Killer Instinct

30 | Lindsey

Last door on the right. Enter. Lock the door behind you.

Lindsey obeyed, of course. She had spent her entire life doing exactly what everyone else wanted her to do. It was second nature by now.

She had expected the room to be dark. Like in the horror movies, right before the main character was stabbed but then miraculously survived. Or the place where the secondary characters were stabbed and actually died.

Lindsey hoped she was a main character.

Whatever she had been expecting, it hadn't been a fully lit room that was practically devoid of anything even remotely alarming. There was nothing there; no table with a human skull on it, no body parts in jars, no blood-stained sheets. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a regular person's study.

There was a desk in the corner of the room. Lindsey felt as though she should walk over to it, or at least do something. It seemed like she was waiting for directions that had no way of getting to her.

So she walked over slowly, taking her time to look around the room, searching for anything out of the ordinary. She had heard the others go into their rooms, and assumed that they had been met with at least something.

Lindsey reached the small desk in the corner and looked down to see that there actually was something on it: a file folder.

She pulled out the chair and sat down, picking up the folder and examining what was inside. She had seen things like that before: it was a police report, a generic one that people flashed in the cop movies. This one simply was for the city of Easton instead of LA or New York City.

Then her eyes widened.

The police report was for the murder investigation of Edward Hadden, Neil Conrad, Victoria Marcum, and Erin Green. More specifically, it had the name of someone they believed to be the perpetrator.

Lindsey Marcum, the paper read in clear ink, Lindsey Marcum.

Lindsey felt her hands go numb. She didn't even think that the Easton Police Department thought that it was a murder; they had marked it an accident and put the folder away. A murder case was what the five siblings had all wanted—but framing one of them for it wasn't what they had thought would happen.

Lindsey looked around, confused, holding the folder in her hand without a clue of what to do next. She looked down at it and saw that the officer who had supposedly filled out the report was named "John Doe". And all that was missing was a signature. Once this report was signed, it would become official. A warrant would be sent out for Lindsey's arrest. She would have a criminal record.

"Terrifying, isn't it?"

Lindsey didn't even jump when she heard the voice coming from the walls around her. Her mind was so wrapped up in what would happen to her as a result of this report being filed that she was grateful she had an entity to direct her questions towards.

"Yeah, so what is this?"

There was silence for a moment before the voice spoke again.

"You didn't jump. The others all jumped."

"I asked you a question." Lindsey snapped, "Why is this report here? I didn't do anything that this says I did."

"But can you provide an alibi for the night in question? Do you have any evidence to refute the claims made in that folder?"

Lindsey looked down and shook her head slightly. Obviously, she knew where she was on the night her sister had been killed, but there was no one else there to corroborate her story. She had been alone in her house, in her room, watching Netflix. It had been a normal night for her. She had gone to bed alone in the house, knowing...or, at least, she thought she knew...where everyone else in her family was at that moment.