Book Five, Chapter 110: The Final Girl

🔴 REC    SEP 23, 2018 14:02:35    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

 

Kimberly was slumped over in her chair, leaning against one of the desks in clear distress, drinking a glass of wine unashamed.

“We’re off the clock,” she had said earlier.

Logan was examining the outsides of the tapes on his workstation. I sat just out of the camera’s range.

We were having a quiet moment; all that could be heard was the construction going on a few rooms down.

Antoine appeared in the doorway with an unapologetic look on his face and asked, “Are we disturbing you?”

“You’re fine,” Kimberly said softly.

“It’s just—we tried to get this done on the weekends so that we wouldn’t bother you,” he added.

“I know,” Kimberly said, looking back up at him. “You didn’t do anything wrong. We didn’t realize that we would be in this weekend.”

Antoine broke his gaze away from Kimberly and looked around the room until his eyes landed on the wooden crate that had contained the videotapes.

His eyes perked up.

“Did you manage to play those tapes?” he asked. “Not that it’s any of my business; it’s just a really strange find, and I once found over 100 Barbies behind a sheet of drywall.”

He was being funny—he had not yet seen the tapes. He didn’t have to act worried or confused.

Kimberly glanced at me and then at Logan before saying, “They… they aren’t anything important.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Antoine said. “I was sure we’d stumbled on some lost history.”

Logan let loose a restrained chuckle.

Antoine, sensing the tension in the room, said, “Well, I’ll get back to work. Sorry for interrupting things–wait,” he said, doubling back. “Did you guys hear about the stage collapse yesterday?”

We all nodded.

“I talked to some of my work contacts. The stage was rotten. Somehow, it has passed inspections for the last decade. Somebody’s getting fired.”

“Heads will roll,” Logan said.

“Well, anyway,” Antoine said and then left.

“So it wasn’t sabotaged,” I said. “For whatever that’s worth.”

Kimberly waved him goodbye.

After a moment of silence, she asked, “What are we going to do?”

“Whatever you tell us to, boss,” I said.

She glared at me and then sipped her wine.

“Well, my first instinct would be to go to the police,” Logan said, “Actually, my first instinct is to confirm and authenticate the find so I can take credit, but my second instinct is to go to the police. Of course… when the police got the tapes, they would need to call in an expert on Carousel’s history to authenticate them, and I’m who they would call. So it’s all the same to me.”

“We go to the police and say what?” Kimberly asked. “We found some disturbing tapes that appear to be historical snuff films or reenactments of snuff films, and we, the brains over at the Museum of Crime, cannot figure out which. We are going to look like fools. We have to know more about these before we say anything.”

“The old tapes are one thing,” Logan said, “but if we show them the tape from yesterday’s accident and say we found it behind a brick wall a week ago, what are they going to make of that? Of course, we could just throw that one in the trash…”

“I have an idea,” I said.

“Do you have a real idea, or is it a joke?” Kimberly asked.

“I’ll wait to answer that question until we see if it works,” I said.

“What?” she asked at the end of her emotional rope.

“Well, from what I can tell, all of these films were shot in Carousel, and they deal with Carousel’s history. Maybe we could find a person that we recognize from town, and then we can just ask them about it. If they participated in a reenactment, they could tell us.”

Kimberly sat up straight. “That could work,” she said.

Logan walked over toward where Kimberly and I were sitting, clearly interested in my idea.

“Have you recognized anyone from these videos yet?” he asked.

“The ones I’ve seen that happened recently,” I said, “I did recognize the people—like the daylight dance video.”

“Speaking of, how recent are these videos? Is there a pattern or a cut-off date?” he asked.

“Seems completely random to me,” I said.

He furrowed his brow.

“I’m running out of reasonable theories very quickly,” he said. “The only one that still makes sense is that you’re faking this.”

“I hear you,” I said. “I’m in the same boat, but I have one fewer theory to work with because I know I didn’t do it. Off the top of my head, I did find one video that I think is pretty recent because the cars look modern, but I can’t find any reference to the accident on the Internet.”

“Show it to me,” Logan said.

I fiddled through a list of tapes I had loaded onto the computer until I found the one labeled afternoon nap.

■ STOP

 

▶ PLAY Jan 12, 1996 16:58:02

 

The film started eerily silent as the cameraman walked through a dark hallway in what looked like a factory. No one was speaking, but machinery was running in the background.

The camera panned around a room at the end of the hallway, which contained a machine I had seen before in movies and on TV, but I didn’t know its name.

Logan recognized it, too, because he whispered, “Textiles.”

As soon as he did, I realized he was right—this was some sort of textile factory.

While the room was larger than the hallway, it was still a very enclosed space, and the windows were very high, with grass poking up into view. The room was underground.

As the camera was moved around, I could see lots of desks crammed into the space with sewing machines on them. Most of the desks did not have people sitting at them, but three of them did.

The people at the desks were leaning over and not moving, almost like they were taking a nap. One of their sewing machines was still on because the worker had kept her foot on the pedal beneath the desk.

The camera panned around some more and revealed another worker lying out on the ground.

“Okay, pause it,” Logan said.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I immediately hit the space bar.

 

■ STOP

 

🔴 REC    SEP 23, 2018 14:15:06    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

 

Logan pointed at the screen.
“See that against the wall?” he asked.

I squinted.

“Yes,” Kimberly said. “It’s a calendar.”

We had a good view of the calendar, except a fan was blowing near it, flipping the bottom half upward and obscuring the month and year. All we could see was the top half, which featured a picture—a photograph of a beautiful house. Moving the video forward or backward didn’t reveal the bottom half.

I zoomed in as much as the program would allow, but it wasn’t like magic television zooming. The blurriness just became bigger, but I could make it out.

“Raker Realty,” I read from the top left of the calendar. “This is one of those advertisement calendars that gets sent out every year,” I said.

“So if we can figure out what year and what month had that picture, we should be able to figure out the date of this video,” Logan said.

“It’s that easy,” I said sarcastically.

“It’s better than nothing. When you said that you searched to find an incident like this one, what did you search for?” Logan asked.

I could see why Logan was the highest-level player on his team. Beneath his veneer of apathy and cynicism, there was a part of this game that he definitely liked.

“Carbon monoxide poisoning at a factory in Carousel,” I said.

He tapped his fingers against the desk. “Maybe we need to expand our search a bit,” he said. “We don’t know for sure it was carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Well, you look it up. I’ve been looking up terrible, depressing things ever since I watched the first tape,” I said.

He didn’t argue. He just went back to his computer to do research. But before he could make any progress, Kimberly had an idea of her own.

I knew she did because she started putting her hair up in a ponytail to transfer some points from Moxie to Savvy.

“You know, they hand those calendars out every year. They mail them to everyone,” she said.

“Yeah,” I responded.

“Well, this place has been getting mail for decades.”

Logan and I looked at her and then at each other.

We walked out toward the side of the museum devoted to the historic courthouse. The pile of mail was not-so-neatly stacked in a corner.

While there was a lot of it, it was easy enough to separate something the size of a calendar from something the size of normal mail. Kimberly and Logan did most of the sorting while I filmed and occasionally panned around the room just to make sure the audience got a good idea of the physical space—and to make it look like I was busy so I didn’t have to sort through the mail.

“I got one,” Kimberly said, holding up a calendar that was sealed closed and clearly bent as someone had pushed it through the mail slot.

“What year?” I asked.

“2018,” she said. “This year.”

We immediately rushed back to the computer as she opened the calendar and started flipping through it, looking for the month with the right picture at the top.