Abe stared up at the crumbling house, mouth slightly ajar. “I thought you said this was your childhood home.”
“It is,” Anita said. “It was in a bit better condition last time I was here.”
“Yeah, I’d hope so,” Abe muttered, noting the ripped “Condemned” sign on the peeling door, the broken window, the sagging roof.
“Come on,” she sighed, gingerly pushing open the metal gate. “Let’s get this over with.”
They walked up the cracked sidewalk. Abe glanced around. It was eerie, actually, how quiet this part of town was. He could imagine that at one point, this could have been a nice place to live, but now the houses were boarded up, the remaining storefronts had bars on their windows, and the few people he had seen walk by kept their heads down and ignored his stares. It was hard to see anyone here having a happy childhood. But maybe that was just him.
Anita stopped at the front door, and paused. She seemed to be psyching herself up to enter the house.
“You know, there might not be anything here,” Abe said, gently. “We don’t have to go in.”
“Yes, we do,” Anita replied, her tone steely. “We need to track my uncle down, figure out how he’s involved in all this.”
She pulled out a switchblade, smiling a little at the shnick of the blade releasing from the handle. She carefully pulled back the ancient condemnation notice, and tried the handle. Open.
“Of course it’s open,” she muttered. “Damn lock never worked.”
Abe followed her mutely into the house, his eyes widening. It was even worse inside. It smelled of mold and rotten wood, with a hint of dead animal. The walls and ceiling were covered in water stains, and he didn’t even want to think about what might be living in the carpet and soft furnishings.
Anita stood, frozen, in the middle of the living room. She was facing away from Abe, so he couldn’t read her expression, but her body radiated tension.
He hadn’t really asked about her childhood before. They had been working together for three years, and while he happily talked about himself and his family, he realized now that she had never joined in. She seemed happy, well-adjusted, if not a little intense, so he had always assumed she had a family like his. As he followed her line of sight to the wall, where a hole about the size of a fist leered at them, he began to doubt those assumptions.
Anita seemed to snap out of whatever thoughts had accosted her in this room. She gave herself a physical shake, as if she had been out in the rain, and turned to face him with a tight smile.
“This way. My uncle’s room was upstairs.”
She led the way over to the staircase. The steps were bowed in the middle, sagging as if from the weight of bad memories. Abe watched as she picked her way up the stairs, placing her feet in odd spots on each step. He realized the moment he started to climb what she was doing; where her footsteps were almost silent, the boards screamed every time he put his foot down.
They reached the landing on the second floor, miraculously not putting their foot through rotting wood. Anita glanced at the door by the top of the stairs, before drifting down the hall past it, to a room right at the end. She opened the door slowly and slipped inside. Abe followed, but hesitated in the threshold.
This was clearly a girl’s room. Most of the furniture was gone, as were any curtains that had been on the window, but the walls were pink under the water stains and mold. It was Anita’s posture that told him the room was important. Downstairs, she had stood rigidly straight, every muscle engaged, but here she sagged slightly, as if relieved and resigned. She walked over to the closet, and squatted, pulling her flashlight out of her bag.
Abe felt like he was intruding on something. As private investigators, it was their job to dig through other people’s lives, but it was different when it was his friend, his partner. He was about to turn, leave her to her old room, but she had found what she was looking for in the closet and was standing back up.
“Sorry,” she said, brusquely. “I just wanted to check if something… never mind.”
Abe didn’t know what it say. “It’s fine. Whatever… whatever you need.”
She smiled. “You don’t have to be so nice about it. We’re here for a job, and I keep getting lost down memory lane.”
She was trying to make light of it, but he could still see the strain between her eyes. Before he could say anything else, she brushed past him, and straight to the door at the top of the stairs.
“This was my uncle’s room. He liked being by the stairs, so he could keep track of who was coming and going,” she said, and tried the door. It was unlocked, but something seemed to be holding it shut from the inside. Anita gave it a hard push, then thrust her shoulder at the door.
It popped open, and two things became immediately apparent. The first, that someone had barricaded the door shut. The second, that the faint dead animal smell from downstairs was definitely coming from this room. With the door open, he could see it had also been covered in plastic sheeting, which explained that while the smell was faint throughout the house, the stench inside the room nearly knocked him over. Anita wrinkled her nose, and pulled two handkerchiefs from her bag, passing one to Abe. It helped, but not much.
They walked slowly into the room, and Abe felt his stomach lurch. There was a corpse on the bed, and by the look (and smell) it had been there for quite some time. Years, even. Abe looked between Anita and the body, confused.
“I figured,” she said, her voice muffled from behind the cloth. “I didn’t think he’d go anywhere else.”
“You figured we’d find a dead body?”
She shrugged. “He loved this house. If he was going to go down anywhere, it would be here. And once the cops started closing in…”
“We have to call this in,” Abe said, reaching for his phone.
