Page 106 of Wrong Mail

They’re coming for David.

I can feel the whole slow machine of it grinding toward this house, one badge-swipe record and one surveillance camera at a time. But that machine moves at the speed of paperwork, and I am done waiting for it.

I get to my feet with my hand still closed around Julia’s phone. That’s when I feel it.

Air.

Air moving, a draft from the other side of the plastic, cool against my face, carrying the smell of raw wood and something underneath it.

There shouldn’t be a draft here. The far wall is the only place weather could get in. It’s supposed to be sealed, the rough opening covered with plywood and weather membrane until the window goes in. But cold air is coming through anyway, slipping past the plastic and into the hall.

The membrane has been pulled back. Someone must have opened it from the outside.

And then the thought lands.

Is she still here?

On the other side of the plastic. Only feet away. In the dark I have refused to look into.

I should run.

Every animal part of me says get out, get to the car, call the cops from the road, and let them handle it.

Instead, I reach for the plastic where its edge has come loose.

And I go toward the breathing dark.

Part Four

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The plastic comes away from the wall in my hand, cold and heavy. The smell reaches me first.

Beneath the raw wood and wet plaster, another smell rises. Human sweat and something medicinal. Under that, the sour smell of a body kept too long without washing or fresh air.

It doesn’t belong in a house.

My stomach turns over.

I cover my nose and make myself go in.

The flashlight beam swings ahead of me across bare studs and a stack of drywall gone soft at the corners. There’s plywood bolted over the opening where a window will go, but rain is getting through every seam. Halfway across the room, the subfloor gives way to open joists. Between them is a gap where the framing drops into the crawlspace below.

I move the flashlight beam along the far corner, and it finds her.

For a second, my mind refuses to understand what I'm seeing. Then it does.

Julia.

She’s curled in the gap between the open joists where the flooring stops, on a padded blanket somebody laid there. I go down onto the boards, and they give under my knees. I wedge the flashlight against a stud so its beam holds on her face. Then I get both hands on her.

"Julia."

Her face is fully in the light now. There is a bruise gone yellow-green across one cheekbone, older than tonight. Her mouth is sealed. Someone has taped it shut. One strip of white tape is laid across her lips, another pressed over it the other way. The edges are clean and square. Careful work. I’ve watched David do exactly that a hundred times, over a dressing, over a wound, smoothing the tape flat with his thumb.

Her eyes are partly open.

That is the thing that breaks me. They’re moving.