“What in the world?!?” I drop the piece of brown paper in my hand to join the ones on the floor as I stare at the pale white mannequin standing in the middle of the room. Why would anyone have a mannequin in their house?

The light from the window reveals a lot that I wouldn’t have seen and would’ve walked past. There are smears of blood on the multicolored walls nearest to the mannequin and something is crumpled on the floor that looks like fabric. It doesn’t look like the frilly fabric from the box downstairs. This looks more like a shirt. A white t-shirt.

As I make my way over to it, I can see that someone has drawn a face on the mannequin. That’s why I thought someone was looking at me! They actually drew eyes on it! The eyes aren’t your typical eyes that someone who was an artist would draw. These look like manga eyes from those manga comic books. And whoever drew this, also drew an X where the mouth should go.

Creepy.

When I bend over to pick up the fabric, my gut tells me not to do it. This could be an actual crime scene. I don’t want my fingerprints on that, whatever it is. I still want to know what it is though, so I use the toe of my shoe and move it around, flipping it so that most of it is laid out. It is a t-shirt! It looks small though, like maybe this squirrely Blake wore it, or maybe a small woman.

Part of the shirt won’t open up. It’s stuck together. I stand on one edge of the shirt and use my other foot to pull the other edge. I try to skid my feet across the wood floor but something on the floor is sticky. The shirt won’t come all the way open either because it’s not only stuck together but it’s stuck to the floor in one spot. When I lift my foot from the floor to see what it is I’m standing on, I feel like I can’t breathe.

I’m standing on mostly dried, sticky blood.

Why did I have to see this shirt?? Why did I have to come inside??

The blood has stuck to the tread in my shoes and now I’m going to be trekking this through the rest of the house. The police are going to think it’s me that did this. And I just realized that my fingerprints are on the door and cardboard boxes downstairs.

Shit.

Maybe this isn’t a crime scene. Maybe some squatter had a bloody nose. Maybe it was Blake.

But maybe it’s Blake’s crime scene.

“This is no time for you.”

I feel like I’m losing my mind and now I’m talking back to the voice in my head. Great. Hope there’s a spot next to Kendra in the facility.

I figure I might as well check the rest of the house. I’m already here and my DNA is everywhere. Just as I’m about to turn to go into another room, I see a bloody handprint on the lower part of the mannequin’s leg. It’s like someone was trying to hold on to keep from being taken or something. Why else would there be a handprint so low?

I turn on the flashlight on my phone so that I can see the floor behind the mannequin. The mannequin is casting a shadow over something in the corner of the room. Something small. The light moves across the floor where I see a handprint streak move away from the mannequin toward the green and pink room. There was definitely a struggle here.

The light moves across the floor, illuminating different drops and smears of blood before landing on the small, overturned shoe in the corner of the room. There’s blood on the treads, and as much as I want to turn it over, I don’t do it. I do stand as close to it as I can and see that it’s an Adidas women’s tennis shoe.

Like mine.

It even looks to be about the same size as mine.

Whoever it was that wore that shirt and shoe, I’m afraid of what happened to them. Is it Blake and he just likes to wear that kind of clothing? Or was it someone else?

I decide to go back into the green and pink room. Maybe there was something I missed in there. My senses are heightened as the adrenaline rushes through my veins, and I smell something rotten when I pass through the doorway. I didn’t smell that before.

I use the flashlight on my phone and walk over to the window. It has the same brown paper taped over it too, just like all of the windows. I’m starting to think the paper wasn’t put there by the bank that foreclosed on this. I’m thinking that it was put there by whoever made the bloody mess in the living room.

My light casts a dim glow across the floor and droplets of blood show up in here too. There are a few smears on the wall but nothing like what’s in the living room. Just as I reach the window, a chill runs down my spine. I flash my light in the corner behind me, but nothing is there. Hopefully it’s just a false alarm and my mind is in overdrive.

I used one of my fingernails to pick at a piece of the tape that’s holding the paper to the window and then I’m able to pull on it. Multiple brown paper sheets fall but not all of them. These were put up differently than the ones over the big window. It’s enough light for me to see the woman’s pink pleated skirt on the floor near the closet though.

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My stomach turns at the thought of what this woman went through. I mean, it’s still possible that it’s just Blake dressing up in woman’s clothing, but my gut tells me that it’s not. My gut tells me that a woman was hurt, maybe even killed, here.

There’s a closet to my right that has mirrored doors on it. When I get closer to the closet, the rotten smell gets more intense. The closet is one of those that has two sliding doors on it. When one side is open, the other side is closed because one door slides in front of the other. I slide the one mirrored door to the right, allowing me to see inside the left side of the closet.

The smell. It’s so bad. My eyes water as the stench violates my nostrils.

There’s enough light from the openings in the paper on the window to see this side of the closet is empty. There’s nothing even on the floor. There’s just some dust in the back corner and a random wire hanger dangling from the bar that would normally hold clothing.

