Chapter 2
THE VOICE BEHIND THE DOOR
The recording ended, but Adrian Vale's voice remained in my head.
Good. Now we can begin.
I played it again.
Then a third time.
By the fourth, I had stopped listening to the words and started listening to everything around them. The low electrical hum. A faint metallic rattle. The distant sound of water running through pipes.
And beneath it all, something I hadn't noticed before.
Breathing.
Someone was standing close to the microphone, breathing quickly through their nose. Whoever it was had tried to remain quiet, but every few seconds the breath caught, followed by a tiny, involuntary sound.
A whimper.
I pressed my headphones tighter against my ears.
The sound came again.
Then my own voice, calm and distant.
She's inside. I've locked the door.
I stopped the recording.
My hands had begun to shake.
There were two possibilities. Either the voice belonged to me and I had done something I couldn't remember, or the recording had been manufactured to make me believe I had.
Neither possibility offered much comfort.
I saved three copies of the file. One went to my laptop, another to a cloud account, and the third to a small flash drive I kept in the pocket of my coat. Then I wrote down the file's metadata, including its timestamp and duration.
The recording was eleven minutes and fourteen seconds long.
I stared at that number.
Eleven minutes.
Fourteen seconds.
I checked the file again, convinced I'd made a mistake.
I hadn't.
Three years ago, the police had asked me to reconstruct the eleven minutes missing from my memory. I remembered the beginning of the evening, Elise arriving at my apartment, the argument, the broken glass.
I remembered looking at the clock at 11:41 p.m.
My next clear memory began at 11:52.
Eleven minutes.
Now I had a recording that lasted eleven minutes and fourteen seconds, dated the same night.
My phone vibrated.
An unknown number.
For several seconds, I simply watched the screen.
Then a message appeared.
DON'T PLAY IT AGAIN.
I didn't reply.
A second message arrived.
HE KNOWS YOU HAVE IT.
I looked toward the window.
The man who had watched me outside the police station was gone.
I drew the curtains and turned off the lights.
For the next twenty minutes, I sat at my kitchen table with the flash drive in my hand, listening for footsteps in the hallway. Every noise seemed amplified: the refrigerator clicking off, a pipe knocking somewhere in the wall, a car passing on the street below.
At 2:13 p.m., I made a decision.
I was going to find the door.
Not the door in my apartment. Not the front door of Dr. Vale's office.
The door in my memory.
I opened the drawer where I kept old documents and removed the missing person report, the police interview transcripts, and the photocopies of my original statement. I'd collected them over three years, searching for inconsistencies that might explain why the investigation had gone nowhere.
I spread the papers across the table.
My first statement was dated October fourteenth, three years earlier.
Two days after Elise vanished.
I began reading.
At 8:12 p.m., Elise arrived at my apartment.
At 9:05 p.m., we argued about her decision to leave Blackridge.
At 10:17 p.m., Elise made a telephone call.
At 11:41 p.m., I reported hearing a noise from the kitchen.
At 11:52 p.m., I remembered standing in the hallway alone.
I read the final sentence twice.
Standing in the hallway alone.
It was the only detail in the report that didn't fit with what I remembered.
I had always thought I was in the kitchen when the missing minutes began. I'd told myself that the broken glass had startled me, that I'd bent to clean it up, and that the next thing I knew, I was standing in the hallway.
But the statement said otherwise.
I checked the handwritten notes attached to the transcript. A police officer had underlined a sentence in red ink.
SUBJECT CLAIMS SHE HEARD SOMEONE KNOCKING FROM INSIDE A LOCKED ROOM.
I felt the room tilt.
I had no memory of saying that.
The next page contained the officer's follow-up question.
Which room?
My answer had been recorded in quotation marks.
I don't know. There shouldn't be a room there.
I sat back.
There shouldn't be a room there.
I read the sentence again, hoping the words might rearrange themselves into something ordinary.
They didn't.
My apartment was in a converted Victorian building. The floor plan was awkward, with narrow corridors, high ceilings, and old pipes that rattled whenever someone upstairs used the bathroom. But I knew every room. Every closet. Every cupboard.
There was no locked room.
Unless I had been referring to somewhere else.
I found a photograph of my old apartment in the case file. It had been taken by police the day after Elise disappeared. The kitchen was visible through the open doorway, with the broken glass still scattered across the tiles.
Behind the kitchen stood a narrow passage leading toward the rear of the building.
I enlarged the photograph on my laptop.
At the end of the passage was a door.
A small, dark door, almost hidden behind a hanging coat.
I leaned closer.
The door had a brass handle and a keyhole.
I had lived in that apartment for four years.
I had never seen it before.
Or I had seen it and forgotten.
I searched my old lease, the building's maintenance records, and the floor plan I had received when I moved in. The floor plan showed a wall where the door appeared in the police photograph.
No doorway. No room.
Just a wall.
I called the building's former landlord.
He answered with a weary greeting and seemed confused when I introduced myself.
"Mara Ellison? It's been a while."
"I need to ask you about my old apartment."
"All right."
"Was there a locked room behind the kitchen?"
Silence.
Then a short, uncomfortable laugh.
"Behind the kitchen?"
