Della

The week Della Voss had been missing turned into ten days and then twelve and the police investigation, which had started with the usual urgency of a missing minor, had begun to quietly shift in the way investigations shift when they run out of immediate leads and the urgency has to be sustained on willpower rather than momentum. Morganta had seen it before. The transition from active search to ongoing inquiry, the gradual narrowing of manpower, the press coverage moving from front page to a shorter piece further back. It didn't mean anyone had stopped caring. It just meant that caring without anything to act on looks different from the outside than caring with a clear next step.

Carol Voss called every other day. Morganta always answered.

The calls were short and followed the same shape. Carol would ask if there was anything new. Morganta would tell her honestly what she had, which was never as much as either of them wanted. Carol would be quiet for a moment and then thank her and hang up. The calls lasted between three and seven minutes. Morganta always sat still for a while after them before going back to whatever she'd been doing.

On the twelfth day she spread everything she had on Della across the meeting room table and started again from the beginning.

This was something she did on cases that weren't moving, had done it since her early days at Martins when she'd learned through frustration that the thing you missed was almost always there in the original material, waiting for you to look at it from a different angle. You went back to the start and you looked at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time, without the assumptions you'd built up through the investigation sitting on top of your thinking and filtering what you saw.

She put the photograph up first. Della at some sunny outdoor event, hair blowing sideways, that wide easy smile. She stood and looked at it for a moment the way she always looked at the photograph first, reminding herself that the file was a person before she got into the details of the file.

Then she started going through everything else.

Della was seventeen, a year eleven student at Kingsport Secondary, described by her teachers in the police interviews as reliable and sociable and not someone who caused concern. No history of running away, no documented mental health issues, no significant friendship conflicts flagged by anyone the police had spoken to. Her grades were consistent. She showed up to things. She was, by every conventional measure, fine.

Which meant either something had been happening that nobody around her had seen, or the explanation for why she walked down West Kingsport Road on a Tuesday evening had nothing to do with her internal state at all.

Morganta kept coming back to the call.

Eleven seconds. Unregistered number. Forty minutes before she left the house.

She'd requested the full phone records from Della's provider through a contact she had who was willing to pull things that weren't strictly within the scope of a private investigation when Morganta asked nicely and provided a reasonable explanation. The full records went back six months. She went through them carefully, looking for the unregistered number or any variation of it, looking for anything unusual in the pattern of calls and messages, any disruption in what looked like a normal teenage communication life — constant messages, group chats, voice calls to the same handful of numbers repeated regularly.

Nothing stood out. Until she went back three months and found something small that she'd skimmed past the first time.

A text message. Received, not sent. From a number she didn't recognise, not the same unregistered number as the call but similarly untraceable when she ran it. The message had come in at eleven-thirty on a Sunday night three months before Della disappeared. Morganta looked at it for a long time.

The message said: Do you ever feel like something is calling you somewhere and you don't know where.

No question mark. Not phrased as a question exactly, more like a statement that expected recognition rather than an answer.

Della hadn't replied. Or if she had, it hadn't been to that number — there was no outgoing message to it in the records. The number never appeared again in six months of records. One message, received once, no response, and then the number gone as though it had never existed.

Morganta photographed it and sent it to Callum.

His response came back in twenty minutes. A single line first: checking against other cases. Then, eight minutes after that, a longer message. The phrasing — something calling you somewhere — appeared in two of the Threshold Project's other case files. Not as a text message in those cases. As something witnesses reported thinking or feeling in the period before the disappearance. Not something they'd been sent. Something that had just arrived in their heads. One witness had described it as an intrusive thought that kept recurring. Another had described it as a feeling she couldn't shake, like being tugged by something she couldn't see.

Morganta read Callum's message twice. Then she looked at Della's phone record, at the text sitting there in the middle of an otherwise ordinary stream of teenage communication. Someone had sent that to Della specifically. Not a thought that had arrived uninvited. A message. Targeted. Three months before the call that came forty minutes before she walked out of her house and didn't come back.

Whatever this was, it had been working on Della for three months before it took her.

She brought it to Lexus first, which was always the order of things — Lexus before the research team, because Lexus was her partner in every sense and because sometimes she needed to say a thing out loud to him before she could say it in a room full of people taking notes.

He read Callum's message and the photograph of the text and sat with it for a moment. "Three months," he said.

"Three months," Morganta said. "Which means this isn't impulsive. Whatever the mechanism is, it's patient. It works across time."

"Grooming," Lexus said, and then looked slightly uncomfortable with the word, not because it was wrong but because of the specific horror of applying it to this context.

"Something like that," Morganta said. "A gradual process. An initial contact, then a period of — whatever that text was doing. And then the call. And then she walks out."

