To Tell An Altswood Lie (The Altswood Saga #3)

Chapter 3 - Decode

Chapter 3 - Decode

My phone was vibrating with an incoming video chat request, breaking the tense silence that I had been working in.

"Hello?" I answered, tapping the green button.

Annabelle's pixelated face appeared, her concern taking up the entirety of the screen.

"Are you watching the news right now?"

"Let me guess," I intoned, shuffling a few papers to the side. "It's video footage of me and Gabriel leaving the house of Maire Reeve, who has just been found murdered."

Annabelle gaped at me. Her jaw had dropped open, and she didn't seem to notice. "It's not you, right?"

"Of course not," I sighed. "Gabriel and I were in Greenfield. Then, the police station, being arrested because of that footage, then we got let off because it's flimsy evidence, and now I'm looking through Maire Reeve's case file trying to figure out who wanted to frame us, of all people."

I had to gasp for air after that sentence.

"Why didn't you text me?" Annabelle exclaimed. She had a hand pressed over her cheek in disbelief. Her eyes were fixed onto something above her phone, probably still following the news. "This is really bad."

By tomorrow, there would probably be people giving statements to the local news saying they always knew there was "something off about me." I wondered if we were going to get reporters boating onto the island again.

"I'll worry about who's trying to masquerade as me later," I muttered. "Look at what I have here."

"Hold on, hold on, let me turn this thing off so I can actually hear you."

While Annabelle grabbed her remote, I flipped around the photo in my hands, holding it up to my phone. When Annabelle settled on her couch and really looked at what I was showing her, she appeared to turn green even through the poor quality of her front camera.

"Is that—"

"Maire Reeve's strangled body floating in her pool?" I finished. "You bet."

While it was kind of mentally scarring to be looking at this file, in its own way, it was calming too. There was no argument to be had with these crime scene photos—no hidden angles or distorted perspectives. Everything was out in the open, and if I looked hard enough, perhaps I could piece together what each detail meant.

"Geez, Luca," Annabelle winced. "Should you really be looking at that stuff?"

"What's it going to do?" I asked dryly. "Give me PTSD?"

Annabelle furrowed her eyebrows, not amused by my sarcasm. "It could worsen it, which is the last thing you need when you've been doing so well."

I waved her off. "I'll be fine. Now listen—preliminary results show asphyxiation to be the cause of death, but they're prohibiting an autopsy. Wanna know why?"

Annabelle made a face as if to say Go on...

I held up another glossy photograph to the camera. "Isn't this bizarre?"

The entirety of the crime scene had been left spotless. Apart from the obvious problem of Maire's dead body floating in the pool at the back of the house, one would think that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred through the photographs that had been taken.

There were no signs of a struggle, no items that were out of the ordinary to be collected into evidence bags—except for one very small note on the bedside table, written with the very typewriter in Maire's bedroom, printed on thick and waxy sheet paper that Maire stocked on her vanity table. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine the killer calmly re-entering her bedroom after the murder, sitting on Maire's antique chair and tapping out their deranged message: