He'd made it to the waterfront boardwalk at the bottom of Battery Street before he started to seriously consider taking his phone out of his pocket again. The route he'd taken had been circuitous, too, looping first up to and then down from Church Street and tangling through the knotted grid work of homes converted into anywhere between three and five student apartments. Ari was a fast walker and could look purposeful and hurried even on these long ambles. His Dad called it city-walking, in memory of the years he'd spent packed into a Brooklyn loft above a convenience store in pursuit of his post-graduate education.

It wasn't the distance from 'home' or the winding walk that made placing the call feel possible. Instead, the churn and chatter of Waterfront Park on a sunny Saturday made him bolder and crazier than he'd otherwise be. Vermont's answer to a true coastline had turned stark and shiny after the night's rain and fog in the same whiplash way Vermont made all its meteorological decisions, and everyone was too dazzled by the laser beam flash off the waves and the novelty of blooming sunburn to watch one guy make a phone call.

Nobody would overhear if he couldn't stop himself from asking, 'Do you think this is why there's CCTV footage of my friend throwing herself under an Amtrak?'

That was still floating out there, Somewhere. Ari had never seen it. He'd only been told it existed, by classmates he no longer talked to for reasons he'd convinced himself were unrelated.

The kind of people that Blake was excited to think Ari had reconnected with, which wasn't off-base in the spirit of the thing. Caerwyn Cain had come to him with a binder full of corpses, a vision board dedicated in no small part to the single worst event in Ari's life, and that was not unlike being baited with implied offers of a URL. What had him fingering the phone in his pocket, though, was another implied offer: a solution. And Ari was young enough that a solution to something years dead and beyond his control was still very appealing.

Ari pulled off the boardwalk and onto the broad strip of green that ran between the boards and the bike path, and he settled on crossed legs in the shade of an overgrown azalea bush that buzzed with bees. The bees kept the yoga moms and volleyball kids who usually populated the green at a respectable distance. He pulled up his contacts and allowed himself one final diversion in the form of thumbing through his photos for a contact image for Wyn. Everyone got a photo. Even creepy weirdos. He settled on a photo he'd snagged at Crater Lake back when he was still bumming around Oregon. A scruffy-looking red fox he'd caught sunning itself on a rock overlooking the lake. Ari'd been proud enough of the shot to make Blake email it to him on his new phone. It had strong contrasts between orange and the shocking blue of the lake. More impressively, it was one of maybe five photos Ari had managed to take of an animal without it darting off.

In that moment, though, it was reduced to, 'Screw you. You're a cute woodland animal now.'

Making the phone call was so easy his stomach dropped. He put the phone to his ear and waited, hoping in spite of himself that he'd just have to sit through a voicemail preamble.

No such luck. Two rings. Very prompt. Freshman year planner girl behavior. Disgusting.

"Ariel?"

No hello, no nothing. Worse than he could have imagined.

"Who else?"

What was that even supposed to mean? 

"I've given a couple of people the work number recently, but I figured it would be you at this hour. The others are busy."

Ari could not deny that he was not busy. He had ditched work, the one way in which he was ever busy in the middle of the day, to do this.

"Yeah. Fair. Do you have time right now?"

"Some, but I don't know how much. I had been expecting some clients, but they're running late and I haven't been able to raise them on the phone."

Ari wasn't ready to ask what kind of housekeeper took client visits at home.

"Like a few minutes. If they call, you can just drop me."

"No, I'm not interested in having this kind of conversation over the phone. If you're by the waterfront, you're not far from my building. I live at Jackson Place, that big red brick complex near the end of Battery."

Looking around, Ari found only bees. "What makes you think I'm at the waterfront?"

A pause that suggested a shrug. "It's not far from the hostel, I hear crowds, and I've seen you playing guitar there before."

Ari's stomach did another weird little flip. "You've seen me before?"

"You're a local character. What, you didn't realize? Anyway, Jackson Place. I live on the fourth floor. Are you coming or not?"

"Fine." Ari pawed at the screen until the call winked away with an antiseptic chime. He stuffed it into the pocket of his cargo shorts with a malice that could only be satisfied by smashing a handset down on a receiver. 

---

Jackson Place was a bank of red brick facade with manicured window boxes of flowers on the balconies enjoyed by every single unit, most of which commanded some view of Lake Champlain. It was one of several 'nice' apartment complexes in Queen City. Ari had visited it a few times to give guitar lessons to the sons of UVM professors living in the bigger units. It was only ever sons. Even jet-setting ascended hippies with doctorates in the humanities couldn't get over the puritanical ick they felt at the idea of letting some semi-random artistic man interface with their little girls.

The call box was inside the spacious entryway on the street-facing corner of the ground floor. A cool wave surged out at him when he pushed the glass door open. Jackson Place was so nice that the air conditioning reached the place UPS drivers had to hover for fifteen minutes waiting for someone to let them in.

There was a security camera in one corner of the little slate-floored space that acknowledged this by saying, effectively, 'I know this is here, and I know there are also benches, but you'd better not enjoy it.'

The call box and its associated directory were digital, set into the brick wall as a flat, shiny screen one navigated with a keypad. Scrolling through the alphabetically sorted directory, Ari realized that he had probably glanced over Wyn's name in the Cs half a dozen times on his way to deeper parts of the alphabet.

CAIN, CAERWYN

UNIT 404 

CALL 6327

He punched the numbers into the keypad, and there was a chime - not an abrasive buzz - and he waited like the UPS men had to wait.

A voice issued from a speaker designed and installed in such a way that Ari couldn’t find it. "Hello. Come up. It's not the perfect time, but it might be better this way."

