4338.215 · August 3, 2018 AD
Every Surface Tells a Different Story
Bring the best forensic equipment in the state. Bring two centuries of architectural plans. Bring officers trained to make buildings confess their secrets through measurement and science and the patient comparison of what's recorded against what's real. Then send them into Jeffries Manor and see what happens when a property that's been keeping secrets since 1817 meets an investigation that doesn't know yet what kind of secrets it's looking for — or how deep into the foundations the questions go.
The convoy reaches the manor at first light. Stout watches from his car as the property resolves through bare elms — fifty acres of frost-held grounds, Georgian sandstone turning pale gold in winter sun, a building that looks back at him with the settled authority of something that has been outlasting investigators since before the colony had a police force.
Harrison's forensic team processes the shed in ninety minutes and confirms what Charlie already knew: no biologicals, no trace evidence, no prints, no disturbance in the dust layers. According to every physical indicator available, nobody has been inside that structure in weeks. The last confirmed sighting of Karl Jenkins placed him walking towards its door.
Inside the manor, Thompson and Mackenzie begin comparing rooms to architectural plans and the discrepancies start accumulating faster than anyone anticipated. Walls forty centimetres thicker than documented. Floor levels that rise and fall over subsurface features. Wainscoting mounted on different backing timber. And in the study — the room where the first Jeffries vanished in 1821 — a fireplace with mismatched stonework and a hearth that sounds hollow beneath their boots.
Upstairs, Thelma Jeffries refuses to speak to anyone but Charlie. The promise was personal, not institutional, and the institution's decision to replace him is the institution's problem. Louise has called her solicitor. Tom Jeffries remains unreachable in Melbourne. Three calls unanswered.
The morning is three hours old. The questions are multiplying. The answers are not.
