The Cache
The phone buzzed on the bed next to me. I couldn’t pull myself out of sleep fast enough to answer. It buzzed again. Detective Vanta was calling. Through half-closed eyes, I stared at the call. My finger touched the green circle.
“Hel-“ I tried to answer.
“Penny,” Detective Vanta snapped, “I hope I didn’t disturb your beauty sleep. I need you on a case. An officer is en route to pick you up. ETA is 10 minutes. I’ll fill you in when you arrive.”
“Wha-,” I tried to answer, but the call was already gone. I laid my head back on the pillow to rest my eyes.
Someone knocked on the door. I sat up, realizing Vanta’s call hadn’t been a dream. I opened the door, and Officer McCrady narrowed her eyes.
“We need to leave ASAP,” she ordered. “They’re waiting.”
“What’s going on?” I mumbled.
“The faster we get going, the faster you’ll find out.”
“Okay, okay.” I headed to the bedroom to change. “Any chance for a coffee?”
Officer McCrady parked on the lawn of a mid-century ranch house. It matched the sprawling one-story homes that populated the surrounding neighborhood. Officers and CSIs swarmed the house in white jumpsuits.
“I need you inside,” Vanta ordered.
I stayed alongside the patrol car. “What’s going on? Why do you need me if you’ve already found the house?”
“We can’t find the bodies,” Vanta said as he stared at the army of police scurrying to search the property.
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
Stepping through the threshold was what I imagined the vacuum of space to be like. No air reached my lungs, and the cold froze the marrow of my bones. Barely through the door, my knees folded. Fear and ache, homesickness, hunger entered my nose, my mouth, my ears. The tears were involuntary; my hand couldn’t wipe them away.
Then the wheel turned. The borrowed torment in me tore through the house now in cold waves. The officers could feel it. Some screamed, some cried, all found the fastest way to escape me. Vanta stood next to me, unflinching, as he took my arm to pull me back over the threshold. My shoulder and knee hit the prickled grass, my head throbbed. I could hear Vanta yell “medic” as though he was in another room shouting at the TV.
When my eyes reopened, I was in a hospital. The requisite IVs and monitoring equipment tethered me to a bed. My left arm and leg were unresponsive. The left side of my face was a thousand pinpricks masquerading as sensation.
Vanta was waiting for me to wake up.
“So, where are they? The girls? How many?” he asked rapid-fire.
“Under the house,” my mouth only forming words on one side. “an earthen room that hides. Stacked like cordwood. One cache of three.”