Asher
Asher spent the next ten minutes wallowing by the table in the cafe, his forehead resting on the net he’d made by interweaving his fingers, his elbows on the table. Dissatisfaction filled him like rain fills a dam, slow but impactful every time. Every thought pricking his mind into thinking the next one.
What would be his next lead?
If not the cup, or the handwriting on it, what did he have?
He thought about Rebecca, walking the cobblestone streets outside, maybe she’d sat by the same table he was sitting by. Maybe, with her husband; or alone.
And then what?
He’d died. She’d been left wounded and grieving, when she’d retreated to her lakehouse like an ice queen to her palace. From there on, the most people saw of her was when she went grocery shopping. The owner of the only grocery store in the town died two months ago, so Asher would never find out what the woman brought from the store for all these years because the owner had kept her catalogs secret on being requested to do so, something she’d also asked her daughter to do while she lay on her deathbed. Rebecca hadn’t been to the grocery store since the owner had died though.
In a way, the owner was the only friend she’d had in the town. She wasn’t endearing, to anyone else. And the friend she’d made wasn’t a significant person until her husband’s death. She never mingled with the townspeople and when they approached her, the most they’d get were cold replies.
In the thirty years Rebecca had lived in the lakehouse, she had never invited anyone from the town in. Infact, she didn’t welcome the prospect of guests either. However, she was famous for her aloof personality. The icy authoress.
A person’s relationships can tell a lot about who they are.
Rebecca did not have any such relationships with her neighbors. And the one person she did talk to was dead. Now, Rebecca was too. One died of natural causes, and the other did not. They couldn’t be connected.
In his mind, Asher had a map, and Rebecca was at the centre of it; every word of information about the town, the lakehouse, and her was a part of the bubble she was in. He just didn’t know how to connect the strings of the past. He needed to resolve that before he ever got back to the murder scene. A backstory gave context, meaning even, and most importantly, reason for case.
Asher got up, grabbing the jacket that sat in place of Avery. The small golden eiffel tower keychain lay lonely on the floor under the table. He picked it up, and put it in his pocket, before slipping on the jacket and walking out of the cafe.
The wind turned his breath into white wisps in the air. He rubbed his palms to keep them from freezing. The Sun was just a glow in the sky.
He could hear people talking, some whispering, as most walked with someone else. There was gleeful laughing and somewhere, the loud rattling of pans on a blaze. The scent of Chinese food infiltrated his nose and his head turned to the restaurant right infront of the cafe. Asher stopped walking. A man with a face of concentration played with a wok, cradling it rashly on a low flame as its orange and red contents went up in waves in the air as hot steam blew from them to the rest of the town. He noticed people smiling as they walked by the man and his wok. The restaurant inside was filled with an audience that despite the time being an odd one for going out, made it look like a rush hour in the place.
Asher felt something hard push his side, causing him to stumble to his right, only to be pushed to his left again. He fell over multiple times, only balancing himself before the next push as giggling children ran past him remorseless.
Children. His eyes widened. That was it, that was his next lead.
“Hey, wait!” He yelled after them, running like an oversized yeti after humans. They did not stop, not until they reached an alleyway which led to the back door of a house. An old woman stood at the doorstep, a bag in her hands and huge round glasses on her small face as she slowly gave out a candy to each of the kids. Her wrinkled arms shook and her figure hunched over. She smiled at Asher as he walked towards the crowd of children that had collected around her. She drew an orange wrapped candy out of her bag and pressed it to his chest. He only caught it before it could drop to the floor as the old woman went in for more candy, slapping away the hand of a kid with a missing tooth who had been trying to dive into the bag.
Asher smiled, putting the candy into his pocket as he turned to the kids, all of them busy talking or chewing- and mostly ignoring him as he tapped them or called out to them. He felt so stupid.
Eventually, he had to pull a red haired girl aside to question her. “Hey.” He whispered, squatting to be at eye level with her. She stared at him with brown eyes and an angered expression. “What is it?” She folded her arms, and knitted her eyebrows, while clicking her foot against the floor. “Well, speak! I don’t have all day!” She snapped.
