The nurse led us into a cozy living room, decorated in a style I could only describe as cottagecore. It was cozy, but dusting must take them forever. Carissa gestured for us to have a seat on the overstuffed sofa, and I perched delicately on the edge, trying not to disturb the pile of pillows lining the back.
“Just wait here for a moment, I’ll get the tea,” Carissa headed for the kitchen.
“Let me help you with that,” Simon jumped to assist her, leaving me alone in the room.
I sighed. I should not have agreed to this. It was obvious what Simon was trying to do, and it wasn’t going to work, anyway. Which meant that this was going to be an awkward afternoon for all of us. Still, I had agreed, so now I needed to at least go through the motions. I would take a quick look around, tell them what they wanted to hear, then go home and enjoy my week of peace and quiet. I took a sip from my flask and pulled out my phone. They were taking an unusually long time in the kitchen, but I doubted that I wanted to interrupt whatever they were doing, so I occupied myself for the moment by typing up a text message to Tom. I decided to shoot for a casual tone, just checking-in on a friend I hadn’t spoken to in some time.
Hey Tom, it’s been a while. We should grab dinner. Let me know when you have some free time.
There was no need to mention Gail’s concerns. Not yet, anyway. I hit send. That done, I tucked my phone back in my pocket; I didn’t expect to hear back from Tom any time soon. He was terrible about responding to his personal messages, it could easily be days before I heard from him, but I was sure he would get back to me, eventually. At least I had set things in motion. I leaned back on the couch, but I had forgotten about the pillows, and knocked several to the floor. I was still busily rearranging them when Carissa and Simon emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray of little cakes and tea in a rose-shaped pot with matching cups. The cakes looked home-made. Carissa had gone to some trouble, in a way which only reinforced my opinion that they were exaggerating their concerns. Simon had made it clear that he thought I needed to get out more, and apparently this was how he had decided to motivate me. I sighed, and jammed the final pillow back onto the couch, there wasn’t much I could do about it now, I was already here. Carissa placed the tray down on the coffee table and began pouring the drinks, turning to me as she did,
“What do you like in your tea?”
“I’ve got that covered, thank you,” I accepted the cup from her and added a generous splash of whiskey from my flask.
Carissa glanced over at Simon, he just shook his head, and she let it pass, clearing her throat and attempting to move the conversation along.
“It is very nice to finally meet you, Simon has told me so much about you and I…”
“I appreciate that, but in a missing person case, time is crucial, so perhaps we should focus on your roommate, for the moment?” I didn’t really want to do that, either, but it was certainly better than talking about myself.
“Oh, um, of course. That makes sense,” Carissa shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “What would you like to know?”
“Well, maybe you can start by telling me about the last time you saw her?” I sipped my tea, it wasn’t bad. “How did she seem? How was her mood? Did she tell you where she was planning on going?”
“Well,” Carissa thought back, “I only saw Mia for a short time that Wednesday evening, and nothing unusual happened, that I can think of. She got back from her shift at the hospital around 7, like usual, and I told her that I’d cooked dinner, but she said she was going out and so she wouldn’t be eating with me. I suppose I was a bit surprised by that, actually, because she had just finished her fourth 12-hour shift, so I knew she must have been tired.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“No,” Carissa rubbed the back of her neck. “We had had an argument recently, and I didn’t want her to think I was criticizing her, or her choices. Mia can be a bit sensitive about that, sometimes.”
“What had you fought about?”
I watched as her eyes darted momentarily to Simon, then back to me.
“It was nothing,” she tugged on her earlobe. “Just roommate bickering. I can’t even remember what started it.”
Well, that was obviously a lie, but I let it go, for the moment.
“Ok, what happened then?”
“Well, I went into the kitchen to eat, and I heard her go into the bathroom and start the shower. She came back a bit later, dressed up for a night out, so I figured she must have had a date lined up. She grabbed her water bottle from the fridge, said goodnight and that she would see me tomorrow, and she left. She seemed to be excited, but a bit nervous, I assumed it was because of her date.”
“Does she have a boyfriend she would have been meeting?”
“No, no boyfriend. If it was a date, it would have been with someone new.”
“And you didn’t ask who she was meeting, or where? Do you two not usually talk about your dates?” I grabbed a tiny pink cake off the serving tray.
“Sometimes… but not always,” Carissa looked at the ground, the tips of her ears turning pink. “Anyway, that is the last time I saw her. I wasn’t that worried when she didn’t come home that night, but by the next day, I started to get concerned. I have texted her over a dozen times, tried to call her phone, she isn’t answering.”
“Is that unusual? Perhaps she is just taking some time away, if you two have been fighting?”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
“No, she wouldn’t do that. We have lived together for a long time, we have fought plenty of times before, she wouldn’t just disappear without saying anything.”
“Has she missed work, or any important appointments?”
“No, Mia is working a 4 on 4 off schedule right now, and Wednesday was her last day, she doesn’t have work again until Monday.”
I nodded. Well, so far this all added up the way I suspected. The roommate had a date, she was off work, she was fighting with Carissa. It seemed very likely she had just decided to take a break from the situation, maybe staying with her date, and she would be back in time for her shift on Monday. Still, there was something about Carissa’s evasiveness when I asked about their fight that made me want to press a bit further.
“Has she been posting on her social media?”
“No. At first, I thought maybe she had blocked me from seeing her new posts, but I have reached out to our friends, and they all say she hasn’t posted in days, which isn’t like her at all. I asked if any of them knew who she had a date with that night, but they all said she didn’t mention having a date to them.”
