The Doll Garden

Fifteen

If I had known my father, Henry, Tahlia, and Reiner were going to be brought down to the station yesterday afternoon, I would have been better prepared.

The cops were allowed to hold someone in their custody up to between twenty-four hours and forty-eight hours upon suspicions of murder, according to Aaron. I had double-checked myself, just to be sure. But the brutal question was whether they'd be charged or released. None of them had returned home yet. What a shitty way to start a Saturday morning.

"Come on, Daddy, what else are you hiding?" I growled whilst scavenging through one of the drawers in his study. I'd been at it for quite some time now—somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes seemed to be the sweet spot. Well, that I'd spent in this room alone. Unfortunately for me, there was nothing here to prove his innocence. Nor that he was guilty.

Shit, I didn't know where else to look. My patience was starting to run thin and that wasn't a good sign. I'd already looked everywhere that I could find in his bedroom. The next best thing was his study, which was how I ended up here. I was seriously starting to run out of ideas.

"Fuck!" I slammed the drawer shut. "Breathe, Jenna. Just breathe. You'll wake everyone else up if you don't relax. Whew, okay. Okay, I'm good," I tried to give myself a mini pep talk. It didn't exactly calm my nerves. It was a step in the right direction, though.

The warm brown walls of the room were beginning to box me in. More like suffocate me in their folds. I wasn't claustrophobic, but being in here for so long was starting to make my head spin. I hadn't eaten yet and my head was so light I was seeing double through blurred vision.

I had no plans to wake up at the ass crack of dawn again, but I needed to if I wanted to look through my father's things before anyone else woke up. I'd already been up too early yesterday. Someone didn't want me to get any sleep. I was being punished. Better yet, tortured. This wasn't going to work. I needed to start from the beginning. Right. The perpetrator—left-handed.

The cops claimed they had reason to believe that, based on recent autopsy reports, the incisions made on the victims could have only been done by someone who is left-handed. I didn't want to believe it. But they'd conducted a series of writing tests to see whose left hand was their dominant hand. The odds didn't work in my father's and the rest's favor.

I squatted and opened the last drawer at the bottom of his desk. Stacked papers filled the drawer in four short rows, among other neatly organized envelopes and whatever else he had stored in there. I'd have thought it was all junk mail. My father didn't keep things he didn't need, though. He couldn't stand the idea of hoarding shit.

I sat everything from the drawer on the floor at my feet, still stacked together. After, I stuck my hand inside the empty space. The drawer only allowed room for below my elbow to fit. It was enough for my hand to reach the very back, though.

"Huh? I thought I got everything." My head inched forward so that I could see better into the dark interior. A small yellow envelope was pressed up against the back of the drawer. Unlike all the other mail, it was pinned shut. I pulled it out, squeezing on both sides of it. I couldn't tell what was inside. A small hollow object? There was more than one, apparently.

Carefully removing the pin from the envelope, I used two fingers to pry it open.

"Oh." What the hell was this? I gawked at the five thin, silver rings at the bottom of the envelope. Four of them had a diamond on them. The fifth one didn't. Within one of the four diamond rings, one of them was thicker than the others, as if two rings were merged together. The bottom half of it was encased in tiny diamonds too.

I wasn't familiar with promise rings, engagement rings, wedding rings, or whatever the fuck, so I was incapable of deciphering which these were. One thing I knew for sure, though it struck me as odd that two of the rings weren't like the rest. Two completely different designs. Looked damn sure expensive too—like my father had paid a pretty penny for just one of them alone.