Lexus was quiet for a moment. "The other cases on Nina's map. Did any of them have a documented contact period before the disappearance?"

"Callum's checking," Morganta said. "But even if they didn't document it, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. If nobody thought to look at phone records in detail, or if the records weren't available that far back—"

"The pattern could be the same across all of them," Lexus finished.

"Yes."

He leaned back in his chair. "So it makes contact. Twice at least. Once to plant something, once to activate it."

"That's one way to read it," Morganta said. She looked at the photograph of Della on the table. "The other way to read it is that the first contact was testing her. Seeing if she was — receptive isn't the right word." She paused, looking for the right word. "Reachable," she said. "Seeing if she was reachable. And then waiting."

Lexus looked at her. "And if she hadn't been?"

Morganta thought about that. "Then I think it would have moved on to someone else," she said. "I think it's looking for something specific in the people it contacts. I don't know what. But not everyone receives a follow-up call. Not everyone walks out."

"How do you know that?"

"Because Kingsport isn't empty," Morganta said. "If it contacted everyone who lived near that road, we'd have hundreds of missing people, not seven incidents across thirty years." She looked at the map on the wall. "It's selective. And I want to know what it's selecting for."

She brought everything to the research team that afternoon.

Callum had already been working on it by the time they sat down — he'd cross-referenced the text message phrasing against every witness account and family testimony in their nine case files and had found not direct matches but consistent thematic echoes. A feeling of being called. A sense of pull toward somewhere specific without a rational explanation for the pull. In two cases family members had noted in retrospect that the person who went missing had seemed distracted in the weeks beforehand, not unhappy, just slightly somewhere else, like part of their attention was already somewhere other than where they were.

Nina listened to all of it without interrupting and then sat with it for a moment in that way she had of processing before speaking, glasses off, one hand flat on the table.

"It's consistent with an extended contact model," she said. "We've theorised about this but never had evidence for it. A single impulsive mechanism doesn't explain why some people in proximity to these sites are affected and others aren't. An extended selection process does." She looked at Callum. "The text message. Three months prior. Can you trace the number at all?"

"Same dead end as the call," Callum said. "It exists in the records as having been sent but there's no registered origin. I've sent it to someone I know who does deeper telco analysis but I'm not expecting much."

"The phrasing of it," Priya said. She'd been quiet until now. "Do you ever feel like something is calling you somewhere. That's — it's not threatening. It's not frightening. It's almost an invitation."

"Or a test," Morganta said.

"Both can be true," Priya said.

Ro was leaning forward slightly in her chair, further forward than usual, elbows on her knees. She'd been more physically present in the room since the previous day's session, less against the wall and more in the conversation. "Marcus," she said. "In the months before. He was — I thought at the time he was just stressed. Work stuff, nothing major. But he was distracted in a way that I noticed and didn't think enough of." She looked at the table. "He kept driving out to a particular area. No reason. Just said he wanted some air, he'd be back. He always came back." A pause. "Until he didn't."

The room held that.

"Did he ever say anything about it?" Morganta asked. "About why he went there?"

Ro shook her head. "He said it was peaceful. He liked the quiet." She pressed her lips together briefly. "I just thought he meant it literally."

Nina looked at her gently. "There was no way to know, Ro."

"I know that," Ro said, and said it in a way that meant she knew it intellectually and that hadn't fixed anything.

Morganta looked at the photograph of Della on the table. "I want to talk to Della's friends," she said. "Not the police version — I've read those statements and they were fine as far as they went but nobody asked the right questions because nobody knew what to look for. I want to ask them specifically whether Della seemed distracted, whether she mentioned feeling drawn somewhere, whether anything in her behaviour changed in the three months before she disappeared."

Nina nodded. "That's good. And if we can establish a contact timeline — first message, then the call, then the disappearance — we might be able to predict a window. If there are other people who received that first text."

Everyone in the room understood what that meant without Nina finishing it.

If Della wasn't the only one who'd been contacted, there might be someone else out there right now three months into a selection process they didn't know they were in the middle of, going for drives to a particular area because it was peaceful and they liked the quiet.

"I'll go through Della's social media," Callum said. "If the first contact was a text to her phone it might also have reached her through other channels. DMs, comments, anything. I'll look for anything that matches the phrasing or the number."

"I want to run another recording session tonight," Priya said. "Late. The frequency data has been stronger in the recordings I've taken between eleven and two than in the daytime ones. I want to see if I can narrow the directional mapping with a night session."

"Not alone," Morganta said immediately.

Priya looked at her. "I work better—"

"Not alone," Morganta said again. "That's not negotiable." She looked at the table. "Take Callum."