So, she hadn’t told anyone who she was going out with. That was a bit unusual, most women like someone to know where they will be when they are meeting a stranger. Perhaps this wasn’t a stranger, or perhaps there was a reason she didn’t want anyone to know. I bookmarked that for later and moved on.
“Did she take everything with her? Her purse, her phone, her laptop?” I inquired.
“Her purse and phone, yes, but her laptop is in her room. I can show you, if you want to take a look?”
“Alright,” I drained the last of my tea and rose to follow her. “Simon, you wait here, alright?”
He looked up and opened his mouth to argue, but I shot him a pointed glare and he seemed to get the message.
“Right, I’ll uh… I’ll start washing the dishes,” he began gathering the teacups and plates from the coffee table.
“Thanks, sweetie, I’ll come help once I’m done,” Carissa beckoned for me to follow her up a small flight of stairs and down a hallway.
She opened the door on the right to reveal a moderately sized, tidy room that matched the living room décor perfectly. A plush bed and frilly fabrics featured heavily, and too many pillows covered every available surface, other than a small desk in the corner, with an open laptop in the centre. I dropped into the desk chair, turning it to face Carissa, still standing in the doorway.
“Have you checked this laptop, yet?”
She shook her head,
“No, I don’t know her password. Is that a problem?”
I shrugged,
“I’ll see what I can do. But, before that, do you want to tell me what you two really argued about?”
Carissa dropped her eyes to the floor, her cheeks flushing crimson,
“I told you; it was nothing. Does it really matter?”
“No way to tell for sure, but it could.”
She was silent for a long moment, before finally sighing,
“We argued about Simon. Mia said he was here too often, that she hadn’t agreed to a third roommate. She wanted to set limits on how often we were allowed to have overnight guests. But he really isn’t even here that much! And he is very considerate and inobtrusive when he is. I thought she was just jealous, and I told her that it wasn’t fair of her to take it out on me.”
“Jealous?”
“Well, it’s kind of embarrassing, but neither of us have ever been especially… lucky in love, if you know what I mean. It’s part of the reason we have stayed roommates for so long. Neither of us has ever had a serious, long-term relationship before, no boyfriend or husband to live with. So, we stuck together, even joked about being spinsters together. I was fine with that, really. I know I am not… conventionally attractive, I can be very shy around men, and my work keeps me too busy to date much. I had made my peace with being alone. But then I met Simon,” the blush had spread to the roots of her hair. “He is such an amazing person. He’s kind and funny, and so handsome. By far the most handsome man I have ever dated. Oh, I know he has his own… complications. But he has been honest with me, he loves me for who I am, and I love him. I want to be with him. But I know that it hurts Mia to see us together, to see me in a good relationship, while she is still alone. The problem is, I don’t know how to make it any easier for her. We’ve been fighting about stupid things for weeks now, and this is the only reason I can think of. I also think this is why she has started dating again. She had mostly given up on that years ago, but in the last few weeks, she started going out in the evenings, all dressed up. She didn’t really explain what she was doing, exactly, and I didn’t ask her about it, because I didn’t want to start another fight about Simon, and I didn’t want to rub salt in the wound.”
I leaned back in the chair, chewing my lip as I considered this new information. In many ways, it fit with my current theory, but it was also a bit concerning. If she was hiding this from all of her friends, what other risks was she taking? If she had ended up in a precarious situation, would anyone know? It was still probably nothing, but worth thinking about.
“I can understand that,” I said at last. “So, you don’t think there is any possibility that she met a man and is simply spending her off days with him?”
“I am sure she would have told me,” Clarissa bit her lip.
“Even with things as tense as they are, between you?”
She swallowed hard,
“I guess I don’t know. Not for sure,” she admitted, her voice very small. “Maybe she is just avoiding me, and she will be back for work on Monday. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have wasted your time.”
“Well, since I am here, I will see what I can do with the laptop, and we can decide what to do from there, alright?”
“Thank you,” she appeared to be struggling to hold back tears.
I had embarrassed her, which I felt badly about, but the questions needed to be asked. Still, it would probably be best for her to have a little space from me, for a bit.
“Why don’t you go help Simon in the kitchen? I will let you know what I find,” I suggested.
Carissa smiled, relieved,
“Thank you, I… shouldn’t leave him to do all the chores by himself, should I?”
With that, she scurried off down the hall without a backwards glance. I turned back to the laptop. I debated whether I should be poking into this woman’s personal things like this, when she was probably just shacked up with someone for the weekend. Still, there was a small chance that she was really in trouble… I decided that I would just take a quick peak at her most recent internet activity, hopefully confirm that she was just out with a date and nothing more sinister was going on, and then I would stop and not invade her privacy any further. Of course, all that depended on if I could actually get into her computer. I powered the laptop on and frowned at the password screen. I was no hacker, but fortunately I didn’t usually need to be. People were not as careful about cybersecurity as perhaps they should be. I tried typing in the five most common passwords, but didn’t have any luck. The next thing to do was to look for… I reached around to close the laptop and felt a piece of paper flap under my fingers. Spinning the laptop around I saw the yellow post-it note stuck to the back that read ‘SquirrelP@nts92’. Chuckling, I typed it into the password field, and it unlocked. Simon and Carissa certainly hadn’t tried very hard to get into Mia’s computer. I shook my head, then pulled up the web browser. A page was pinned to the browser and opened automatically; clearly, she visited it frequently. Looking it over, I found it was a private Facebook group for a nightclub. As I skimmed the description, I paused. Maybe it didn’t mean anything, but just in case, I decided was going to take a closer look around her room, after all.