Michael was annoyed by the box.
It wasn’t in an incorrect place. It was in the exact location it was meant to be in, hidden inside an unused trash can behind Ravenville’s pharmacy, inside a plastic bag and shut tight. The black plastic of the pencil case was untouched, the thin rod of pencil lead between the hinges still intact. It had not been opened, and likely not even disturbed by somebody searching through. It was untouched, undisturbed, and still fit for the purpose of serving as backup equipment whenever Michael might need medical supplies or a spare weapon.
That was good. And yet it annoyed him.
This cache held an awl inside it. Michael had not placed this weapon here for any specific reason, merely for the fact that it was an unconventional weapon that would throw people off. It was a perfectly viable backup weapon. But there were no leatherworking stores in Ravenville, and he had stolen this from his father’s toolbox. There were not many options if one wanted to get their hands on an awl, or any weapon with a similar cutting profile and breakable wooden handle. Either one could steal from their own parents, or from somebody else.
The easiest way would be to pilfer a weapon from a backup stash hidden somewhere in Ravenville. Michael had several, and he certainly was not the only one. But all of them had been untouched, including this one. He must have checked half a dozen caches belonging to other people, and another half dozen that were his own. Yet none were even touched.
He scowled, replacing the lid on the trash can and walking back towards his car. The suspect’s weapon did not have to be an awl, strictly speaking. Just something with a sharp tip and a wooden handle. But that still required a weapon, and if none of the caches had been touched, he could not dig up any sort of lead. There had been a persistent lack of new evidence in the several days since Jane’s attack, and the longer it took, the more difficult it would be to find any evidence that was there.
The sign above the pharmacy’s door cast a sick red glow on the parking lot, and Michael stopped at the edge of the pavement, the light upon his back. It was a quiet Sunday night, the pharmacy was under an hour away from closing, and everybody who was going to go somewhere had already gone somewhere. There was a chance that knives were glinting in the dark of night, that somebody was breathing the air of their last few hours. There was always a chance that tomorrow, he would walk into school and hear that somebody else was dead. Violent things happened in the dark of Ravenville, and the exercise of violence inherently demanded an opposite end, a recipient of the effort.
There would always be more bodies to receive it.
Michael looked around at the empty lot and extracted a folded up note from his back pocket, looking over the list. He was nearing the bottom and still unsuccessful, everything untouched and ready to use. If he didn’t find any evidence in these next few caches, then he would need to start fresh again in a wholly separate lead. An evening of work, wasted.
But it was nearly all that he had. There had been no fingerprints, no identifying features, and the hardware store didn’t sell any tools with wooden handles. There was a woodworking store nearer to the woods that he knew existed, even if it did not get much business, which could have provided the weapon. Michael doubted that, though. Jane’s attacker had been aware enough to leave after their weapon had broken, knowing their main advantage was gone, which implied a level of awareness of the intricacies of attempted murder. He doubted somebody intelligent enough to run away when they knew they were at a disadvantage would have attempted a kill with a weapon they had recently purchased, especially when a place with slow business would know exactly who bought what, and when they bought it. There was evidence, but the window to make use of it was dwindling.
There was still one more cache on his list to reach, and he walked across the empty lot to his car to make the short drive to get there. The lights in the store windows that populated Ravenville’s east main street were winking out as those places closed for the night, a slow and inconsistent stream of headlights flowing out of the area marking people going home. He would be leaving the main street half of town alongside them, but not following them to the suburbs quite yet.
His car started without trouble and he drove out of the pharmacy’s parking lot, streetlights washing over and past him as he drove into the emptiness marking the liminal roadways of Ravenville. Driving back from the stores always had an emptiness to it, the shadow of the forest looming in the distance like vantablack specters darker than the sunless sky, the sun having long sunk below the bottom of the horizon. Perhaps it was the lack of shortcuts, the fact that everything had to run through the intersection marking the center of town making him feel vulnerable, unless one wanted to sprint through a waste of nothing but knee high grass while rows of houses loomed in the distance, the tallest thing for two miles and still so small in the expanse. It was a paradox of open space, so much left unclaimed and yet nothing had moved in, not even the park down at the south end by the high school.
People hid evidence and bodies in the woods because it was crowded. There were trees, creatures, layers upon layers of debris and detritus on the ground that could hide a corpse in the chaos. In the fields, if the vultures came down, they could be seen from all over town, and that posed a question that answered itself. An example of emptiness could be its own highlight.
So instead of turning south at the intersection, to look for something in the fields, Michael turned north, to where the final cache on his list was. There was far less in the north of Ravenville than in the south and east, and he knew this was a much worse place to hide something. He hadn’t hidden this one, anyway, but whoever had seemed to have thought that the mailbox of a property that no longer had anything on it was a great place to hide something, when it was a three minute drive from the police station.