“U-uh. Sorry, but did you know Rebecca Wright? Ever encountered her, or spoken to her?”
The girl’s gaze softened.
“Becca?” She asked, tilted her head forward. “Oh, she was alright. Wait, aren’t you that detective? My dad told me about you. You’re Jackson, you’re from London!” She gasped, tugging at his hand to shake it aggressively. She called the other children, her voice loud and boisterous enough to disrupt their small gatherings so they surrounded him as the old lady retreated back into her house with a much less heavy looking bag than she’d started with.
“You want to know about Becca?” A blonde haired boy said, his clothes dirty and his hair disheveled. “Should’ve come sooner. We’re the only people she ever spoke to. Probably because of how approachable we look, and yet Miss Demsey’s terrified.” He laughed, hi-fiving his friend who seemed to have got the joke.
“She used to give us candy every time she came to town. And I’m talking, like, 3 for each. She was way richer than grandma Tootsie, here. This one time, she gave my older brother a drone for his birthday.” A girl in bright pink said, her cheeks raised and rosy, much like her strawberry blonde hair which was cut like a mushroom.
“Did she ever really talk to you all, or was it just exchange of candy and ‘thankyous’?” Asher asked.
“Most of it was just exchange of candy, but this one time, she did ask us what we all wanted for Christmas. And she got all of those things, mostly atleast, she forgot my American Doll; but yeah. She was really nice.” The girl Asher had pulled aside said.
“Anything else she ever told you? Or, any other exchange you guys had with her, something you think the others didn’t?”
The kids went quiet, like they were thinking. One of them sprung his hand up, and Asher focused his attention on him. The kid adjusted his glasses. “My older brother told me that when him and his friends were in elementary school, they went to her house for halloween once. They walked the entire lake shore to get there but she hardly opened the front gate, and she didn’t even give them any candy. Infact, she forced them to leave without any, and when they objected, she threatened to call the parents and the police. He told me to keep it a secret, but now he’s off to college so I suppose it’s alright to break that promise.”
The crowd erupted into whispers and gossip.
“Ok, ok!” Asher said, patting them down virtually. “Is that it?”
Most of them nodded, others stayed unnerved and lost.
“You can talk to our older siblings if you want. They don’t get out of school until 2 though, and they’re usually spread out over town at different hang outs in their groups, but they knew Becca better, she used to tell them stories about Iraq and stuff, stuff she heard from her husband; and my sister got a LOT of spoilers of her books when she would pry.” The girl smiled.
Asher nodded, giving the kids a polite smile and a ‘thankyou’ before he left the alleyway.
He wasn’t about to get his hopes up high, but atleast he knew where he was headed next.
***
That afternoon, Avery did not show up at the lakehouse.
Asher was too busy investigating the house to notice. To him, it was a welcome distraction to the cruel thing he’d done- made her feel like he cared. He’d hurt her without meaning to, which had caused his feelings to add up to confused guilt, and a certain disappointment in himself for having used her.
He tried not to look at the front door when he was passing by it, or listen in for the sound of the door creaking open because, he knew he wouldn’t hear anything, not with both Liam and him indoors, inspecting the rooms; and their boatman outside, on the phone with his girlfriend. It had been an hour, and they could still hear him giggling and smooching.
Asher sighed, closing his eyes. “It’s just disappointing, you know.” He told Liam, as they looked through Rebecca’s bedroom. The only bedroom in the house. It had sky blue walls and a king sized bed, it was fairly empty otherwise; besides an oak desk shoved in the corner and bookshelves lining every other wall.
“I was really hoping for a lead.” Asher said.
He heard Liam grumble a nod. “And not a date?”
“Come on, Asher, we both know that woman has nothing to do with this case. She’s a journalist, a freshie out of college. The most ‘murder’ she’s seen is vivid case studies. No shame in admitting you’re drawn to her. I’m glad to see you moving on.”
Asher sat down on the bed, his eyes on the carpeted floor, shaking his head. He wasn’t moving on. After a year, he doubted he ever would. “Let’s just keep searching.”
