Mary sat in her en-suite bathroom, with tears streaming down her face, and the door securely locked behind her. Quaddra had left the house just twenty-five minutes ago and since then, all that Mary could do was cry.
She knew that she needed to get a grip on herself, she needed to calm down and think of what to do next, but how the hell do you calm down and get a grip of yourself when you just found out that your husband, the man that you’ve been sharing a bed with – a life with – for over a year and a half, had a fucking chamber of horrors just under your house.
‘Did he kill all those women?’ she asked herself in thought.
The answer came from her internal voice, like a sucker punch to the gut.
Of course he did. Why the fuck else would he have their photos in his basement… photos showing different stages of their torture? Not to mention that fucking video. We didn’t look, but do you really think that that was the only video he had saved in that computer? He probably has a video for each of them.
Mary closed her eyes for a moment then opened them again, but it didn’t really matter. What she saw down in that basement kept on playing and replaying inside her head like a horror film on an endless loop, regardless of whether her eyes were open or not.
‘This can’t be fucking real,’ she whispered to herself, as sheslapped her face as hard as she could a couple of times. ‘Wake up, Mary… fucking wake up. This has to be a nightmare. What else could this be?’
Reality,her internal voice replied.
The horror film kept on playing inside her head in its never-ending loop. Then, all of a sudden, it paused.
Mary’s body stiffened to nearly spasms.
‘Holy shit… the printouts… the newspaper clippings,’ she said out loud.
Down in that crazy basement, Mary’s eyes had settled on a couple of different printouts and newspaper clippings for just a few seconds. The printouts all seemed to be internet articles of some sort… the clippings, from different newspapers around the country.
She splashed her face with some cold water and tried to think. Her memory was usually very good with things like that. She could read something today, and still remember a lot of it in a few months’ time. She had no idea of how she did it. It wasn’t down to some technique or anything. It was just something that she was born with and it happened effortlessly – when she wasn’t freaking out, that was.
‘Calm down and you’ll remember,’ Mary told herself and immediately went back to her breathing exercise, counting back from ten. This time, she had to do it twice before she felt her heart slowing down to a steadier rhythm.
Mary hadn’t stopped to properly read the printouts, but her eyes had scanned through what looked to be news headlines, right at the top of the printouts. All she needed was to…
Mary gasped, sucking in a lung full of oxygen.
She immediately exited the bathroom and rushed to her bedside table, where she retrieved pen and paper before writing down a name – Kelly Holder, City Terrace, California.
That had been one of the names that she had read on theheadline on one of the printouts – Kelly Holder, from City Terrace, in California. She was certain of it.
‘C’mon,’ she urged herself. ‘Think… think.’
It took her almost a full minute, but there it was again – as if the horror film inside her head had re-engaged, only to slow down as her eyes moved from one printout to the next.
‘Aileen Thompson,’ Mary said the name out loud as she wrote it down, just under Kelly Holder. ‘From Chicago, Illinois.’ Those were the two names that she’d read on that wall.
In a flash, Mary reached for her cellphone, opened her internet browser, and typed the name ‘Kelly Holder’, then ‘City Terrace’, then ‘California’.
It took her cellphone browser just a second to return a results page. The headline for the first link was – ‘Kelly Holder, missing in Los Angeles’.
Mary tapped on the link and a new webpage loaded onto her cellphone screen.
Kelly Holder, a twenty-three-year-old actress, who lived in City Terrace, an unincorporated area of East LA, was reported missing by her flatmate on 19 July 2024.
Mary’s eyes widened at the screen. That was over a year ago. She and Quaddra weren’t married yet, but they were certainly dating already.
She returned to the article, which went on to explain that Kelly was originally from Spokane in Washington, but she had moved to LA to pursue her dream of being an actress. She’d been living in Los Angeles for only a year when she went missing. The missing persons investigation was still ongoing. The article ended with a recent photo of Miss Holder.
‘Oh fuck!’ The word dribbled out of Mary’s lips as her eyes settled on Kelly Holder’s picture. In it, Kelly was wearing a whitesweater and smiling at the camera. Her black hair was tied up into a messy bun on the top of her head.
Mary had only looked at the photo on the wall in the basement for maybe a couple of seconds, if that, but she was sure that it was the same girl.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
