A sigh escaped my lips as I gathered my clothes and unlocked the bathroom door, flicking the light off on my way back out.

As I’d expected with the whispered quieted down, the room was dark, both of them were curled up in their beds. Tiptoeing towards the pullout, I winced as my socks caught in the rough carpeting. I’d forgotten to slip my shoes back on after I’d changed.

Dumping the clothes on the floor beside my bag, I crawled onto the bed. The springs groaned loudly as I tried to find a comfortable position. What seemed like an eternity later, I finally settled and pulled the scratchy blanket over my shoulders.

“Goodnight, Kara.” Isabelle mumbled into the darkness.

“Goodnight,” I whispered back before burying my face into my pillow and squeezing my stinging eyes shut.

The next morning, Isabelle gently shook my shoulder, and I peeked one heavy lid at her. She gave an apologetic smile and offered me a styrofoam coffee cup. I sat up and wordlessly took it.

It was a restless sleep. At least it was for me.

“Hungry?” Josh grumbled out, not looking at me. He shoved his pajamas back into his backpack and mumbled something to Isabelle before taking both of their bags out to the Jeep. There would be no talking about last night’s argument because if we did talk about it, it would just lead to another stupid argument.

“How’d you sleep?” She asked when we were alone. I shrugged and sipped my coffee.

“Normal, I guess.” She ran a hand through her auburn hair and sat down on the foot of her bed facing me.

“I believe you.” She admitted, glancing once over her shoulder to the doorway. “Josh is—well Josh is Josh. There’s really no explaining him.” I sipped my coffee again but remained silent. “Kara, what happened last night? What’s really going on? We’re best friends, you know you can tell me anything, right?” She pushed a few messy strands of my hair back from my face. “I’m worried about you.”

“I’m not crazy.” I blurted and pulled back from her touch. “I know you guys think I am, but I’m not. You weren’t there. You didn’t see it. You didn’t see him.” I threw the half empty coffee cup into the overflowing trash can by the nightstand. What was left of the coffee splashed up over the cheeseburger wrappers. I could see the gears working as she tried and failed to find something to say. “We should just call it and go home.”

“Go home?” She was on her feet now too, her arms crossed over her chest. “You just presented us with probably the most intense case we’ve ever had the chance to investigate and now you want to call it quits now that we fully understand the investigation? That hardly seems fair.”

“Fair?” I gave her a skeptical look. “What’s not fair, Iz, is that Josh blew up on me last night over it. He didn’t listen and neither did you.” Her eyebrows lifted. “You didn’t even defend me.”

I shot to my feet and scooped up my discarded clothes from the night before, dumping them onto the pullout mattress and knelt before my bag. Unzipping it, I set the camera aside and dug through the clothes in the bottom. I decided on a black MIW t-shirt with a neon pumpkin on the front and my whitewashed jeans.

Isabelle pursed her lips and stared ahead to the wall. I wasn’t wrong when I she didn’t defend me, but maybe it wasn’t fair to expect her to when it was between him and me. My shoulders drooped a little. Irregardless of the situation, I was her best friend and if it had been the other way around and it had been my boyfriend blowing up on her like that, I would have jumped in immediately to defend her. Right?

“I think,” Isabelle began as I faced her. “I think that last night was just a lot, and I think that we were all overly tired. I don’t agree with how he reacted, but I can’t change it now. What I can do is go back to this apartment complex with you and do another round of recordings.”

Shaking my head, I stepped into the bathroom but didn’t close the door all the way so that we could keep talking. “There’s no point in going. Josh said we didn’t get anything, so I doubt he is going to want to go back anyways.” I stripped out of my pj’s and pulled on my jeans and t-shirt.

“But you think we did.” Isabelle said. Bed springs squeaked and I could hear her feat shuffling closer to the door.

I brushed my teeth and ran the brush through my hair. Pulling the sides back from my face, I fastened them with a hair tie and once again examined my appearance in the mirror. The circles under my eyes weren’t as dark as they had been last night, which was a good sign, even though the yellowed light above me still made me appear sickly.

“Kara?” Isabelle urged.

Through the mirror, I could see the side of her leaning against the wall by the bathroom door. Her face was pointed upward as she stared at the ceiling.

“I think we should go back. Those articles you showed last night said there was another apartment that had activity. Maybe we could check out that one instead.” She reached a long slender finger up to scratch the bridge of her nose. “It was apartment three something, I think.

Apartment 3B. I knew exactly which one she was talking about. It was the one that I couldn’t look away from while we were sitting in the parking lot last night. I snapped a few photos from the widow facing the street before we left. It hadn’t occurred to me until just then, that I never finished looking at the photos. We didn’t finish going over the recordings either for that matter.

“Kara, please. I’m really trying here.”

I sighed and grabbed the toiletries pouch from the shelf and my dirty clothes and elbowed the door open. “Fine,” I said. “But I want to go home afterwards. I don’t want to keep hanging out with Josh.”

“But, I thought we were going to spend the summer doing this?”

“We were. You and me, Izzy. That was the plan. Not you, me, and Josh.” The hurt on her face had my stomach twisting. I didn’t want to hurt her, it was the last thing I wanted to do, but Josh’s outburst last night made me nervous.

“He’s a good guy, Kara. He really is.” She frowned slightly. “He just—has trouble sometimes.”

“Yeah, and I know firsthand what happens when he has trouble sometimes.”

Her brows bunched together, and she chewed on her lip as she tried to find a better way to approach this delicate topic. From that expression alone, I knew that she was remembering all of the times that Josh and the other jocks at Wickshire High had harassed all of us. All of us except her. She was always the exception for him. Whenever she came into the room, he would go from punching Aaron Briggs in the gut to wrapping his arm around his shoulders and asking him if his lunch was upsetting his stomach. It was painfully obvious to everyone, including Isabelle, that he had been beating the crap out of him before she’d walked in. But for whatever cosmic reason, when she walked into the room he faltered like a deer in headlights and couldn’t look away from her.

