Chapter 5 - The Missing Report
The words hung in the cold air of the storage unit, refusing to register in my brain.
"Missing?" I repeated, the word tasting like dry ash in my mouth. "What do you mean, missing, Brandon? She's not missing, her stuff is right here—her clothes, her portraits, her things—"
"No, Lauren," Brandon said, his breathing heavy on the other end of the line, as if he had been running. "When I say missing, I mean nobody has seen or heard from Elena since the night before she was supposed to fly to her parents' home in Seattle. Scott told everyone she walked out on him because of his financial troubles. But the police never closed the file."
My eyes darted across the dark, cramped unit, suddenly seeing the stacked boxes not as relics of a past relationship, but as potential evidence.
"How do you know this?" I asked, my voice dropping to a terrified whisper. "Brandon, how do you know about an open missing persons case?"
"Because I was the paramedic on the dispatch call to their house in Oakridge two years ago," Brandon said, the confession tumbling out in a rush. "Scott called 911 claiming Elena had fallen down the basement stairs during an argument and hit her head. When my rig arrived, she was conscious, but badly bruised, and she told me—privately, while Scott was outside talking to the cops—that if anything ever happened to her, Scott had done it. She said he had drained her inheritance to pay off his investors."
I grabbed the edge of a plastic storage bin to steady myself. The concrete floor seemed to sway beneath my feet.
"Why didn't you say anything?" I whispered, a cold wave of betrayal washing over me. "Brandon, you knew? You've known all this time, and you let me marry him? You let me have his children?!"
"I didn't know you were marrying him until it was already done!" Brandon fired back, his voice thick with guilt and panic. "Scott and I had a falling out right after that incident. We barely spoke for over a year. When he reconnected with me, he introduced you as his new fiancé, and he swore up and down that Elena had resurfaced in Seattle and that the police had cleared him. I had no idea you two were serious until the wedding invitations went out, and by then... God, Lauren, I thought he had changed. I thought people could change."
"People like Scott don't change," I said, my voice dead and hard as iron.
I looked down at the leather-bound journal in my hand, and then at the email notification still sitting on my phone screen: Ask Scott about what happened to Elena's inheritance.
"Lauren, where are you?" Brandon asked sharply. "Are you still at home?"
"No," I said. "I'm at SafeHaven Storage, Unit 412."
A sharp intake of breath echoed through the phone. "Get out of there. Right now. If Scott has storage units registered under that LLC, he tracks access logs. If he sees someone opened that unit tonight—"
Before Brandon could finish his sentence, the heavy metal door of Unit 412 suddenly slammed downward with a deafening crash.
The overhead light went pitch black.
I cried out, dropping my phone as it clattered against the concrete floor. Total, suffocating darkness enveloped me, broken only by the faint, sickly purple glow bleeding in through the gaps in the corrugated metal door.
Outside in the alleyway, a heavy padlock clicked shut with a sharp, metallic bite.
"Hello?!" I screamed, rushing forward and slamming my hands against the metal door. "Open this door!"
May you like
From the other side of the partition, a heavy, familiar voice answered—not panicked, not pleading, but chillingly calm and flat.
"You really shouldn't have gone snooping where you don't belong, Lauren," Scott said through the metal. "Now we're both going to have a very long night explaining things."
