The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,109
lived next door to Elyse in apartment 121, who hadn’t answered even when I’d sworn I’d heard movement inside.
According to Bennett, she had been in our lounge, on our floor, across from the medicine room. Maybe I hadn’t seen the signs in Elyse because it hadn’t been her. Maybe Elyse knew and was chased—the chaos of her apartment, like she knew someone was coming for her.
And now this woman was trying to blame it on me instead.
I just had to look her up. Pass the information on to Detective Rigby—that bottle of wine could be proof, the last thing she needed to pin Nathan Coleman, and all of this would be over. If he’d been drugging me . . . it was so much worse than I’d thought. If this Erin Mills was involved, it was another angle we could take. Another person who could point the finger at Nathan Coleman.
I’d been the only one to see the state of Elyse’s apartment. To believe that she was running from something, in a panic.
Get away from me—the thing I’d been calling out in the night. Had it been Nathan Coleman? Someone else?
I opened my work laptop. Searched for her name. The thumbnail photo from her badge, small and grainy, like they all were. Only the doctors had full bios and head shots. Everyone else had a small ID photo from their access badge, blurry when enlarged.
I could tell she had long, curly auburn hair—yes, the woman who had been in the lounge that day, whom I’d seen from behind. But now I could finally see the rest of her: a thin face, large glasses that distorted her face’s dimensions. I leaned closer, trying to get her into focus, and something prickled. A twinge of familiarity. I might’ve seen her other times in the nurses’ lounge, maybe. Or in the cafeteria. Downstairs near the gift shop.
But it was something more. It was her smile, the shape of it—the wideness. Goose bumps rose down my neck. I heard Bennett’s words again: older than us.
I shook my head, to concentrate. To keep the past from rising up and overlapping with the present.
I read her employment history, but there was only one place listed before here, a few years earlier: in Ohio.
A wave of intense nausea washed over me—a darkness, settling in my limbs, before everything went numb.
My hand shook as I grabbed my phone and scrolled through my call log. I moved back in time to more than a week ago, to before the box arrived. The only number that didn’t have a contact attached. That out-of-the-blue call that had caught me off guard, like whiplash: Is this Arden Maynor, daughter of Laurel Maynor? Ms. Maynor, I’m afraid we have some bad news—
Every nerve was firing as I called that number back now.
When that man had called, I hadn’t asked for specifics, too caught by the shock of the moment. I had accepted what he said at face value: that they had taken care of everything, and all that was left were her possessions. It was part of my past, and I’d wanted to keep it there. There was nothing I could do about it now. I couldn’t get off that call fast enough.
I held my breath one second, two, as the number processed. It was late; I expected the call to go to an answering service, but I needed to hear who it belonged to.
It rang once, and then I heard it: a muffled echo.
I put the phone down. Dropped it to my side. Listened, my nerves on fire, my heart in overdrive, as another phone rang, in echo—from somewhere down the hall.
I stumbled to the end of the hall, into my bedroom, looking for the source. Another ring—in the closet, on a shelf. In that box.
The phone that I’d ignored—the old flip phone, useless, presumably dead.
Someone had turned it on. The screen was lit up and ringing.
I sank to the floor, feeling four walls closing in and not caring, not caring at all. I opened the phone, checked the outgoing call log. The only thing that existed, not deleted, were calls, one right after the other, on the night of Sean Coleman’s death.
Like someone had stood just outside this closet, with the window open, watching me there. Watching me and wanting me to wake—or wanting someone to find me there with the body. Calling the number until I heard it. Until I woke.