Page 19 of Her Last Refuge

It was a scanned page from something old—the sort of scan where the original document had probably been folded for decades before someone flattened it out to photograph it. The handwriting was in cursive, leaning and cramped. The ink had faded to a brownish gray in places, and half the page was creased badly enough that whole words disappeared into the fold. But she could make out a date at the top: 1959. And she could make out enough of the rest to understand what she was looking at.

It was a police report. But it was very short and looked like it had potentially been written as an afterthought, just something that needed to be done. It looked like it might have taken an officer ten minutes to fill out before he moved on to the next task of the night. She read it slowly, making sure she didn’t miss a single crumb.

The complainant's name was blurred past recognition, but the aggressor was listed clearly enough. Victor Lewis. And the victim, right below it in the same cramped hand, was Eve Lewis. According to the report, she was fourteen years old though the number was hard to be sure of. There was a line for a witness, and in that line was a woman's name Paige recognized instantly, because she had spent an entire evening two weeks ago tracing it through three different genealogy records. Jasmine Lewis…Eve’s mother.

Paige looked at the scanned document for a long time, not sure how this altered things just yet. What she did know was that Eve’s father had hit her and Eleanor’s mother had been the witness. Eleanor had not been the one who had been abused, it was Eve.

Paige wasn’t naïve. She knew that it had been a different time back then and sometimes kids got punched around without any consequence. Unless it was something life-threatening or vile beyond measure the cops wouldn’t make too big of a deal out of it.

She thought about the timeline she'd pieced together on her own—some of which had come directly from the original conversation she and her mother had with Eve at her home. Eve was supposed to have been away from the farm the day Victor Lewis died. That was the story, the one detail that had always seemed to put Eve outside of it entirely. It was the reason nobody ever seemed to look at her twice.

And now, nearly seventy years later, Jasmine Lewis was dead. And Eleanor was dead. Whoever else might have been around the farm in 1959 to remember it clearly was almost certainly dead too, decades on, the way everyone from a report that old eventually was. Which meant that as far as Paige could tell, the only person left alive who could say where Eve had actually been the day Victor Lewis died was Eve herself. Nobody else was left to agree with her, or to argue.

She typed back to ledger_girl with fingers that felt slower than usual on the keys. Where did you get this? she typed.

She still wasn’t sure exactly what this report meant, though small suggestions and theories were starting to pop up in her head.

She thought about telling her mother. She got as far as picturing the conversation, the two of them at the kitchen table with the lockbox between them, before she talked herself out of it. Not yet. Not until she had more than one blurry page and a hunch that made her stomach feel tight…that made her feel a little icky whenever she thought of being in Eve’s house.

More than that, she really didn’t want one of the infamous Rachel Gift I told you sos. Because if what this one scanned report suggested was indeed true, Paige had no doubt that she had stepped into something much darker than she had imagined.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The conference room was bland and cozy…so much so that when they came to the end of the last bit of security footage, Rachel felt herself growing sleepy. She had been staring at the same grainy color representations of a few of the common areas within the facility for the better part of two hours. Her eyes had started to ache and her head, while not quite hurting yet, was beginning to go a bit dull at the edges.

"There," Novak said, tapping the screen. "Right there. Tell me that's not the most productive thing we've found all day."

Rachel leaned in. On Novak’s monitor, a man in the hallway outside the dining room dug at his nose with a thoroughness that bordered on surgical. He examined the result, and then, in a single unbothered motion, wiped his finger on the back of the woman walking beside him.

"That's disgusting," Rachel said.

"It is. But it’s also the most interesting thing I’ve seen in any of this footage.”

Rachel sat back and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. They'd gone through four days of footage from the main hallway camera and the one covering the parking lot, and between the two of them they had a nose picker, a woman who'd cried in her car for eleven minutes before going inside, and one very long stretch of nothing at all.

"I was really hoping for more than this," she admitted.

"Me too. Although the crying woman got to me a little."

"Yeah." Rachel closed her laptop and stood, working a kink out of her lower back. "Okay. We're not going to find anything in this footage. I think that’s pretty clear at this point. I think the next step is talking to the security guys."

Novak looked up from his laptop. "The rent-a-cops?"

"Whatever you want to call them. We haven't talked to them at all, and that's on us."

"To be fair, when we did the staff interviews, Colt handed us a list. Security wasn't on it."

"I know. Because they're not Ashford Glen employees,” Rachel said. “They're contracted through some third party firm, which means Colt's list was her own people, not the people actually watching the cameras and walking the halls at two in the morning." Rachel picked her bag up off the table. "Which is exactly the kind of gap that gets missed if you don't go looking for it."

"So let’s go look for it,” Novak said.

They exited the conference room and walked down the hall, to the stairs. On the first floor, the building was going about its daily routines. A few residents were out and about in the halls, and somewhere, someone was playing a Beatles song softly from a speaker. It was as they passed through the common area that served as the game room that Rachel spotted one of the security guards outside. He didn’t appear to really be doing much—maybe just walking a loop around the building.

Rachel waved at Novak to follow her. They stepped outside and managed to cut the guard off at the rear patio, a covered walkway between the rear entrance and what looked to be the employee parking lot. When they approached him, Rachel saw that there was another security guard there as well. He was sitting at a picnic table, smoking a cigarette. Both men were in matching gray uniforms with a patch on the shoulder that read Halstead Security Solutions, and both straightened slightly when Rachel showed her badge.

She ran through quick introductions and bit back a small smile when Novak took a seat at the picnic table with the smoking guard.

"We won't take much of your time," Rachel said when introductions were done. "We just want to walk through your setup here. Rounds, coverage, that kind of thing."