Should I open the other side? Maybe I should just leave and forget I found any of this. Just get back to hunting for Blake. And yet, my hand reaches up and pulls on the closet door, first closing the one side, and then pull on the other door.

There’s a cardboard box in the bottom of the right side of the closet in the back corner.

A dried puddle of blood on the floor surrounds the box and appears to have soaked the bottom two to three inches of the cardboard walls. The top flaps on the box are barely shut, but closed enough that I can’t look inside. The smell is horrid. It’s like sewage or rotten meat. I pull my shirt up over my nose, hoping that it’ll keep out some of the smell, but I’m sadly disappointed when it doesn’t. I might have to burn these clothes when I’m done.

I reach down and flip back one of the flaps, then another flap. I still can’t see inside but there’s definitely something in the box. I flip back a third flap but one of the other flaps falls shut again. Ugh! The closet is too dark for me to see inside the box, so I shine my phone light inside, and pull back the front flap with my other hand.

Is that hair?

There are tiny bugs crawling all over the dark auburn hair inside the box. I step in a little further and shine my light down inside, past the hair. The light lands on something that looks like a nose. And lips.

It’s a head.

This is someone’s head in a box!

Morbid curiosity makes me lean down to see if it’s a woman, and based on the makeup and small features, it sure could be. Especially considering the fact that I already found a skirt, a small t-shirt, and a shoe the size of my foot.

A strange calm comes over me as I take a step backward.

Do I call the cops?

How am I going to explain why I’m in the house?

“Why yes, officers, I broke in to find out who was staring at me when I was peeping through the window. Oh, the decapitated head? That was here. My fingerprints on all of the boxes? MORBID CURIOSITY! Dammit! Why do I have to be so curious???”

I slide the closet door shut again and walk out of the room. Even the colors in this room are making me nauseous, not just the smell. And as easy as it would be to just go out the front door, that’s even more places for my fingerprints.

Nope.

I need to go back out the way I came.

I look back out into the living room and see the mannequin and the brown paper scattered on the floor. Should I put that back up? I mean, it’s down in the green and pink room too. I don’t think I can just re-cover everything I uncovered at this point. I can explain everything I’ve touched so far. If I spent more time in here and covered everything back up, not only would that be even more DNA left behind, but my stomach might not be able to be in here with that smell.

I make my way back through the galley kitchen and descend the stairs that will take me back to the basement. Every squawk and creak of the steps sound like screams in my head. Screams from the girl whose last resting place is in the closet upstairs.

Well, at least her heads last resting place.

I pass by the pile of cardboard boxes that have the random sex toys and lingerie and can’t help but wonder if there’s more in there. I don’t smell the rotten meat smell down here nearly as bad, so I don’t think the rest of her body is down here. But what if the weapon is in one of the boxes?

The basement door is slightly open. Didn’t I latch it behind me? I don’t even remember now. It doesn’t matter. I open the door all the way up, past the shards of plexiglass on the floor, and walk out into the fresh air. When I close the door behind me, I know I didn’t lock it. And yet, I don’t really want to open it again just to lock it. I’m just going to leave that as it is.

Climbing back up the hill to get back to my car feels so much harder than it should be. My feet slide through the grass and all I can think is that it’s wiping the bloody residue off my shoes. I have to use both of my hands to brace myself up the hill but once I make it to the top, I turn around and look at the rest of the backyard.

There’s a random deck in the back of the yard. It looks like someone replaced the deck that was off of the back of the L-shaped living room and instead of breaking it down, they just moved the old deck to the spot in the backyard and left it there. If it was in good shape, someone could use it for an above ground pool, but I think there’s going to have to be a lot of cleaning before anyone is going to want to move in here.

As I make my way back to my car, my mind races. I know what I should do, but I also don’t want to get arrested for breaking and entering. That could happen. Or maybe it would just be trespassing since it’s foreclosed? I don’t really know how that would work.

I unlock my car, open the driver’s side door, and basically fall into the driver seat. I pull my legs inside and close the door. My head hits the headrest harder than I mean for it to, but I let it set there.

Ew.

What is that smell? It smells like inside the house.

I grab my shirt and lift it to my nose. Ugh! I smell like dead body! How could that smell have permeated my clothes that fast?!? I wasn’t in there that long. Was I?

I drop my shirt back down to my chest. I’m going to have to throw these clothes away. I would take them home and burn them, but I really do not want them stinking up my other clothes. And something tells me that I’m not going to be able to wash this smell out.

My key slides into the ignition and my car roars to a start. The air from the air conditioner blows the smell away from my face and I lean my head against the headrest and close my eyes. Do I call the cops? Or do I call Viv? Or do I call the bank/realtor?

Suddenly there’s a loud tap on my window. When I jerk upright, a man in a uniform is shining a flashlight in my eyes.