Page 111 of Entangled

“Okay.” He sighs. “But call me if anything weird happens, I don’t think Kyle and Kurt are still in town, but you never know.”

“Don’t worry, Dawson.” I roll my eyes, walking to the front door and turning the lock. “The door is now locked and all is quiet on the home front. Talk to you in the morning, okay?”

“Alright… hey, Elle.” He pauses, voice becoming soft when he speaks. “You know I love you, right?”

My heart gives a little flutter of happiness as I walk back to the living room. “I know.”

Heavy silence sounds from the other end of the phone before I hear his breath hitch as if he’s about to say something but the words never come.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “Yeah, everything’s fine. Just call when you’re done, okay?”

“Will do. Tell Zane I said hi.”

I pull the phone from my ear and end the call, setting it down on the arm of the couch and digging my keys out of the back pocket of my shorts to drop there as well. Sitting down, I bring my knees up to my chest and loop my arms around them, looking at the large file sealed in a clear evidence bag next to me. It’s bigger than I expected, a thick thing with the Landing Point police department crest across the front and my parents’ names along with the date of their death below it. I can see a multitude of papers and photographs sticking out at the edges and it’s bound inside the evidence bag with some tightly wound rubber bands.

It intimidates me, the size of it. I’m not sure what I expected or if I had even really thought it through but there are clearly hundreds of pages within. My eyes zero in on the edge of one of the photographs peeking out, seeing the pool of blood standing out against the wood floor and my stomach clenches up painfully at the sight of it. I stare at the reflective burgundy pool, wondering which one of my parents it belongs to, and feel a flood of saliva in my mouth as my stomach turns and my pulse pounds in my ears. Swallowing down the excess saliva, I reason with myself that I’ll look through the paperwork first, and then, if that doesn’t hold any answers… I’ll face the photographs.

It’s just like their house, El. One room at a time, yeah?

I clench my teeth and take a few slow breaths through my nose, allowing the thought to calm me down enough to reach forward and break the seal on the evidence bag. Pulling the file out, I twist off the rubber bands and make sure to grip it tightly as I do so that the contents don’t fall out everywhere. I place the rubber bands on the arm of the couch next to my phone and settle in, crossing my legs before pulling the file into my lap and opening it up.

The first page is a police report filed by the deputy who had first arrived at the house that night, citing that he had responded to an anonymous call made about hearing shots fired from the Delacroix home. My brows drop down at the description and I narrow my eyes at the page, rereading the description. It makes no sense. No one could have heard shots fired with how far they were out there. And just like Leah Reynolds had said, no one had traced the fucking call. There wasn’t even a phone number listed.

I look up to find the deputy’s name and see that it’s Garret Simmons. I just might have to look up Deputy Simmons and see if he’s still around to answer some questions about who was on the other end of the call that night. Dropping my eyes back down to his report, I read that when no one answered the door, he had proceeded to perform a wellness check, during which he found my parents’ bodies upstairs in their bedroom. He had called in the cavalry at that point and then checked out the rest of the house.

Where he had found me. Fast asleep in my bedroom.

I had never spent much time thinking about it, who had found me that night, who had ushered me from that place of horror and tragedy. But this…

I run my fingers over his handwritten note where he describes finding me asleep in my room, waiting with me until the other officers arrived and then picking me up and taking me from that place. And all of a sudden I feel some kind of kinship with this unknown officer who watched over me for a short time. Gratitude that he was there to save me from waking up and finding my parents that way. Even if I’m about to dive headlong into the trauma now. At least he had sheltered me from the worst of it for a time.

Clearing my throat to ease the tightness in it, I flip to the next page and find the then town sheriff’s notes on what they had found that night. My mother, shot in the chest and splayed out by the door. My father, fallen at the foot of the bed with that brilliant mind exposed to the world. The gun that had inflicted so much damage found mere inches from his hand.

I flip through page after page of handwritten reports and evidence logs, trying to find anything that speaks to what caused their altercation that night. But everything else in the house was in perfect order, not even a book fallen from a shelf or a pillow out of place. The bodies lying on the bedroom floor were the only smudge found in the perfectly happy facade.

Darkness has fallen by the time I make it through all the paperwork and can see the shadow of the first photograph behind the page I just finished reading. I play with the edge of the page, putting off the inevitable for a few seconds longer as my heart starts to race. The life-giving muscle pounding right through the skin of my chest. As if it’s beating all the harder to spite the death I’m about to see.

Whose ghost awaits me on the next page?

Mother? Father?

Or both, waiting for this macabre last embrace?

I flip the page and the sight that greets me has my hand flying up to cover my mouth as I race for the bathroom. Barely making it in time to lift up the lid to the toilet before emptying my stomach of everything I’ve eaten today. I keep heaving long after there’s nothing left but bile in my stomach. The picture I just saw burning itself into my mind, unable to ever be unseen. And I know instinctively it will not be a memory that ever fades blissfully into the gray matter.

Pushing down the handle to flush the toilet, I sit back on the tile, body chilled by the light sheen of sweat covering my skin. Stomach still knotted as soft shudders hit me in random intervals. Maybe Sheriff Reynolds was right. Maybe I should have let their grisly ghosts rest in peace and saved myself this trip to a haunted wonderland.

Some innate part of me bucks at the thought though and I stand up, walking to the sink and splashing some water on my face before looking in the mirror. Seeing the almost exact replica of the death I just saw staring back at me from the photograph. But there’s something harder in my eyes, even though I’m alive, than my mother’s lifeless ones ever held.

You are Eleanor Delacroix. You wear shine and snark like it’s going out of season and you do not crumble. You survived this once and you’ll survive it now too.

I walk back out to the living room and check my phone, surprised to find that it’s already two a.m., before sitting back down and collecting the now scattered file on the couch. Dropping all the paperwork onto the floor, I look down at the first photograph again, seeing my mother’s lifeless body. The bullet hole in her chest that’s cracked her open and stained her pretty clothes with blood. She didn’t deserve this. She might have been mysterious and shallow and contradictory… but she had loved me. That much I had been sure of after reading her journals.

In a way, I had been her greatest accomplishment.

I flip through the photographs for a while, the horror of them all jumbling up in my mind before realizing I’m never going to be able to reallyseeanything this way. You don’t understand a book by only reading a page or a movie by only viewing a scene. You have to understand how the whole thing fits together.

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