I put my chin on my palm and clicked through the footage again. The problem wasn’t that there was no color or sound so much as the angle was off. But then, the camera was intended to capture foot traffic in front of the gym and not what was going on across and down the street. As such, only the steps below the side door of Dr. Massey’s building were in frame, not the door itself. The good doctor was a little younger than I expected. She trotted down the steps and disappeared down the sidewalk toward the main road. Sure enough, a few minutes later, a four-door sedan identical to the one I found pulled in front of the curb and stopped. She got out and started loading boxes.
At some point, a bearded man in fashionable, thick-rimmed glasses waited by the open trunk of the blue car. Doctor Massey came out and seemed surprised to see him. They had words. First it seemed like she was threatening him. Then it seemed like he was threatening her. She got spooked. She ran to the steps, like she was going to flee back to her condo, but something out of frame stopped her. Just then a big vintage car stopped in the street and blocked most of the shot. I could see some movement, but that’s all, and by the time it pulls away, everyone is gone, including Dr. Massey’s blue sedan.
All of this took place in one tiny corner of the video footage. Blowing it up made it blurry—too blurry to make out any real detail. I was at the office until after midnight, going frame by frame, trying to find a clean still shot of the bearded man, but it was no good, and eventually I gave up and went home, where I sat at my kitchen bar with my laptop and kept at it. I was right about Amber not being local and not being married but wrong about family. I couldn’t find any who would’ve missed her. They were all dead. No one at her work or former residence had seen or heard from her in over a year. That hadn’t raised any alarms because she’d quit her job and paid for an early exit from her lease. No one had expected to see her. She had packed her car herself, which suggested she was running from something, as Lt. Miller guessed. In all likelihood, the video footage was the last anyone saw of her before she disappeared. Where she was between then and the day she died, no one knew, but wherever it was, they had a helluva weight loss program. She was quite a bit heavier on the tape than when we found her bobbing in the reservoir.
I snapped awake, still sitting at the kitchen counter. My laptop screen was blank, meaning I hadn’t touched anything in at least ten minutes. That didn’t seem possible. I didn’t remember nodding off, or even feeling tired. My head wasn’t bobbing or eyelids drooping. I had been totally awake, working. Next thing I knew, I woke up in shock with that sense that someone was watching me. I was still sitting, but I had my head resting on one hand, and it had been that way long enough for my hand to have fallen asleep. I’d had a dream, I realized. Or nightmare. In it, I was sitting right there at my kitchen counter, and I wasn’t alone. But it wasn’t a person with me. It was a wolf. And not the cuddly kind you see romping through the snow on TV. This was a wild animal, a natural hunter. Huge. Easily the size of a horse. Mottled coat. Dark grays. I couldn’t see or hear it. But I knew it was there, studying me.
The wolf’s two eyes stared at me intently. Motionless.
Then a third opened. Sideways. Right in its forehead. A vertical fold of fur just opened to midnight. Speckled in tiny stars.
I sat there at the counter for a moment. Like, what just happened? I held my breath and listened. I was certain someone else was in the apartment with me. Just beyond the half-closed bedroom door. Or maybe in the closet. But the little voice in my head wasn’t saying to run. Not at all. It was saying I missed something.
On the tape.