"At the end of the passage. A small door."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I have a photograph."
"Well, the building was old. There were all sorts of odd spaces. Storage cupboards, service passages. Things that had been sealed off years ago."
"Was there a room?"
"I couldn't tell you."
"Did you have a key?"
Another pause.
"Mara, why are you asking me this?"
"Because someone may have been inside it the night my sister disappeared."
The line went quiet.
When he spoke again, his voice had changed.
"You should leave that alone."
My stomach tightened.
"Why?"
"I don't know what you think you saw, but that building had problems long before you moved in. The previous tenants complained about noises. Doors opening. That sort of thing."
"What sort of noises?"
"Nothing I could prove."
"Did you ever hear someone knocking from inside a wall?"
He exhaled.
"I think you should speak to the police."
"I already have."
"Then speak to them again."
He hung up.
I stared at the phone.
The old landlord had been frightened.
I was sure of it.
But fear alone wasn't proof, and I had promised myself I would never again confuse the two.
I put on my coat, took the flash drive, and left my apartment.
The old building stood on Bellweather Lane, less than fifteen minutes from my current home. I hadn't returned since the police released the property after their investigation. The landlord had sold it the following year, and the new owners had renovated the entrance, replacing the original wooden doors with glass and steel.
I stood outside for several minutes, studying the windows.
My old apartment was on the fourth floor.
A light was on in the kitchen.
I told myself that meant nothing.
Then I rang the buzzer.
A woman's voice answered.
"Yes?"
"My name is Mara Ellison. I used to live in apartment four."
"I'm sorry?"
"I lived there three years ago. I need to ask you something about the layout."
"Can you come back later?"
"Please. It's important."
The buzzer sounded.
I entered.
The stairwell smelled of fresh paint and damp stone. The old wooden banister had been replaced with black metal, and the walls were covered in pale gray plaster. Every detail seemed designed to erase the building's past.
At the fourth floor, I stopped outside apartment four.
The door opened before I knocked.
A woman in her thirties stood in the doorway, holding a dish towel. She had short blond hair and a tired expression.
"You're Mara?"
"Yes."
She looked at me for a moment, then stepped aside.
"I wondered when you'd come back."
I froze.
"What do you mean?"
She glanced down the hallway before closing the door.
"I've seen your picture. In the news, years ago. Your sister's disappearance."
"How long have you lived here?"
"Eight months."
"Have you noticed anything unusual?"
Her eyes shifted toward the kitchen.
"Like what?"
"A door that shouldn't be there."
She said nothing.
I moved past her before she could stop me.
The kitchen was smaller than I remembered. The cabinets were new, the floor had been replaced, and the old window had been widened. But the narrow passage behind it remained.
I walked toward the end.
The wall was smooth, freshly painted, and completely blank.
No door.
No handle.
Nothing.
I touched the plaster.
It felt cold beneath my fingertips.
"Who told you about the door?" the woman asked.
I turned.
"Nobody. I saw it in a photograph."
She twisted the dish towel between her hands.
"Then you should probably forget it."
"Why does everyone keep telling me that?"
"Because it's not there anymore."
"What was behind it?"
"I don't know."
"You just said it isn't there anymore."
"I meant the door."
"How was it removed?"
She looked at me with something close to pity.
"They bricked it up."
"When?"
"Before I moved in."
"Who did it?"
"I don't know."
"Did you see the work?"
She shook her head.
I studied her face.
She was lying.
Not convincingly, but deliberately.
"Listen," I said. "I don't want to cause trouble. I just need to understand what happened here."
Her eyes filled with tears so suddenly that I took a step back.
"You need to leave."
"Why?"
"Because he told me you would come."
The words landed between us.
I couldn't move.
"Who told you?"
She pressed the dish towel against her mouth.
Then she whispered a name.
"Dr. Vale."
For several seconds, the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator.
I stared at her.
"How do you know him?"
She shook her head.
"Please."
"Did he come here?"
"Please, just go."
"Did he know my sister?"
The woman began to cry.
I reached toward her, but she recoiled so sharply that my hand fell back to my side.
"Don't touch me."
I stepped away.
"I'm sorry."
She wiped her face with the towel.
"He said you would ask about the room. He said you wouldn't remember why you were there."
My mouth went dry.
"Why was I there?"
She looked toward the kitchen wall.
"I don't know."
"You're lying again."
"No." She swallowed. "I'm trying to remember what he told me to forget."
She closed her eyes.
Then she spoke so quietly I almost missed it.
"Your sister wasn't the only person inside that room."
I heard a sound from the other side of the wall.
Three knocks.
A pause.
Two more.
The same pattern Elise had used on the telephone.
The woman dropped the dish towel.
I stepped toward the wall.
Another knock.
Then a voice, muffled by plaster, whispered my name.
"Mara."
I pressed my palm against the wall.
It was warm.
Not cold.
Warm, as though someone stood directly behind it.
I leaned closer.
"Elise?"
A long silence followed.
Then the voice spoke again.
"Don't let him open the door."
Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside the apartment.
The woman grabbed my arm.
"He's here."
I turned toward the entrance.
A key slid into the lock.
The handle began to turn.