Patricia arrived twenty minutes later.
One of the officers had called her as next of kin for Ethan.
She pushed right past both officers in my front hall. Her face was wild.
“Where is he? Where’s Ethan? Where is my son?”
“Ma’am,” Detective Hale said. “Please sit down.”
“I want to know where my son is!”
Detective Hale held up his tablet. He’d been sent preliminary photos from the scene. Identification photos. He was going to ask us to look at them.
Patricia looked at the screen.
Her face went completely white.
“No,” she whispered.
Then she collapsed onto my living room floor.
Everybody rushed toward her. The younger officer knelt down and checked her pulse. Detective Hale called for an ambulance on his radio.
But I was still sitting on the floor of the front hall. I was closest to the tablet. It had fallen face up on the rug.
And I looked at that photo.
The woman wasn’t Claire.
She had short dark hair. Claire’s hair was long and blond.
And the man wasn’t Ethan.
He was older. Heavyset. A gray beard. Maybe in his late fifties.
I’d never seen either one of them in my life.
Patricia came around before the ambulance even got there.
The very first thing she did was grab my wrist. Hard. Her fingernails dug into my skin.
“Where is Ethan?” she hissed. “What did you do with Ethan?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
It was the truth.
Detective Hale was watching the two of us very carefully.
He’d already asked me who’d been driving my car. I told him Ethan took it around six. I didn’t mention Patricia.
I didn’t mention the video in my pocket.
Not yet.
The detective explained that there was no identification on the two bodies. The car had caught fire after it went down the embankment. Investigators had found two phones, badly burned.
Neither phone belonged to Ethan.
“Then who was driving my car?” I said.
“That,” said Detective Hale, “is a very good question.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
Sophia holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Toronto, where she developed her skills in news reporting, media ethics, and digital journalism. Her expertise lies in identifying key stories, crafting compelling narratives, and ensuring journalistic integrity in every piece she edits.
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