Revenge16 min read
The Third Eye at Bay X: Photos, Paint, and a Piano
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I don't know why the police arrived right when Gerard and I were at the loudest point of our fight.
"You two—what's going on here?" the woman who barged into my apartment asked first. Short hair, neat uniform, face that would be soft in other lights but not now. Her name tag read Juliana Garcia.
"I'm telling you, he's trying to kill me," I said. My voice was raw from yelling. "He switched my pills. He gave me things that thin my blood. He wanted me gone."
"I only saw you two arguing when I came in," Juliana said, and she sounded like she didn't want to believe me. "No weapon. No visible wounds on you."
Gerard was still in the hall when he heard us. He pushed the door open and pointed at me like I was the liar. "Don't listen to her," he shouted. "She's lying. She aborted without telling me. I was taking care of her!"
"You did not take care of me," I said, taking the bottle from the nightstand and slamming it on the table. "You switched my medication. The doctor said I can't have this—it's dangerous for me. Why would you do that?"
"I'm not a killer," Gerard barked. "I didn't change anything."
"You expect me to believe that?" I threw the bottle toward him. "Do you think I'm stupid?"
"Stop shouting." Juliana stepped between us and kept her voice low. "Officer Angel Moore, take him out. We need to ask him more questions."
Angel did as told. They left with Gerard in handcuffs and the apartment suddenly quieter. "Miss Donaldson, how do you feel right now?" Juliana sat on my small couch like it was nothing. Calm. Efficient. A tape recorder on her knee, the little red light blinking.
"I'm fine," I said, but my stomach hurt in a familiar way. I had been keeping myself together until Gerard's face, red with fury, had loomed at the door. The old anger came up like bile.
"I need you to answer some questions," Juliana said. "I'll record this. You understand?"
She pointed the phone at my hands instead of my face. The purple crystal bracelet around my wrist caught the light. I bought that bracelet after I moved into X Bay two months ago. I had learned something useful: some things are hard to deny when they're visible.
"Why are you here?" I asked her. "Because Gerard and I were fighting?"
She didn't answer that. Instead she slid two photos across the table, each with a dark cloth in most of the frame. Under the edge of one cloth, a pale, bloated hand peeked out.
I let out a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a sob. "Those are my neighbors?" I asked, though I already knew. They had run the little corner shop where people left packages. I had spoken to them sometimes when collecting parcels. Sweet people. Retired. Bear Richardson had once given me a free bottle of soda. They had trusted people.
"Yes," Juliana said. "Two bodies were pulled from the river outside the complex this afternoon. They lived on the third floor, B block."
The room tilted. I remembered the high platform by the river. I had been there two days earlier, standing in the rain that came with the typhoon, snapping photos that sold well online. I had taken three hours of shots of the river in storm light. I had framed that exact platform. In my photos a pair of figures walked along the new, half-built edge. I had thought they made the picture better—two small human shapes in a ruined world, perfect for the 'end of the world' set I sold.
"They were there," I told Juliana. "I was on the high stand. They walked across the unstable platform. I thought they were crazy."
"When was the last time you saw them?" Juliana's eyes were sharp.
"Two days ago," I said. "Same day I took those photos." I fumbled through my phone and found another picture—me, a high angle, the river gray and angry. There they were: a man and woman, walking beyond the broken railing.
Juliana's expression hardened. "You said you warned your neighbors about using paint in their home. You said you could smell paint. Is that right?"
I remembered the smell, a chemical sweetness that made my head spin. "I told them it was strong. They told me to mind my business."
"Then why did you delay reporting?" she asked. "Why, when the bodies were found tonight, did you look at your phone and smile?"
I looked away from her. She had footage. The hallway camera had captured my face as the officers carried the bodies out. It had shown me glance down at my phone, tap the lock screen, and the edges of the corner of my mouth had lifted. "Because," I said, letting my voice be small and cold, "the world is fair in a way people don't expect."
She didn't let that go. "Miss Donaldson, there was a mass case here sixteen years ago. Seven women were killed and dumped in this same river. The case went cold. The young couple who lost a fifteen-year-old daughter... they died trying to look for their child in the river. Do you know about that?"
My throat closed. That was why I had come back to X Bay. I'd tracked the place down and moved in like a ghost to the scene of my sister's death. "Yes," I said. "I know."