Somehow, after we’d graduated and transitioned to WU, she’d managed to tame the beast in him, and he began following her around like a lost puppy. I still wasn’t sure if it was more impressive or more disturbing to see.

“Kara, he really is trying to be better.” She insisted. “He’s not the same person that he was back then, none of us are.”

“Yeah.” I mumbled as I passed her. “It’s kind of hard to not be back in high school when he lashes out like that, violent or not.”

“I know, but—.”

The motel room door opened, and Josh stepped inside with a brown paper sack. “I got breakfast.” He said. His grey eyes darted between us and then at the bed closest to him. Clearing his throat, he held the sack out to us. “Sorry.”

My brows shot up at the unexpected gesture. A peripheral glance at Isabelle revealed a warm smile spreading on her face. Her arms lowered to her sides, and she walked over to kiss his cheek. Just like that, his visibly relaxed.

“Sausage biscuits.” Josh held the bag out to me with a tight-lipped smile. “I wasn’t sure what you liked.”

I locked eyes with her, and she nodded encouragingly and tilted her head towards him as if saying, ‘see, he’s trying’. I let out a breath and nodded, trying not to roll my eyes in the process.

“Sausage biscuits are great,” I said, reaching out to take the bag from him. “Uh, thanks.”

“So,” He began, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Isabelle says you might want to go back today?”

“Yeah, maybe.” I stared at him a moment longer, still trying to feel out the situation and his extreme shift in mood.

“We were just talking about it actually.” Isabelle tugged his arm gently and lead him to the bed to sit down. “I was telling her about one of the apartment numbers I’d seen in the articles she showed us last night and asked if she wanted to start there.”

At the mention of the articles, Josh’s grey eyes met mine, and his throat bobbed as he swallowed.

“Is that where you want to start?” His voice was a little strained as he asked, but he cleared his throat and continued. “I could make sure we have a fresh tape for the audio-recorder while you eat.”

“Uh, sure. That would be great, thanks.” I turned away finally, and made my way back to the pull out. I set the paper sack on the mattress and shoved my dirty clothes into my bag. My eyes dropped to the camera, and I picked it up, turning it on and thumbing through the photos. I got to the ones of the exterior of the apartment complex. There were three photos of the window leading into apartment 3B.

The first one was just a dark shot of the window and the green siding surrounding it. There was nothing out of the ordinary, which was to be expected. The second shot was nearly identical, except for a small speck in the frame just above that window. I flipped to the third one and gasped as my grip on the camera tightened.

“Kara?” Isabelle’s voice sounded distantly behind me as a low ringing sound filled my ears. “What’s wrong?”

I didn’t answer her. Couldn’t answer her. All I could do was stare down at the camera white knuckled in my hands. At the green siding and the lone window. At the shadowed outline of a man standing in that window staring back at me.

My chest tightened as I stared at the photo. At him. The ringing in my ears was drowned out by the thudding of my own heartbeat. I was having trouble getting air to flow into my lungs.

“Hey, Kara.” A warm hand grasped my shoulder, and I yelped, air rushing into my lungs and a dizzy feeling coming over me as I dropped the camera onto the mattress.

My stomach twisted and I clutched a hand to it as I stepped backwards. I knew there were sightings. I knew it was a possibility. But I had hoped—.

“Talk to me, Kara, what’s going on?” Isabelles face filled my line of vision. Worry was etched over every inch of it. Somewhere behind me, I heard the bed springs as Josh got up and made his way towards us. “Baby, please talk to me.” The same warm hands cupped my face, but my vision blurred.

My stomach roiled and shoved past her, racing towards the bathroom. I barely dropped to my knees in time before the contents of my stomach spilled out into the toilet. I heaved and coughed as everything I’d eaten from the night before projected out.

“What the hell happened?” Josh asked from the other room.

A moment later, Isabelles hand was in my hair, holding it back while the other one rubbed circles on my back in an attempt to sooth me. I heaved again, and again, until there was nothing left. I placed my arm over the toilet set and rest my forehead against it, trying to catch my breath. Isabelle stayed beside me rubbing my back and mumbling words that I couldn’t make out through the pounding I still heard in my ears.

Josh picked up the camera and his eyes widened in disbelief. “Son of a bitch.” He murmured. He stood there for a moment, staring down at the shadow man whose red eyes peered right back at him. His pulse skipped a beat, and his mouth dried out as his eyes lifted to the open bathroom door where Isabelle crouched behind her friend.

He walked towards the bathroom, his feet feeling like lead, and stopped in the open doorway. He held the camera in one hand and his other swept his blond curls back from his pale face. Glancing back down at the camera, the shadow man’s face turned as if looking over it’s dark shoulder. Josh blinked a few times and looked again. The shadow man was facing forward, those red eyes boring into his grey ones.

“I’m sorry, Kara.” He whispered. “He’s—he’s real.”

Isabelle peered over a shoulder at him, brows bunching. “Who’s real?” She asked.

Josh swallowed hard and cleared his throat. He looked up after what felt like an eternity, and he looked to Isabelle, then to Kara, who had finally lifted her clammy face from her arm to lock eyes with him. His mouth opened and then closed and then opened again. He looked back to Isabelle who was growing more confused by his strange behavior, and he thrust his hand out.

Isabelle hesitated, searching his face. She reached up, taking the camera from him and peered down at the photo that had caused so much emotion to cross her boyfriends otherwise stoic expression. “Holy shit.” She breathed and slid down into a sitting position.