Sweet Romance12 min read
The Wrong Room, the Wrong Door
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They asked my name like it was a formality.
"Name?" a recorder clicked.
"Noah Reyes," I said.
"Age?"
"Twenty-four."
"Gender?"
"Male."
The questions kept coming, and the room kept shrinking around me. The interview room smelled faintly of coffee gone cold and institutional bleach. I had no idea why I was there for three days straight. I kept replaying the last week in my head: the fieldwork, the professor's lecture I once sat through in college, the elevator button I was sure I’d pressed for the fourth floor. None of it made sense.
A man across from me didn’t say anything until a long while later.
"You look like trouble," he said suddenly.
I glanced up. He'd been there the whole time, a silent shape perched on the cot. He had a thin face, narrow bright eyes, and when he smiled it changed everything about him. He moved like someone who'd practiced small courtesies until they were effortless. He looked about my age and somehow older at once.
"You've been here a week?" he asked. His voice was smooth as oil.
"No. Less than that." I couldn't stop staring at the way his smile bent his eyes. "Why are you here?"
He scratched his nose like he did something he shouldn't, then laughed very quietly. "Same reason. Only difference is I told them I warned the dead man he'd have bad luck if he stayed. Next day he was dead. So now I'm part of the scenery."
I stared. "You told a man he had bad luck and now you're in the same room as me?"
"Not me. Fate sometimes needs a push," he said, smiling. "Relax. The cuffs will come off soon."
When the door finally opened and the interrogator's voice announced I'd been released on conditions, I felt like a man who'd been given air after being underwater too long.
Downstairs, a woman with a file folder in her hand called me by name as if she already owned part of the story.
"Noah Reyes."
"You're Lauren Sokolov," she said when I blinked. "I’m here to lead the investigation. We don't think you or—" she glanced at the silent man beside me as if he were a footnote— "—Elijah are guilty. But you will cooperate."
Elijah. The name fit: huge, gangly, and oddly comforting in the way his smile softened the edges of his face.
"You could have just told us that at the station," I muttered.
"Protocol," Lauren said. "Come. I promised you three days. You have three days to clear your name. Or not. Either way, this will be handled."
They gave us a room and a file. The file had the name of the dead man: Franklin Conway, a forty-three-year-old professor of geochemistry from the State Geological University. The hotel camera had caught a skinny, tall man with a cap opening room 203 on the second floor at 3:45 p.m. on March 31st. The still frame was horrible. It wasn't supposed to be my face, but it was.
"I remember the day," I told Elijah. "I went to the fourth floor. I swear I pressed four."
"Maybe the elevator was polite and took you where you needed to be," Elijah said, as casual as a weather report.
That evening, with the rain turning the village roads into black ribbons, we walked the ridge toward the narrow path the locals called the western trail. Elijah moved like he belonged to the country, like he had lived in the hills. He told me stories between laughs: how he'd once been hired to find lost livestock by singing at dawn, how he would help households with small exorcisms when they couldn't find the right medicine.
"You really watch over people?" I asked.
He shrugged. "You either see the line between the day and the night, or you don't. It matters a lot out here."
A child named Zion Barrett led us to a ruined shack at the turn of a narrow trail. There was blood on the ground—darkened streaks that mixed with mud into black ribbons. We called it in. The shack became the first crime scene. The next day, the lab confirmed a single, dreadful fact: the shack was where the attack happened.
The puzzle began to unfurl in pieces. Franklin's body was moved later, we learned, but his face—stripped, horrifying—turned up in the grass behind the ruined motel. The county lab said he'd died on March 31st, around the afternoon. We found a shoe print at the motel matching the prints on a wooden crate by room 203's window, a square imprint where the crate had sat. There was a second print at the scene, smaller and narrower, and a smear with blood on it.