Since yesterday evening, him and Liam had been looking through every bit of the house for anything peculiar- like the mug. At first, Asher had thought that one of the children in the town must have gifted it to Rebecca, since it was factually stated that the kids were the only ones she ever spoke to willingly. He had tried to connect the theory to his first, one which he’d pictured while reviewing Raquel. One which forced a reason behind Avery’s reactions to the interview, but now he felt like he was reading into signs that had never been.
Yesterday night, he’d decided that he would investigate both theories- and he’d done so by stalking Avery’s profile, yet finding nothing relevant that made her seem, different. She was a journalist who stayed low, the important details about her job being the only things that defined her. Monotonous and boring. His goal had been to fish something, anything out of her, including her handwriting; and he felt like he’d done that. But what he’d found had been perfectly useless to him.
He’d stumbled on the kids, his second theory, and found that Rebecca had reason to never let anyone near, let alone, enter her house. That explained the huge wall too. His best prediction, the one he was relying on the most, was that she was hiding something, or someone in here, and he was determined to find out what this was, and how it had played a part in her death. A secret son or daughter was just an idea to him, something vague and floating in his mind, something he refused to grab until he found harder proof than a mug that could’ve easily been brought from a pound shop selling old models.
“I saw the way she reacted to Rebecca’s sister, alright? It was weird, suspicious even. You think I’m being delusional, and I probably am, but I don’t regret following that lead. I only regret that nothing useful came out of it.”
Liam snorted. “I’m sure you don’t. Hey, maybe she’ll come around.”
Asher groaned. “I don’t want her to come around, Liam. You know what, forget about it.” He left the room,
Liam was impossibly hard to convince of anything that was against his theory, unless you had cold hard proof to slap him in the face with. Then, he tamed his wounded ego and got back to work.
“Did you call the builder?” Liam asked. It had been Asher’s idea to call the builder of the house, to ask him about the rooms he’d built and if any of them included a secret safe, so Rebecca could store whatever she was hiding. With Raquel’s help, Asher had gained access to the builder’s number. He’d called 30 minutes ago, and the consultant had told him that he’d be called back in a half hour since the builder, Trevor Brown was in a meeting.
He heard his phone ring, and looked down. “Great timing.” He smirked.
“Hello.” Asher said, as soon as he’d swiped up the green button on his ringing phone.
A gruff voice replied from the other end. “Yes, hello. This is Trevor Brown. Is it Asher Jackson speaking?”
Asher walked into the bedroom and fell onto the bed, while Liam turned to him with a bothered expression, asking him to get up to avoid messing up the bed.
“Yes, this is Asher Jackson. I had called for an interview about Rebecca’s case.”
Liam sat down at the edge of the bed, listening into the silence and the small voice that could be heard from the other side of the phone.
“Rebecca- oh! The writer! Yes, well, you should have scheduled an appointment. Please, make this quick. You’re taking up my break.”
“I apologize. Thankyou for attending this call, I’ll be taking a voice recording of our conversation.”
When Asher didn’t receive a reply, he kept talking.
“I’d like to know more about the rooms you’d built for Rebecca. Specifically, if there were any hidden spaces in the house that she’d asked for.”
Silence followed his words.
“No, there were no such spaces. Is that all?”
Asher was left speechless with disappointment that echoed in the break in his voice when he spoke again. “Alright. Yeah. That’s it. Are you sure about this, sir? It’s, quite important that we know if there were any hidden spaces made in the house, at all.”
“No, no. There were none. I’ll have my assistant send you the details and the blueprint for the house. Goodbye now.”
And Trevor hung up.
The beep that followed seemed to resign Asher to darkness in his thoughts.
“Well, that was disappointing.” Liam shrugged. He pat Asher on the shoulder. “It’s alright. It was worth a try. Let’s keep going through the house. If we don’t find anything,”
“Then, we’ll look for a new lead. Trace back to the gunshots.” Asher sighed.
Liam nodded, and Asher got up off the bed.
The next moment, his legs shook, when the phone rang.
He fell back onto the bed, quickly reaching for the green button on his phone that was still on the bed. It was Trevor, hope uplifted him. He pressed the phone to his ear.
“Yes? Hello.” He said, excitedly.
“Ah, Asher. Wait, there was one thing. A room.”