The New Case

The call came in on a Wednesday morning, which was the kind of detail that shouldn't matter and somehow always did. Not a Monday, which would have felt appropriately grim. Not a Friday when the week had built up enough momentum to absorb something like this. A Wednesday. The middle of everything, the day that belonged to neither side of the week, unremarkable in every way except that it was the day a woman named Carol Voss sat down across from Morganta's desk and told her that her daughter hadn't come home.

The ML Detectives office was quiet that morning. It usually was before ten. Lexus had come in early and was already at his desk in the adjoining room, working through the paperwork on a case they'd closed the previous week — a straightforward insurance fraud thing that had taken two weeks and involved a lot of sitting in a car outside a warehouse in the rain. Not glamorous. Not the kind of case either of them had imagined when they renamed the agency and started again, but it paid and it was clean and there was something to be said for clean. Morganta had made coffee, opened the blinds, sat down at her desk and spent twenty minutes on the kind of administrative work she would never fully make peace with. Then Carol Voss knocked on the frosted glass door and Morganta called for her to come in.

Carol was in her mid-forties, dressed neatly in the slightly over-careful way people dress when they're going somewhere that matters and they want to make a good impression even though making a good impression is the last thing on their mind. She had dark circles under her eyes that no amount of sleep was going to fix quickly and the particular held-together quality of someone who had been crying a lot in private and had decided that today she was not going to do that, at least not in front of a stranger. She sat down without being asked and put her bag on her lap and held it there like it was something to anchor herself to.

Morganta offered her coffee. Carol said no thank you and then changed her mind and said yes please, and while Morganta poured it Carol looked around the office the way people do when they're trying to seem calm and instead just seem like they're looking at things without seeing them.

Morganta set the coffee down and sat across from her. "Tell me about your daughter," she said. No preamble, no form-filling first. She'd learned over the two years of running ML Detectives that people who came in looking like Carol Voss needed to start talking before anything else, needed to feel like the thing they were carrying was the first priority in the room.

Carol's hands tightened around the mug. "Della," she said. "Her name is Della. She's seventeen." She stopped for a second, reorganising. "She went for a walk four days ago and she didn't come home."

"Where did she go?"

Carol looked slightly uncertain. "She didn't say exactly. She just said she was going out for some air, she'd be back in an hour. She does that sometimes — she's always been a walker, since she was little. She just goes." A pause. "She always comes back."

Morganta wrote the name down. Della Voss. Seventeen. Four days. "Have the police been involved?"

"Yes. They've been looking. They've been — they're doing what they can." Carol said it carefully, in the tone people use when they want to be fair but the fairness is costing them something. "But I found you online. I read about the Dawson case." She looked at Morganta directly for the first time since sitting down. "I know that was different. I know what happened there was — I know it's not the same thing. But you found things the police hadn't found. And I need someone who's going to find things."

Morganta nodded. "Where was she walking? Do you know which direction she went?"

Carol set the mug down and opened her bag. She pulled out a printed map of the area, the kind you print from your home computer when you're trying to show someone something and you want it to be clear, the edges slightly uneven from the printer. She unfolded it and turned it toward Morganta and pointed.

West Kingsport Road.

Morganta looked at the map. She looked at Carol's finger resting on the road. She looked at the stretch of it that ran alongside the tree line, the left side where the woods pressed close, the section she knew by a particular quality of memory that had nothing to do with professional familiarity.

She kept her face still.

"Has she walked that way before?" Morganta asked.

"Not that I know of," Carol said. "She doesn't know anyone out that way. There's nothing out there that she'd normally be going to. That's what I don't understand — she went in that direction but there's no reason for it. I've gone over it and over it and I can't work out why she would go that way."

Morganta wrote that down too. She wrote it down and looked at it for a moment and then moved on to the next question, and the one after that, and she sat with Carol Voss for another forty minutes going through everything Carol could tell her about Della — who her friends were, whether anything had been different recently, whether there had been any argument or tension or anything that might explain a girl deciding to walk somewhere unfamiliar alone in the evening. Carol answered everything thoroughly and honestly, the way parents do when they're past the stage of protecting privacy and into the stage of just wanting their child back.

By the time Carol left, Morganta had four pages of notes and a photograph of Della that Carol had printed off her phone — a girl with her mother's eyes and a wide easy smile, standing somewhere sunny with her hair blowing sideways. Seventeen and ordinary and gone.

Morganta sat at her desk after the door closed and looked at the photograph for a moment. Then she picked up her pen and wrote two words at the top of the first page, underlined them, and put the pen down.

West Kingsport.

She didn't say anything to Lexus immediately. She made another coffee she didn't particularly want and stood by the window looking out at the street below, the ordinary mid-morning movement of it, people going places, a delivery van double-parked outside the café across the road. She stayed there for a few minutes longer than she needed to.

Lexus appeared in the doorway between their offices. He'd heard the conversation — not clearly, not the details, but enough to know the shape of it. He leaned against the frame and looked at her at the window. "New case?"

"Missing girl. Seventeen. Four days."

"Police involved?"

"Yes. Mother wants a second set of eyes."

Lexus nodded. He was quiet for a second. "You going to take it?"

Morganta turned from the window. "Already have."

