AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Do not contact anyone or end up like Brooks
We see everything
I collapsed into my chair. I couldn’t breathe. My throat constricted, preventing the scream of terror lodged there from escaping.
I willed myself to restart my breathing and closed my eyes.
When they reopened, the deadly threat on the page only looked worse.
“Ready?” my coworker Kirby Stackhouse asked from behind me.
Somehow I hadn’t heard her approach. I quickly folded the note closed and turned.
She tapped the cubicle wall. “Come on, Kell. We don’t want to be late.”
I opened a drawer and hid the ghastly paper inside.
“You can tell me about Harold on the way,” she added.
I rose on unsteady legs. “Nothing to tell.”
“That bad, huh?”
I glanced down at the scuff on my new shoes. “Worse.”
Kirby pushed open the door to the stairs—never miss a chance to exercise was her motto. She went quiet while we descended, and my mind returned to the note. Six months ago, Melinda Brooks—who’d worked two cubicles down from me—had left work on a Monday night like any other. She was kidnapped and found dead four days later in Rock Creek Park. The details had been sickening.
In the weeks and months that passed, life here in the Smithsonian had slowly returned to normal as the incident was forgotten.Shehad been forgotten, but not by me.
Following the crowd to the cafeteria, Kirby and I made it in time for the start of the meeting. We took up residence near the back. I slid in next to Evelyn Gossen, another senior auditor in our department. She had never been the talkative type, and my greeting merited only a nod this morning. She looked as bad as I felt.
Here in the back, Krause wouldn’t notice if we snickered at something ridiculous he said, which was pretty much a guarantee. The meeting was supposed to get us all off to a very efficient, German start of the day.Bullshit. It had most of us needing a second cup of caffeinated beverage to stay awake while he prattled on.
Mark Porter smiled at me as he took the seat on the other side of Kirby. “Morning, ladies.”
Having him find a seat nearby had become a weekly occurrence, but at least he’d stopped asking me out. I’d learned to nod back to him, rather than encourage him with words.
With the note burned into my memory, the only words that came to mind anyway wereWhy me? What had I done to be targeted? Who could I or should I bring the note to?
Looking over the sea of people, I realized the note could have come from any of them. It came in interoffice mail, so I couldn’t trust anybody in the building.
Just then, Helmut Krause started his talk.
Krause had brought this meeting system over from his last job at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. It was, after all, the world’slargestmuseum of science and technology, he liked to remind us. Never mind thatwehad the Apollo 11 command module that had ferried Americans to the moon and back. That was my definition of technology.
Wendy had been the first on our floor to make the mistake of mispronouncing where Krause was from.Munich,he told us, was an English bastardization of the real spelling, München, and the word was to be pronouncedMoon-chen.
I could never get the U sound quite right and avoided the word entirely.
Krause’s speech this morning went right by me. Every time I blinked, I saw Melinda’s face staring back at me. She’d been the second tragedy we’d experienced in the past year. The first had been the kidnapping and murder of Daya Patel, another Smithsonian employee, just six months before Melinda.
The only thing I heard while Krause talked was the sound in my head of the newscaster from the night they found Melinda. “Tonight we have the tragic story of a young woman found strangled in the woods…”
Her face had been the first thing on the evening news. For a week or so, the story had dominated the news. But no more details became available, so the news people shifted to something about North Korea, then to a budget impasse the following week, and life went on.
But Melinda was always with me. She’d provided the recommendation that got me my job here. I would never forget her, or what had happened.
She’d left a letter for me in her apartment, sealed and addressed but unstamped. Her family had located it while clearing out her things three months later and given it to me.