The lot was as empty as every other lot along the northern street, the high standing lights of the apartment block staring at him like the patterns on a bad bingo board, slowly fading away. Michael stopped the car in the overgrown patch of loose gravel that might have once been a driveway, when there might have once been a house here instead of grass, empty dirt, and slowly encroaching bushes, and got out to look inside the mailbox, the headlights still on and the car still running.
Untouched. The plastic bag containing the weaponry was in the same position he remembered it being in ages ago and contained the same things, sitting to hold an almost gone puddle of water in the creases even though it hadn’t rained in a long time. Certainly before Jane had been attacked.
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Michael sighed and took out his phone, scrolling to the number he needed and dialing.
A click on the other end answered him, and Sarah’s voice followed a second later. “Michael? What did you find?”
“Nothing,” he replied flatly. “I’ve checked every cache that I know exists tonight, and they have all been uncompromised. The weapon lead, at this moment, appears to have gone nowhere.”
“You didn’t find anything?” She asked. “Nothing at all?”
“I have not found anywhere that leads me to believe Jane’s attacker sourced their weapon from somebody else, or left any sort of trail in its acquisition. This lead has gone nowhere.”
“Really? Where are you right now?”
“I am outside one of the empty lots on the road north. I have checked every weapon and supply cache that I know exists in Ravenville. Some of these have been here since I was in middle school. None of them have been compromised, much less in a way that would line up with somebody stealing a weapon to kill Jane with.”
“Damn.”
Silence took over Sarah’s half of the call with that, and Michael turned around and got back in his car, tucking the phone between his chin and shoulder as he buckled back in and reversed the car back onto the road, beginning the drive back home. She sounded like she was thinking, the faint static white noise of the signal occasionally interrupted by something moving, but she wasn’t saying anything.
He broke the silence first as he took the long way around the intersection to get to the suburbs. “What lead do you want to pursue next?”
“What do you mean, what lead do I want to follow? I thought you were doing the investigation?”
“I find evidence, but since you’re standing in for Jane, you need to direct me to it. You are the one that needs to be guiding me to our evidence.”
“Oh, I–agh.” She sighed. “Okay. I…what’s our next closest lead?”
He chose to overlook how forlorn and upset she sounded and just give her the answer. “The question of where the weapon is from is still open. Assuming that wood is from it, the only place one could get that would be from the woodworking shop near the woods.”
“There’s a woodworking shop near there?” Sarah’s question was half asked to herself, but she threw off the confusion fast. “Okay. I’ll think of something, I guess. Do you know anything about the woodworking store?”
“No.” Michael didn’t hesitate in his answer.
“Okay then, I’ll figure something out. I’ll, just, give it some thought.”
“Understood. Give me some direction as soon as you can.”
“Mhm.”
She didn’t hang up, and Michael waited for a moment longer before she spoke again.
“Do we have to kill whoever it is?”
“That’s how payback works, yes.” He reached one hand up to hold onto the phone as he turned onto his street. “If I’m convinced of their guilt, as the third party, then they’re open to freebies.”
“I can’t try and negotiate anything out of them?”
“You could, but they could also try again very easily. They could also simply kill you, or kill Jane. You would never actually be safe as long as they could try again.”
“There’s got to be some way to talk them out of it.”
“Maybe there is. But I’ve never seen one. You will have to convince Jane of that, too.”
“Oh, damn. You’re right.” She moved some piece of paper around in the background. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“Is it about the investigation?”
“Kind of, but not really.”
He turned into his driveway, shifted the car into park, and let go of the wheel. “Ask, and I’ll decide if I can answer.”
“Do you think that whoever attacked Jane is connected to the guy that attacked me?”
Michael paused, considering the question. It was hard to say, without any evidence, but the events being so close together did feel very unusual. Something had felt very very wrong that night, after the party, and while Michael could admit that there likely was something actually wrong that he had failed to consciously notice, without that lucid recognition of the problem, he couldn’t do anything.
“I don’t know,” he answered, “but I am not willing to rule it out.”
“Why not?” Her voice picked up, interest piquing.
“They’re close together, and both are fairly unusual in that they both failed. But besides that, something just feels strange about your attack, and I think there is a reason for that.”
“Your whole reason is a bad feeling?”
“Intuition can be a useful tool.”
“I…don’t see, but okay. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.”
She hung up, and Michael pocketed his phone, his other hand sliding the keys into another pocket as he got out of the car.
He was curious to see where that bad feeling went. It was novel. Violence was always the same, but something about this was different. Not just attempting to teach somebody what they wanted to know, but going through a deeper investigation? Entirely novel to him, and it might not be boring.
Sarah hadn’t bored him yet. He didn’t know if that would change.
Michael looked down his street, at the streetlights and front porches standing alone in the drifting darkness, and sighed to himself.
Ravenville was dark so very often. It was crucial to the application of violence, giving the ability to go unnoticed. But that darkness was always the same, even if what happened in it changed.
It was always boring when it was always the same.