Six Missed Calls
Cordelia called Bram's cell first. Voicemail. She called the house line — the one Vanessa insisted on keeping, "for landline emergencies," though Cordelia had always thought that reasoning slightly theatrical. It rang eleven times before clicking to a machine.
She called Bram again. And again. By the fourth call her hands were shaking too hard to type a text message properly, autocorrect turning "call me now" into nonsense twice before she gave up and just wrote CALL ME in capitals and sent it into the void.
She thought about calling 911 right then, replaying the four seconds of footage she'd caught before the feed died, but some old, cautious part of her — the part that had spent a career being told to document, verify, follow protocol — made her grab her car keys instead. Fourteen minutes if she caught the lights right on Route 9.
She caught none of them.
By the time she pulled into the driveway, the porch camera showed green — online, working — but the house looked exactly as it always did. Curtains drawn just so. Vanessa's silver sedan parked at its usual careful angle. A wind chime her late husband had hung fifteen years ago still turning lazily by the door, as if nothing in the world had happened.
Cordelia didn't bother knocking. She tried the door.
Locked. Vanessa never locked the door before five.
She knocked hard enough to hurt her knuckles, and for a long, terrible ten seconds, nothing answered her at all — not footsteps, not Poppy's voice, not even the television Vanessa always left running. Cordelia pressed her ear to the door and heard, faintly, from somewhere deep in the house, a sound she couldn't place at first.
It took her a moment to understand it was crying — the kind a child does when they've been told, very clearly, to stop.