The box didn't give Ari or the UPS men any option to reply. The door into the main lobby made a mechanical shuffling sound as it unlocked, and he went in before it could change its mind.

Inside the lobby, the air conditioning was even more assertive. It nibbled the sweaty backs of his bare knees as he made his way across the expanse of slate tile that separated him from the elevator. He wasn't about to walk all this way to save whatever property firm owned the place save on the electricity it would take to get him to the fourth floor.

The fourth floor itself was unremarkable to Ari. He'd been there. He'd passed Wyn's apartment on his way to a spate of lessons for a resort manager's son who found a new hobby within weeks and never called again. It was carpeted in dense dark blue, which was probably a pain and an expense to clean. There were upholstered benches for taking off boots or waiting to be admitted to units. There was local art on the walls which made up for being local by being boring.

The door into number 404 was way too close to the elevator. Larger units meant fewer units per floor, which meant fewer doors, which meant he only had a moment to wonder what kind of housekeeper could afford to live at Jackson Place. Maybe, his mind offered, he managed a cleaning service. That made more sense, right?

Two sets of shoes, a worn down pair of white New Balances and a dusty pair of black work boots of indeterminate pedigree sat in a little heap by 404's door, in the polite rectangle of a corrugated plastic tray. Landscaping, too, maybe? That was difficult to visualize.

Ari knocked. He didn't wait long.

An even more aggressive surge of chilled air rolled out of the apartment when the door swung inward to reveal Wyn dressed in a decidedly less slumpy manner than Ari had first encountered him in. The sight of him in a black turtleneck and matching skinny jeans jarred Ari's memories of movie night in the basement coffee shop at college. If he didn't bleach his hair, Wyn could pass for Cesare. 

It was hard to tell in the half-light beyond the doorway, but he might have been wearing makeup. He definitely had product in his hair; the frizz was gone.

"Ah, good. Come in, we're about to start."

"Start?" Ari followed him into the apartment's combined entryway and kitchen. His body was operating on its own, like a fire chasing fuel. 

Wyn led him over to a corner of the kitchen, away from the doorway into the living room. The whole place was barely lit, and it was hard to tell if it was set up in the same way as the others Ari'd seen. He let Wyn start talking, or rather whispering.

"Listen. My clients have finally arrived, and they don't expect you." People didn't really whisper to Ari. He was not from a whispering household. The papery rasp of real whispering was disarming in a way he didn't like. "Theirs is a sensitive issue that they are not comfortable sharing outside their family, but it needs resolving. Play along, and we'll get through the meeting quickly."

"I-" Ari's voice died in his throat when he tried to tone it down to a whisper, and his eyes wandered to the living room doorway. It was dark in there, truly dark, with a few scattered amber flames licking away in glass chimneys interspersed in the murk. The muscles of his throat worked. "I can wait outside if that's easier."

"Oh, no, this is much easier." Wyn took him by the hand before he could react and pulled him out of the corner with a force and a confidence that Ari failed to resist. The hand gripping Ari's was March morning cold, and smaller and thinner than his own. It slipped loose as soon as they crossed the threshold into the living room. "Gentlemen."

At the other edge of the darkness, on a loveseat beside the heavily shaded balcony doors, two figures twitched to life. The candles threw lapping flashes of color across the faces of the two men, one more aged and jagged than the other. Ari got the impression, informed by nothing he could consciously detect, that they were related.

The man Ari's brain had assigned the role of Father spoke first. "This isn't the same guy as last time."

"No, but you'll remember I had to part ways with him suddenly." Wyn crossed the room as he spoke and settled into a ladder back chair set roughly in its center. "I've replaced him in just as little time."

Ari wasn't the only one casting roles. At a loss, he followed Wyn and stood behind him like they were about to start a ventriloquism act.

"The candles, please," Wyn said, tipping his face up at Ari so that the ambient candlelight in the room pooled in the matching color of his eyes. He waved a hand at his clients. "He's still young and gets flustered and forgets small things."

Ari decided to play along. The situation he'd walked into was weird, but it didn't seem like a dangerous kind of weird.

Queen City had more than its fair share of fortune tellers and diviners, and Ari comforted himself with the rationale that asking for two hundred dollars to flip three randomly selected cards and improvise a performance around the results wasn't too far removed from any other kind of paid performance art. Steer clear of making any pronouncements too prescriptive or life altering and you could have a questionable but (mostly) ethical artistic vocation.

Ari returned to the chair after he'd collected as many candles as he could carry, which was exactly two. He let Wyn prompt him as to their placement by gently kicking the two front-facing legs of the chair. He placed them very carefully, one within inches of each leg, and returned to his spot behind the chair.

Suddenly it was the son's turn to pipe up. "That's it?"

The father elbowed him. "Do you wanna be done with this or not?"

Wyn raised a hand to the level of his eyes and shushed them. They complied. "Nothing else is necessary in this space. We will begin."

The father shifted, the many corners of his pale face catching and holding shadows. "Right. Yeah, uh, please proceed."

At that moment, Wyn's head dipped to his chest and he tipped forward. Ari's hands snapped out to pull him upright again, pure reflex. All around him, the atmosphere of the room shifted in a way that reminded him of the moments that precede freak thunderstorms. 

The father and son crowded together on the sofa. Wyn's head failed to rise again, and he breathed out in a chest-emptying sigh. The air and vapor this produced hit Ari's hands heavy and cold, like fog from a walk-in freezer.

It was a cold that human bodies don't produce.

I’m amped to see you still reading! Just a reminder that if you’re reading this during launch week (April 6 2026-April 10 2026) this once-daily schedule is launch week only. Starting next week, regular updates will drop every Tuesday and Thursday until this case concludes in a few months. I hope you’ll stick around.