Chapter Eight:
“You
must be cold,” I say to Grace, who is wearing green-ish capris and a pale
yellow shirt.
“Oh,
yeah. I guess I am,” she says, looking
at her clothes.
“Come
on,” I say, and everyone follows me back inside.
Colette
is still on the couch, fiddling with her notepad. A small ding sounds. Her eyes widen, and so do Lois’s. Colette stands straight up in one swift
movement.
“I
need to go,” she says, then pulls up a floor board, removes a backpack from the
cavity beneath, and dashes out the door without another word. She left her notepad lying on the couch. There’s a message on the screen.
CM
NUMBER 078346105
MESSAGE
AT 1124 FROM [UNKNOWN LOCATION]
I’m
waiting for you.
“Does
anyone recognize the Contact Messenger number
oh-seven-eight-three-four-six-one-oh-five?” Violet asks.
Grace
squeezes her eyes shut and puts her fingers on her temples. “I know who it is. It’s someone named Nadia May. And Christina, the blonde who just left,
she’s gone to find her, and she will succeed.
But I can’t tell why this Nell Marie person wants to see Claire, they
look nothing alike.”
“I
couldn’t really tell what she was thinking.
It was all jumbled,” Lois adds.
“Also, her name is Colette.”
Grace
smacks her palm to her forehead.
“Right. Bad with names,
remember? Sorry Louise. No, Lee, no, you’re um –“
“Lois,”
says Lois, sort of sympathetically.
“I’m
going to find her,” Violet announces.
But
before anyone can reply to that, Mary bursts through the door breathe-speaking
something. I can’t make it out. I toss a glance at Lois, who looks absolutely
devastated. She notices me looking and I
see a tear roll down her cheek as she looks at me with such pity that I want to
cry myself, though I still don’t know why.
Mary
slowly lowers herself onto the floor.
Her lips are still moving. I lean
down next to her face.
“Malcolm,”
she whispers, “is dead.”
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