“Not yet,” she said, glaring at him. “We need to find the evidence, first. We can’t do that if the cops are crawling around, and there is no way they are going to find anything. Or let us help.”
“Why do you think you can find anything?” he asked. He just wanted to get out of this depressing house, away from the smell and the ruin and all the unasked questions about his partner.
“Because I know where he liked to hide thing,” Anita said, ignoring the body on the bed and moving around toward the bookshelves. She pulled a few books down, revealing hidden compartments, but not the proof they needed. She checked some of the lamps, the drawers. Abe couldn’t bring himself to do more than watch her.
She stood in the middle of the room, and he saw her slowly turn toward the bed.
“All right, you bastard,” she said, quietly. “Where would you put them? You’d want them close, where you could get them whenever you wanted. So they’d be with you forever…” She trailed off, and he saw her face go pale under the handkerchief.
“What is it?”
“It’s under his pillow.”
Abe just stared at her. “No. No way.”
She just nodded slowly, creeping toward the bed. “It makes sense. He always said if you wanted to learn something, you should put a book about it under your pillow, that you could see it all while you slept. And if he knew he was going to die, wanted to bring them with him…”
She was at the bedside now, slowly pulling gloves from her bag and pulling them on.
“You can’t be serious. You’re going to touch… that?” he asked, shuddering.
Anita ignored him, contemplating the body. “You’re sick, you know that?” she whispered to what was left of her uncle.
Abe felt every atom in his body begging him to flee, to get out of this house. But he stood stock-still, watching as his partner warily lifted the pillow, trying not to disturb the corpse too much. Slowly, she pulled out a manila envelope, surprisingly well-preserved.
She opened it, and pulled out a few pieces of paper.
“What are they?” he breathed, simultaneously wanting and not wanting to know.
“Photographs,” she said, her voice shaky. “Of them. During, after…” She flipped over one of the images. “There is info on the back, names, dates, locations. He kept track of everything.” Something dangled from the edge of one of the pictures.
“What the hell is that?”
Anita peered closer, then held it away from herself. “It’s hair. Attached to the picture.”
Abe felt his stomach turn. He hadn’t even seen the photographs, didn’t know what her uncle had done, but knew it had to be awful.
“Is she there?”
Anita pulled out another picture, her face falling. “Yes. Mary Costa, December 2nd, 1998. Elliott Park.”
Abe shook his head. They had the evidence they needed, proof that their client’s daughter hadn’t just run away, but had been murdered.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Anita nodded absently. “We should call the police now. We probably should have when you said so. His hiding place wasn’t as difficult to find as I thought it would be.”
She took pictures of the photos of Mary Costa and the hair, as Abe called the police; they would keep the pictures for their records, and in case their client demanded proof before the police processed them. Anita held on to the envelope as they made their way back downstairs, and waited in the dim light for the police to arrive.
When they did, Anita and Abe explained why they were in the house, providing their PI licenses. They handed over the manila envelope, and told the officers where to find the body. After a few more rounds of routine questions, they were allowed to leave.
Abe didn’t know what to say as they walked back to the car. He thought the smells would never leave his nostrils, the sights would haunt his dreams. He’d seen some things as PI, but nothing like this.
They sat silently in the car for a few minutes.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Anita finally said.
“What, your uncle’s dead body and the file of victims he kept under his pillow?” Abe asked, sounding harsher to his own ears than he meant.
“Yes, that.” Anita sighed, and it sounded so lost, so weary, that Abe finally looked at her. She was usually tough, tougher than he was, but there were tears glistening in her eyes. “I never wanted anyone to know about that part of my life. And there you were, taking it all in.”
“It doesn’t change how I see you,” he said, but she just snorted. “Okay, it does,” he amended, “but it just makes me realize how strong you really are, what you have been through, and what you have done to make yourself the person you are today. And I gotta say, you amaze me.”
Anita glanced up at him, eyes guarded but hopeful. “Really?”
“Really.” Abe smiled, patting her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. Waffles?”
“Waffles,” she said, smiling slightly. They always got waffles when they finished a case.
Abe drove in silence for a while, glancing over to Anita at the red lights. She was turning something small and metallic over in her hands, but he didn’t want to press. He did have one question, though.
“How did you know?”
“What?”
Abe swallowed. “How did you know your uncle killed Mary Costa? We barely followed any other leads before you brought us there.”
Anita hesitated, as if trying to figure out what to say. “I knew she was his type. And I knew… I knew there were a lot of things he did, bad things. And the timing was right, the location. I don’t know, I just… knew. Or had to check, had to make certain one way or the other.”
Abe nodded. “Okay, then. Good enough for me.”
He caught her small smile out of the corner of his eye.
“Thank you, Abe. For… for everything.”
He nodded, and didn’t comment when they arrived at the waffle place and she was wearing a tarnished locket he had never seen before.
Inspired by a writing prompt from Writing Prompt Generator.
© The Lightning Tower, 2020