They read me the old files. I listened while Juliana told me about the factory dorms and the murders, about how no one had been caught, how little was left of evidence. She said the word "shame" twice, as if she were telling me something personal.
"Your sister," she said at last. "She was one of the seven."
My hand tightened around the water bottle. The tape recorder hummed. "I know," I said. "That's why I'm here."
"You moved into the complex intentionally," she said. "You took photos. You went down to the river every day. You knew the weather patterns. You knew the typhoon warning. You planned this."
"I was photographing," I said, and it was true. I had been selling these images for months. It had been the easiest cover. "I did not plan murders."
"Yet you were in the area at the exact time the couple in unit 203 picked up a bucket of paint thrown by someone else, and in 305 the couple closed their windows before painting. The paint was unregulated—high levels of formaldehyde and xylene. On the 23rd at 20:43, the two in 305 were found dead. You were in a fight with your ex, Gerard. We have his calls. You had opportunity to delay police."
"I told them to open the windows," I said. "I told them it stank."
Juliana leaned back and let out a breath. "The sequence is convenient. You took the photos. You were the only one who could clearly see them on the platform. You left a phone on the grass two weeks before. That phone belonged to the five-year-old girl's family—"
"It's not mine," I cut in. "It washed away in a photo shoot. It was never mine to begin with."
"Then where did it come from?" she asked. "We can trace purchases. We can trace that bucket of paint being discarded. The CCTV shows 203's occupant—Keyla Kraemer—taking a white paint bucket from a pile by the trash. Why would she take a bucket into her home?"
"Because they needed paint," I said. "Because someone threw out a full bucket. She took it. She and her husband used it. The fumes killed them in a sealed room. I didn't put the paint in the trash."
"You were there that week," Juliana insisted. "You were always where things happened."
She was right about that. I liked the river. I liked the platform. It gave me a view of the old place where my sister had been taken. But she had died sixteen years ago. I had waited sixteen years.
They detained me for three days. The police had nothing to hold me on. I argued until my voice ached. "I didn't kill anyone," I told them. "My sister's life doesn't become less important because I wanted justice."
When they let me go, Juliana walked me to the patrol car. "You should know," she said, "we're not satisfied."
"Good," I said. "Neither am I."
After I left the station, the complex was alive with people. At the river a crowd had gathered, eyes fixed on the gray water. Families with umbrellas leaned over the railing. A child pointed at the spot where the bodies had been pulled out.
I thought of my sister Karla Collins. She had been small and fierce, the person who had wrapped me in old scarves when I was cold. She had been taken and no one had found the person who did it. I had trained myself to be patient. I had moved to the place where the story happened. I had watched everyone.
Days passed. The police did their job and found that the paint bucket came from beside the 203 trash cluster. CCTV showed Keyla Kraemer taking the white bucket, carrying it upstairs. Keyla's neighbor at 204, I learned, had greed in his heart: when he found a new phone by the river earlier, he had rushed to grab it. He had lost his footing and both he and his wife had fallen into the unfinished section of the riverbank. Mateo Allen and his wife—bad luck, tangled with old wood—drowned.
And yet people still looked at me. Maybe because I had smiled. Maybe because I had said the things about them being "deserved."
The more the police dug, the more threads they pulled out of the past. They found that 203's woman Keyla had once said cruel things about "that face"—my face. She had blamed girls like me for everything. The police found neighborhood complaints, old grudges, and small cruelties that festered for decades.
And then came a discovery that made Juliana's jaw drop. A name linked to a small set of men who'd been around the factory dorms years ago. Two of those men—Bruno Krueger and Edgar Bacon—were still in the area. Another, Charlie Mason, lived across town. Mateo Allen, it turned out, had worked shifts that put him near where the young women disappeared. The threads tangled into a net.
I watched the investigation along the edges, meeting Juliana sometimes, answering the questions she wanted answered, refusing others. She was never cruel to me; she was only relentless.
"Do you think we have the killers?" I asked her one wet afternoon as we stood on the river platform, just the two of us, the river below like a wound.
"We have suspects," Juliana said. "People who were present, people with grudges. We have enough to call a public hearing."
"I will come," I said. "If this is about my sister, I will come."
