Chapter 13
791 Words
Detective Rhea Park had been at her desk since seven that morning and it was now almost eleven at night and she had not eaten dinner, which was not unusual. What was unusual was how loud her instincts were.
Her desk looked like someone had upended a filing cabinet over it and walked away. It was littered with papers, folders, printed screenshots, and a half-empty coffee mug that had gone cold two hours ago.
Anyone else walking in would see chaos. Rhea saw a system. She knew exactly where everything was, and right now everything was pointing in the same direction.
The Claire Donovan case had been on her desk for three months, ever since the anonymous tip came in. It contained just three sentences in a plain email, with no name and a return address that didn’t work: *Claire Donovan didn't kill herself. Look at the professor. Look at the lake.*
When she'd tried to reply, the email bounced back. When she tried to trace it, all she saw was a temporary account created and abandoned in under an hour. Someone had gone to the trouble of sending that email without leaving any footprints.
Rhea found that interesting. So she started digging quietly. There was no formal case yet, so she didn’t log anything in the system that could tip anyone off. What she had so far was thin but it wasn’t nothing.
Three women had died by drowning in the same lake. It happened in three different years, and three different investigations had been carried out, but all deaths had been ruled suicide, so the cases were all closed.
Claire Donovan, four years ago. A woman named Sara Dean, the year before that. And a woman named Beth Wren, six years back. They were all Hartwell students, and they'd all been found in the lake behind a private property in the county.
A property registered to Dr. Gabriel Moreau.
The link wasn't buried. It was right there in the public property records, clear as anything, and nobody had looked until now. Three women, one lake, one property owner. That wasn't a coincidence. Rhea had stopped believing in that kind of coincidence many years ago.
But what she had was circumstantial. She needed something that connected the women to each other, something beyond their physical type, though she'd noticed that too—the dark hair, the pale skin, and the sharp green eyes. She needed something that could link Moreau to all three of them.
She'd pulled enrollment records that afternoon. It was a long shot, but she was determined to dig into every possible lead. And then she found it.
Advanced Literary Theory 490, a graduate class listed under Gabriel Moreau's name for the current winter term. She almost dismissed it. Then she looked at the enrollment.
The class had just one student.
One student in a graduate class was strange. One student in a winter term class at a school where most of the student body had gone home for the holidays was very strange. So she printed the record out.
Autumn Calloway. Twenty-two, senior year, scholarship student. Expected to graduate in January.
Rhea ran the name. There was no criminal record and nothing was flagged either. The search came back clean.
She checked Autumn’s social media. The last post was from two weeks ago, a photo of the campus under snow, nothing tagged, with no location either. After that, there was nothing.
She sat back in her chair. Her instincts weren’t just loud now. They were actually screaming.
She grabbed her phone and called the campus housing office. It rang six times and went to voicemail. She left a message—making sure to be clear and professional, keeping the urgency out of her voice—asking them to call her back first thing in the morning.
She wanted to know if Autumn Calloway was still checked into student housing. She wanted to know the last time anyone had physically seen her.
She hung up and looked at the printed page. Autumn's student photo stared back at her from the file—dark eyes, straight expression, and green eyes that made her look like she was thinking about something deeply.
Rhea didn't know yet that the housing office voicemail was a dead end. She didn't know that Autumn's roommate had moved out weeks ago or that Gabriel had spent months making sure nobody was looking for her.
She also didn't know that right now, Autumn Calloway was lying awake in a room she couldn't leave, turning a silver key over and over in her mind.
What she did know was that she was running out of time.
She just didn't know how little of it was left.
- Writer