He looked at her with the particular attention he'd developed over two years of working alongside her and one year of being married to her — the look that meant he was reading something in her face that she hadn't put into words yet. "What is it?" he said.

"Probably nothing." She picked up the case notes and held them out to him. "West Kingsport Road."

Lexus took the notes. Read the top page. His expression didn't change dramatically — it never did, he wasn't built that way — but something in it settled differently. He kept reading for a moment and then looked up. "Same stretch?"

"Same stretch."

He looked back at the notes. "Could be coincidence," he said. "It's a long road."

"It could be," Morganta said.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. The delivery van outside gave a short beep and pulled away from the kerb.

"I'll pull the police reports," Lexus said.

"I'll go out to the road this afternoon."

"I'll come with you."

"You don't have to."

"I know," he said. "I'll come with you."

They drove out to West Kingsport Road after lunch. The day was overcast, the sky that flat uniform grey that makes everything look slightly washed out, and the road looked exactly as it always looked — unremarkable, quiet, the kind of road you drive along without thinking about it. Trees on the left, grassland opening on the right toward the outskirts of Fraser. The same reflector post that had been leaning at an angle for as long as Morganta could remember, still leaning. The same everything.

Morganta pulled over at the section of shoulder where they'd found the tyre marks two years ago, the glass, the phone. She cut the engine and sat for a moment before getting out.

The marks were long gone. Rain and time and the general indifference of the physical world had erased every trace of what they'd found here. The grass had grown back over the flattened sections. The dirt had resettled. If you didn't know, you'd never know.

She got out and stood on the verge. Lexus came around from the passenger side and stood beside her. They looked at the road for a moment and then at the tree line.

"Della Voss had no connection to this area," Morganta said. "No friends nearby, no reason to walk this way. Her mother has no explanation for why she came here."

"Kids walk in odd directions sometimes," Lexus said. "Especially when something's on their mind."

"Was anything on her mind?"

"Not that the mother knows of. She said Della had seemed fine. Normal week, normal mood, no arguments, nothing unusual." He paused. "Which could mean nothing was wrong. Or it could mean she was good at not showing it."

Morganta nodded and walked slowly along the verge, the same way she'd walked it the first time, eyes moving across the ground and the grass and the edge of the trees. She wasn't expecting to find anything. The police had already been over this section and found nothing, and they had more people and more equipment than she did. But she needed to be here. She needed to stand on this road and let her instincts tell her whatever they were going to tell her.

They told her the same thing they'd told her on the drive out, the same thing they'd told her when she looked at Carol Voss's printed map and saw where Carol's finger was pointing.

Something was wrong with this road. Something had always been wrong with this road. And whatever it was, it was not finished.

She stopped walking. Looked at the tree line. The trees stood exactly as they always stood — still, dense, ordinary in the way that forests are ordinary from a distance and become something else when you're inside them. She stood and looked at them for a long moment without moving.

"Morganta," Lexus said. Not a warning. Just her name, said the way he said it when he wanted her to know he was right there.

"I know," she said.

She took a breath and turned away from the trees and walked back to the car.

That evening she sat at the kitchen table after dinner with Della's file spread out in front of her, going through everything she had. The police reports Lexus had pulled, Carol's account, the photograph. She went through it all methodically, making notes, cross-referencing, building the picture the way she always built it — piece by piece, nothing assumed, everything questioned.

The unregistered call was the thing that kept pulling her back.

Della's phone records, which the police had obtained and which Lexus had got a copy of through a contact, showed a call received forty minutes before the estimated time of her disappearance. Unregistered number. Duration eleven seconds. No voicemail left. After that, nothing — Della's phone had gone dark, no further activity, no location data, nothing.

Eleven seconds was long enough to say something. Long enough to give someone an address, a direction, a reason to start walking somewhere.

Morganta wrote the number down even though it was unregistered and therefore essentially useless as a lead. She wrote it down and looked at it and felt the shape of something she couldn't name yet, the outline of a pattern that wasn't clear enough to describe but was clear enough to feel.

She closed the file eventually and sat in the quiet kitchen for a while. Lexus had gone to bed an hour ago — he was an early riser and an early sleeper, had been since long before she met him. The flat was quiet. Outside the window the city was doing its nighttime things, the low ambient sound of it, a car going past occasionally, someone's television faintly audible from the floor above.

She thought about Della Voss and her wide easy smile and her habit of going for walks when she needed air, and the road she had walked down for a reason nobody could explain, and the trees she had walked toward and then into and then not come back from.

She thought about the last time she had stood at the edge of those trees.

She thought about the sound.

She got up and turned the kitchen light off and went to bed and lay in the dark for a long time before she slept, and when she finally did sleep she dreamed about the clearing, and the arm in the branches, and the breathing that came from everywhere at once and sounded like something trying to be alive without quite knowing how.

She woke up at three in the morning and lay still and listened to the quiet flat around her.

Nothing. Just the city outside and Lexus breathing steadily beside her and the ordinary dark of an ordinary room.

She lay there until five and then got up and made coffee and opened the file again.

Because Della Voss was seventeen and had a wide easy smile and hadn't come home, and whatever was in those trees had had two years of quiet, and Morganta had learned enough to know that quiet was never the same thing as gone.

It was just waiting.