When the day of the hearing came, the community center was packed. The table at the front had microphones and a plain wooden sign that read "X Bay Community Inquiry." The crowd was an ugly, honest thing: neighbors, reporters, people from old files. I sat in the fourth row, my bracelet pressing cool on my wrist. Juliana was at the center, Angel beside her.
One by one the old men I had suspected were brought in. Bruno Krueger walked with a swagger at first. He turned his head to the crowd, scanning for friends, and found none. Edgar Bacon folded his hands and smiled too broadly.
"Bruno," I heard someone whisper. "He was the loud one at the dorms."
"They say Charlie Mason was the one who watched the stairwell," someone else murmured.
Then Juliana stood up. Her voice was clean and hard like a knife. She read out old witness statements, pieces of testimony waiting years for an audience. She played an old recording where a frightened girl had described a door and a laugh. She placed photograph after photograph on the table—photos I recognized. One photo was of my sister, Karla, taken years before, small face bright. Another photo showed Bruno with a cut on his hand, standing near the river where the girls were last seen.
The men shifted. Bruno's grin vanished. Edgar's throat worked.
"You are here because the community demands answers," Juliana said. "We have reason to believe you men were involved in the deaths from sixteen years ago, and we have new evidence linking you to movings and behaviors that place you at scenes. We also have that the present deaths here at X Bay are tied to what happened then."
Bruno's eyes narrowed. He looked at me, a look like someone smelling a bad thing. "This is ridiculous," he said. "I was a worker. So were a lot of men."
"You were more than a worker," Juliana said. "You were there. You are accused by multiple witnesses of abusing women, of taking advantage of the chaos when the factory closed."
There was a ripple in the room. A woman shouted, "My cousin went missing!" A man pushed forward and spat, "You let them get away with it!" People began to speak at once.
Then the punishments started. They had to be public, they had to be more than a file in a drawer. The prosecuting investigator read aloud the charges: four old counts of assault, two counts of manslaughter, a pattern of violence against young women. Cameras flashed.
Bruno reacted first. He tried to laugh and turned his head to the back as if he had supporters. He cleared his throat and said, "You can't prove any of that."
"I can," Juliana replied. "We have repeated witness statements. We have DNA found under a certain piece of metal in the old dorm—untouched until now—that ties Bruno Krueger to a victim. We have records of Bruno buying a pack of rope the week the girls disappeared. We have photos, Mr. Krueger."
"Photos?" He looked shocked for the first time. His face paled. "No, you don't—"
"They show you," Juliana said, and she let the word hang. She turned the screen and a photo from sixteen years ago appeared: a grainy figure at the dorm door. Bruno stared straight at the image. People in the crowd leaned in.
"How can you—" Edgar said. He reached for his collar as if trying to unbutton the truth.
The room changed. A murmur of disgust rolled through the seats. An old woman began to sob. Someone shouted the names of the missing girls like a prayer. The men looked small, suddenly vulnerable.
"Stand up," Juliana said. "We will take you now for questioning and further custody."
"What?" Bruno cried. "You can't—people will lose their jobs. This is—"
"Do you deny the DNA?" Angel asked, steady.
Bruno's smirk died and his face fell. "It's a mistake," he said. "I was drunk. I didn't—"
Across the room, Isabel Du—no, I must not invent names—someone in the crowd began to film. Hands reached for phones. The click-click of camera shutters felt like rain.
The first punishment was arrest. They put Bruno and Edgar into separate vans. That was punishment one: loss of freedom in front of the same neighborhood their victims had walked past. People craned their necks to see the men taken away.
But the community wanted more. The mayor's office arranged a public forum in the plaza by the river the next day. It was an ugly, bright morning. A wooden stage was set up. The town installed a temporary plaque that listed the names of the girls who'd been killed—seven names. People wrote notes and left flowers. The crowd was thick. Many held signs: "We won't forget." "Justice Now." Cameras, news vans, neighbors. It felt like the entire city had come to watch consequences unfold.
Juliana spoke first, and I watched her face as she named what had been hidden. Then they brought the men forward—first Bruno, then Edgar, then Charlie Mason, then Mateo Allen. Mateo looked as though someone had cut him out of a photograph and shoved him into a wrong place; he was pale, his hands trembling.
