks.”

“Totally normal. Except look at this.” Gabriel skipped forward. It was night now, and dark. And the woman was there again. Or at least, it looked like the same woman—no dog this time, though, and it was hard to tell from this distance, with only the streetlights to illuminate her.

---