4338.215 · August 3, 2018 AD
Heating Vents and Open Channels
There are things you learn about a house when you've lived in it for twenty-three years and your husband has spent most of those years keeping secrets inside it. The officers moving through Jeffries Manor have equipment and warrants and protocols. The woman carrying a teacup from room to room has something better — she already knows where to stand.
Louise has been watching since seven-fifty. Not from one position — she moves. Kitchen to landing to corridor to library, each location chosen for what it gives her access to and each abandoned before her presence becomes conspicuous. The heating vent on the upstairs landing carries sound from the foyer with startling clarity. The kitchen wall adjoining the rear corridor is thin enough to transmit conversation at normal volume. The study door leaves a gap of nearly a centimetre at the hinge side.
She didn't plan to use them. But the radios are the first gift — standard operational channels, unencrypted for routine updates, audible from anywhere within fifteen metres of a handset. And Louise has spent the morning within fifteen metres of one officer or another, moving through her own house the way she moves through it every morning, adjusting nothing except which rooms she passes through and how long she lingers.
Her husband is upstairs in one of the rooms he's never explained. He told her to dismiss the solicitor, to say nothing, to let him handle it. The same words he used when Jamie went missing. The same words when Kain didn't come home. None of those things were handled. None of them brought anyone back.
And ten minutes ago, Tom heard about hollow floors and impossible forensic results and none of it surprised him — and the fact that it didn't surprise him is the thing Louise can no longer look away from. Wilson is waiting in the library.