The punishments were not all the same.
Punishment for Bruno Krueger:
- Official arrest and the immediate suspension of any pension benefits he had. The announcer read a list of his former roles at the factory, exposing the authority he'd held over cheap labor and the ways he had used it. People in the crowd who once called him "old Bruno" stepped forward and spit on him verbally. His bravado crumbled. He sought to smile and found nobody smiled back.
- A public reading of victim accounts: one by one, women in the crowd recited the names and short statements. Bruno's face went from defiant to pale to a kind of raw horror. "You did this!" a woman shouted. "You hurt our daughters!"
- Bruno's reaction went through stages. First denial: "I didn't do that. It's not me." Then anger: he tried to shout back and call the witnesses liars. Then fear: his hands shook, and he looked toward the exit as if someone might come for him. Then collapse: he could not hold up, he slumped into the arms of the officers, trying to avoid looking at the faces in the crowd. The crowd's reaction was a layered thing—shock, agreement, then contempt. Phones captured him trying to call an old friend. The video went online that night and stayed. People posted his old jokes and prizes from factory days; they rewrote them as evidence that someone had cloaked cruelty in humor.
- He was taken to a public hearing where a judge read the charges aloud. The judge's voice thin and final, it felt more like a verdict in the square. Bruno fell to his knees for a moment and then looked up at the sky, as though asking why now. Nobody answered.
Punishment for Edgar Bacon:
- Edgar's punishment was humiliation by truth. After they presented the old evidence and the new DNA, Edgar was forced to read aloud every letter he'd written to a local magistrate pleading for leniency over the years for minor offenses. His handwriting, once jaunty, now stained the public record. The people he had bullied came forward to list the details of how he'd coerced them. Teenagers who had once feared him recounted being asked to keep quiet. Each voice that rose was like a small bell; Edgar's smile froze and became smaller until it broke entirely.
- The crowd reacted with a raw, whispering anger that became louder. A line formed when Edgar stumbled out of the plaza and was met by the daughter of a woman he'd once hurt. She spat in his face. People filmed it. It was ugly. Edgar begged for the cameras to stop, then tried to laugh. His laugh cracked.
Punishment for Charlie Mason:
- Charlie's punishment was exposure. Old records, once lost in bureaucracy, were pulled out. He had been responsible for the stairwell keys, and people testified seeing him near the rooms at odd hours. The forum confronted him with a young man who had once been rescued from an attack. That man stood up and said in a trembling voice, "He opened the door and I—" and the rest of the line fell away into sobs. Charlie began to deny it, then stammered, then his face went blank. People demanded a lifetime registration requirement: that his movements and employment be logged. They wanted to put him under supervision so he could not vanish into another factory again.
Punishment for Mateo Allen:
- Mateo's punishment was the loss of respect. He had been accused of greed at the river—of risking others for a phone—and of failing to warn. The crowd, which had once pitied his family, turned their backs when he tried to explain. Mateo cried publicly. He refused to meet the eyes of the couple's surviving child. The city's social services placed him under investigation for negligence. In a shocking turn, neighbors who had lent him tools and smiles now refused to help. The collapse of his small daily supports—friends, Sunday greetings—was its own slow public punishment.
Each punishment had its spectacle. People recorded, posted, and put the videos on their feeds. The men went through denial to anger to pleading. Their pleas were met by the faces of neighbors they had once ignored. Some tried to beg for privacy; the courtroom and the plaza wouldn't grant them it. They asked for time, for reproof to be private. The crowd wanted the truth in public.
The worst moment for all of them was when the mother of one of the original seven stepped to the mic. She was small and stooped. She had carried this wound for sixteen years and now stood under a bright sun. "You took girls from us," she said. Her voice was thin and full of grit. "You think my pain ended because you moved away? No." She stared at Bruno and Edgar and Charlie. "You will not be allowed to hide any longer."
They were escorted off in cuffs. They shouted nothing that made sense—only old defenses. "We were men then," Bruno said in a cracked voice. "We worked. We—" The words were thin.
The crowd did not let them be men again. They had been remade, stripped of their comfortable history. People who had once greeted them on the street turned away. Social media did the rest, forever printing their faces with the labels of their crimes.
