One Night. No Alibis

Chapter four: The Phone

The party house sat at the end of Clearmont Drive in the particular quiet of a place that had recently held a great deal of noise. Logan's parents were away until Thursday. He had been clear about that when he told the others he was going back inside, that there might still be something to find, some piece Sienna had left behind that mattered. He said it like it was practical. Ava thought it might be something else.

They went on Wednesday after school, the five of them, walking in through the back because the front felt too visible. The house still smelled faintly of the party, something sweet and stale underneath the cleaning products Logan had used. Cups were gone. The surfaces were mostly restored. But details lingered the way they always did, a ring on the coffee table, a forgotten jacket draped over the banister.

'She was using the coat room,' Ava said. 'When she was on the phone. She went in there specifically.'

The coat room was a narrow space off the hallway, barely more than a deep closet with hooks on both walls and a small shelf above them. Logan opened it. They stood in the doorway and looked at the ordinary interior of it, the remaining coats, a pair of gloves on the floor.

'What are we looking for?' Riley asked.

Ava stepped inside and looked at the shelf, which held a small decorative box and a ceramic dish for keys. She moved the box. Nothing. She looked at the back corner where the hooks met the wall. She crouched and checked the floor.

The phone was behind the baseboard heater, flat against the wall, pushed far enough that it was invisible unless you were crouched at the right angle. It was a slim phone in a rose-gold case with a small sticker of a star on the back corner, and Ava recognized it immediately.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

'She hid it,' Logan said.

'Or someone hid it for her,' Zach said, which was an interesting distinction that he seemed to realize immediately, because he looked away after he said it.

Ava picked it up carefully, holding it at the edge. The screen was locked but not shattered, and when she pressed the side button it lit up with a series of notifications, texts and missed calls layered over each other, some from contacts, some from a number with no name attached.

She photographed the notifications without unlocking the phone, her own phone camera capturing what was visible on the screen. Three messages from the unnamed number, the most recent sent at eleven forty-eight on the night of the party.

The first said: We need to talk tonight. Not tomorrow.

The second, sent twenty minutes later: I know you're there. Pick up.

The third: You tell them and it's over. You understand what I mean.

The room was very quiet.

'You tell them and it's over,' Riley read aloud, voice thin. 'What does that mean exactly?'

'It means someone was threatening her,' Ava said.

'She said something like that in the hallway,' Logan said. He was looking at the phone. 'On the call.'

Ava turned to him. 'How do you know what she said in the hallway?'

He met her eyes. 'You're not the only one who was near the hallway, Ava.'

It should have been a simple clarification. It didn't feel like one.

They debated what to do with the phone. Caleb said they should hand it over to the detective immediately. Zach said they should look through it first, copy everything. Logan said they should think carefully before doing anything. Riley said nothing but watched everyone's faces with the focused attention of someone keeping a separate score.

In the end they photographed what was visible on the locked screen, agreed not to tamper with the device, and Ava took it home in a paper bag to bring to the detective the following morning. That was the agreement. That was what they said they would do.

She lay in bed that night reading the screenshots on her phone. Someone had threatened Sienna. Sienna had not backed down, at least not on the phone call Ava had overheard. She had said: Try it and see what happens. Which meant she had something too. Something she was using in return.

Blackmail ran both directions, Ava thought. And the question was not only who had threatened Sienna but what Sienna had known that was dangerous enough to threaten back.