Page 56 of Tangled Past
“I’ll go,” Asa said.
Will handed him a small flashlight. “If you see anything that looks unstable, back out,” he said. “Last thing we need is for the floor to give way while you’re in there.”
“That would be on-brand for this week,” Asa muttered.
Maya knelt beside the door. “Be careful.”
He met her eyes. “Yes, ma’am.” Then he ducked inside.
The space forced him onto his hands and knees immediately. The beam of light cut across exposed beams, rolls of insulation, and the occasional spiderweb glinting like wire.
He inched slowly past a rusty toolbox, then later a box of Christmas ornaments. No notebooks. No folders. Nothing that looked like the kind of evidence hidden from a murderer.
“Anything?” JT’s voice floated in from behind.
“A lot of dust,” Asa said, resisting the urge to cough. “A few questionable spiders. That’s about it.” He pushed deeper. Just as he was about to reach the point where the roof dipped too low to continue, his light caught on something that didn’t match the rest of the space.
A strip of wood, nailed between two beams, looked slightly newer than the boards around it. The edge of it had a faint smear of a different paint along one side, as if it had been pulled from another part of the house and repurposed.
Asa shifted, his heart rate kicking up a notch. “There’s something here,” he called. He aimed the flashlight more carefully.
The board wasn’t just bridging beams. It covered a shallow recess in the wall, no bigger than a shoebox. A makeshiftcompartment. Hidden in a place nobody would check unless they were desperate or knew what to look for.
His chest tightened. “Of course, you would,” he whispered to the old boards. “That’s just like you.” Carefully, he wedged his fingers under one side of the board and pried. The nails resisted. Then one gave with a soft squeal. Then another. After a minute of steady work, the board came free.
Behind it, wrapped in a brittle, plastic grocery bag, lay a thin, battered notebook.
For a moment, Asa just stared. He heard his own breathing in the tight space.
“Asa?” Maya’s faint voice floated in. “Is everything okay?”
He exhaled slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I found something.” He retrieved the gloves from his pocket, then carefully slid the bundle toward the opening. Clutching the bag in his hand, he backed out, boots scraping against the boards.
Maya and Rachel were waiting at the door. Both moved aside to let him out. Will stood next to JT, their eyes narrowing at the sight of the plastic-wrapped sack.
“Gloves,” he said. Rachel was already pulling a pair free from her pocket. The others did the same.
Asa placed the bundle on the hallway floor then gently peeled back the brittle plastic.
The notebook was small and black, the kind one bought in multipacks at office stores. The cover was scuffed, with the edges softened from handling. On the front, in his father’s familiar block handwriting, were the words,Mainland Murders. Possible Witness.
Maya’s gasp filled the space. Asa’s knees went loose, and he sat back against the wall.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay.”
Rachel angled her flashlight to give more light. “Take it slow. We photograph, then we read. We do this right.”
They snapped a few quick shots with Rachel’s phone, the flash briefly brightening the narrow hall. Then Asa opened the notebook and flipped through it.
His father’s handwriting jumped out at him. “Unlinked disappearances across Maine between ’98–’00. Victim profiles, female ages 20s–30s. Many were runaways or prostitutes. Those no one was looking for. None were ever found.”
Asa swallowed.
The victims' names followed. Locations where they’d lived. Augusta. Bangor. Rockland. Portland. A town he didn’t even recognize with a note in parentheses: “tiny fishing community.”
Asa felt the hair on his arms lift. He flipped the page and kept reading. Halfway through the notebook, a separate section took shape—a heading written in slightly darker ink, the letters carved deeper into the page.
“Witness – V. W.(Vanessa)”