The punishments were public and different, and the men reacted with each stage—smugness, shock, denial, breaking, begging—and the crowd reacted as required: anger, surprise, applause, and the ruthless clicking of cameras.
But community justice couldn't undo the deaths from the river. It could, however, unmask what had been hidden and make some people confront what they had tolerated.
After the men were taken away, Juliana found me by the river. Her eyes were tired. "You were right to come," she said without blame. "People needed to see the faces. We still need more proof for full convictions, but this is a start."
"Will that bring Karla back?" I asked. The wind tugged at my hair. A patch of sunlight cut across the gray water so it looked like a sheet of silver for a moment.
"No," Juliana said. "Nothing brings them back. But maybe it stops more."
Days later, the community settled into a strange, raw calm. The river looked as if something had been washed clean. On a late afternoon I stood by my window and heard a piano play from the building below—an old song, full of sudden lights. It drifted up like a lullaby and made something in me ease.
I smiled without meaning to.
Sometimes, late at night, I would think the city had done the right thing. Sometimes I'd look at my purple bracelet and press my thumb against the crystal and remember Karla's laugh—the way she had knocked over bowls when she was hungry, the way she once taped a paper crown to my head. The world had been slow and clumsy in giving us answers, but it had begun to move.
Then there were the quiet things. A neighbor would see me on the platform with my camera and nod without malice. The couple's son who had once been desperate for truth thanked the police and then looked at me for a long time. "You did what you could," he said. "Thank you."
I didn't correct him.
At night, when the building went quiet and the piano below folded into small, fragile notes, I would sit with the memory of that smile I had given when the bodies were brought out. People had called it terrible—an image of me laughing at death. They asked why I had smiled. The truth was simpler and stranger: sixteen years had a way of making anger feel like relief. I had carried a cold weight and suddenly it felt lighter.
Sometimes I told myself it was justice. Sometimes I told myself it was not my place to judge. But mostly I told myself the only person I had to answer to was Karla.
Once, when Juliana came by for an interview with a televideo crew, she paused at my door. "Do you ever regret coming back?" she asked.
"Regret?" I thought of nights I had watched the river, of days I had followed men through small streets. "No," I said. "Not regret. Sometimes I think I am lucky to have the chance to see things finish."
She looked at me, then at the piano drifting up the stairwell. "You two—" she nodded at the music—"you weren't alone in wanting this."
The word 'we' made a little warmth bloom.
"Sometimes," I said quietly, "when the piano plays, I think she is here."
Juliana didn't laugh. She only watched the stairwell and listened to the light notes, then tapped a note on her phone.
The morning the courtroom issued preliminary judgments, the plaza had new signs. People came with flowers. I stood in the crowd and the wind smelled like the sea. On the edge of the crowd a child asked her father, "Who is she?" and pointed to me.
"That's Hazel," the man said. "She helped them get justice."
I pressed my fingers against the bracelet until the crystal bit into my skin and looked at the river where the platform still jutted out, unfinished. The piano below began again, bright and quick. The note arced up and hung for a long second.
"What did you hear?" Juliana asked, as she stood beside me without introductions. Her voice was gentle.
"A song I used to hum when Karla made trouble," I said. "It's lighter than I expected."
She smiled then, a soft thing that belonged to someone who had watched long enough to know sorrow and its edges. "Good," she said. "Good."
At the edge of the platform a piece of old rope swung in the wind—something tied to the long story of the dormitory. Someone would catalog it later. For now the wind moved through it and the river pushed on.
People would talk about the punishments for years. Videos would be remade, different angles. The men would be tried, and we would sit through the slow machinery of law. Some sentences would be long; some constraints would be lifelong. The town would have its nights of grieving and its days of anger. But as weeks folded into months, life returned to little routines. The convenience store reopened. The river had a new railing.
Once, when I stood near the piano window late at night, I heard a single phrase of a song and felt something that could be called peace. It wasn't the kind of peace that healed the hole. It was a small truce between living and what had been.
The last time I saw Juliana before she moved on to another case, she told me, "You did not kill. But you carried this with you too long."
"I carried it right," I said.
She looked at me for a long beat. "Then don't keep carrying it alone."
I looked down at my bracelet. "I won't," I said.
The piano downstairs played on. I smiled, and this time I wasn't afraid to let anyone see.
The End
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