Callum looked mildly unimpressed with this arrangement but nodded.

"I'll come too," Ro said.

"No," said Nina and Morganta at the same time.

Ro looked between them. "I'm not going to do anything," she said. "I just want to be there."

"The road at night is not somewhere you should be right now," Morganta said. "That's not me doubting your intentions. That's me saying that what we discussed yesterday about how it selects people — what you just told us about Marcus driving out to a particular area because it felt peaceful — I don't want you on that road at night until we understand the selection mechanism better. Is that clear?"

Ro looked at her for a long moment. Something moved through her expression that wasn't quite resistance and wasn't quite acceptance. Then she looked away. "Fine," she said.

Morganta looked at her for a moment longer to make sure the fine meant what it was supposed to mean. She wasn't entirely sure it did, but she let it go for now and moved on.

She went to talk to Della's friends that afternoon. Two of them, the two Carol Voss had identified as closest — a girl named Simone who lived three streets from the Voss house and a boy named Jake who had been in Della's form class since year seven. She met them separately, Simone first at a café near the school, Jake afterward at his parents' kitchen table with his mother sitting nearby not quite trying to hide that she was listening.

She asked them about Della in the weeks and months before she disappeared. She asked it gently and indirectly at first, the way you approach things when you're asking a teenager to remember something specific without leading them toward a particular answer. She asked about mood, about whether anything seemed different, about whether Della had mentioned anything bothering her or anything she was thinking about a lot.

Simone said Della had been fine. Normal, happy, the same as always. But then she paused and said well, actually, there was one thing. About a month before she disappeared, Della had started talking about this walk she wanted to do. Not like a planned hike or anything, Simone said, just a vague thing, she kept saying she wanted to walk somewhere, she wasn't sure where, she'd know when she got there. Simone had thought it was just Della being a bit odd, which she sometimes was, and hadn't thought much of it.

Jake said something similar but different. He said Della had been distracted toward the end of term, not badly, just occasionally somewhere else in her head during lessons or conversations. He'd asked her about it once and she'd said she kept having this weird feeling like she'd forgotten something important but couldn't remember what. He'd told her to write herself a note. She'd laughed and changed the subject.

Morganta wrote everything down. She thanked them both and didn't tell them what she was building from what they'd given her because there was nothing she could tell them that would help and several things she could tell them that would make the next few weeks significantly harder.

She sat in her car afterward and looked at her notebook.

A vague pull toward somewhere she'd know when she got there. A feeling like she'd forgotten something important. A distraction that had settled over her gradually, quietly, over weeks, not dramatic enough to worry anyone around her.

Three months of quiet, patient, specific work, building something in Della that she hadn't known was being built, and then eleven seconds of a phone call and she walked out of her house toward a road she had no reason to walk toward as though she'd been heading there all along.

Morganta sat in the car for a long time. She thought about what it meant that something could do this. Could reach into a person's ordinary life and plant something there and tend it across months until it was ready, all without the person or anyone around them being aware of it. She thought about the patience involved. The deliberateness of it.

She thought about the text message again. Do you ever feel like something is calling you somewhere and you don't know where.

Not a question. A recognition. A way of saying to someone: I know what you're already feeling. I'm the reason you're feeling it.

She started the car and drove back to the office through the ordinary afternoon city, past the café where she'd spoken to Simone, past the school, past the park where a man was walking a dog in the grey afternoon light. Everything completely ordinary. Everything completely unaware.

She thought about whether there was someone else out there right now starting to feel a vague pull toward somewhere they couldn't name.

She drove faster.

That evening Priya and Callum went out to West Kingsport Road at eleven.

Morganta knew because she was awake when Priya messaged at eleven forty-three to say they were set up and recording. She messaged back and then lay in the dark next to Lexus who was asleep and stared at the ceiling and waited.

Priya messaged again at one seventeen. Two words: Come tomorrow.

Morganta looked at those two words for a long moment. Then she put her phone down and lay in the dark and didn't sleep for a long time, because two words from Priya at one in the morning after a night recording session on West Kingsport Road were not two words you could simply set aside and return to in the morning without your brain doing something with them in the meantime.

She lay there and thought about Della. About the text message three months before. About the eleven second call. About a girl walking toward trees she had no reason to walk toward as though she'd been heading there all along.

She thought about the face in the branches looking at her.

She thought about being counted.

At some point well past two she finally fell asleep and didn't dream, which should have been a relief and instead felt simply like absence, like something that was usually there had decided not to show up that night, and the not showing up was its own kind of message.

She woke up before the alarm and lay there in the early quiet and waited for the day to arrive so she could go and find out what Priya had recorded.