Elijah told tales of windows people left open to escape heat and bad company. He also told me he had seen Franklin exit by the window the day of the murder. No one had recorded it—no camera, no witness—so it was just Elijah's word, fragile as dry reed. We went and checked the crate. There, someone had left a muddy heel print deep enough to be photographed and sent for comparison.
"You're sure you didn't see two people?" I asked Elijah.
"I saw him go out a window. That doesn't mean I saw what came after," he replied. "And the mountain hides things. It also helps fools."
We sent photos to Lauren. She sighed once, then made a decision.
"We'll compare everything," she said. "Noah, you stay. Elijah, you come with us or you'll make trouble."
We divided the work. Boston Patterson, a bright young officer with too much energy and not enough discretion, and I sat in front of monitors while the others did the field work. The footage from the road showed a gray car with the plaintiff report's license plate creeping up the mountain on April 1st at 7:25 a.m. That plate belonged to Nicolas Aguilar, the man who had called the police to report his girlfriend missing. His explanation—he'd drunk, gotten confused, passed out in the car—sounded thin, but he had been detained for a short time for drunk driving. When police checked his car's interior, they found evidence of an overnight passenger.
"You know," Boston said, leaning in. "Something doesn't line up. The passenger could have been anyone."
"Or they were trying to make it look like anyone," I said.
Then the trail snapped. Jade Morgan, the woman who would be named the killer, emerged like a shadow in afternoon light. She worked at a local company in the city; she had been the kind of person who said 'no' when it mattered, or had in the past. When we finally cornered her, she was at a small school where she had once taken refuge from a life that had broken her.
"You're Jade Morgan?" I asked quietly when she opened the gate and looked at us like she knew every step we would make.
"Yes. Are you from the police?" she said. Her smile was brittle but sharp. I knew, then, that she could be dangerous. There was a line in her voice like a knife's edge.
"You're under arrest for the murder of Franklin Conway," Lauren said, steady as a heartbeat. "And for two more bodies found in the hills."
Her face didn't change. She looked smaller than the rumors. "Is that what you came to tell me? Finally. I've been waiting."
"Waiting?" Lauren asked.
"To be listened to," Jade said. "To be seen for what I've become."
They booked her. They took photographs. They collected everything she had on her at the small school: a backpack with a pair of shoes stained with blood, a phone with call logs, a paper bag that held a note. The forensics matched the dna from the cloths to Jade. The evidence fit like a trap falling shut.
The public reveal was something I had only ever seen in the movies, but I lived through its slow, terrible theater.
"Stand in front of them," Lauren told Jade on a bright morning outside the courthouse. Cameras pushed forward like flowers blooming to the sun. Journalists' microphones waved. A crowd gathered—neighbors, reporters, some faces that had been at the motel the night the body was found. They had the right to stare and to ask and to be angry.
"Jade Morgan," the chief prosecutor said. "You are charged with murder, desecration of a body, and accessory acts obliging others to participate. We are prepared to present the case."
Jade's face was cool when they first read the charges. She had the posture of someone who had rehearsed being brave. She folded her hands together as if in prayer.
"Noah," I whispered to myself, but I knew they needed more than a whisper. They needed the truth to be laid out in public so the village could see the who and the why.
The prosecutor unrolled photos like a cruel storyboard. He showed the stadium of evidence: 1) the phone call logs that linked Jade to Franklin on March 30th; 2) the blueprints of the wooden crate in 203 showing an imprint of the same size as the print in the cabin; 3) witnesses who had seen Jade go up the trail with a bag and to leave alone; 4) dna from the cloth that matched Jade; and 5) an audio recording of a conversation reinstating a money exchange.
"She lured him to the cabin, made him drink," the prosecutor said. "She stabbed him multiple times, then beat him in the head with a stone. She moved the body and abandoned the face in the grass. She kept careful portions of his clothing as trophies. She then profited—not only in coin but in silencing a life that would not be profitable to her."
Jade's face started to crack like glazed pottery. A single red fleck of something—anger, fear, shame—flared in her eyes.
"Why?" someone in the crowd shouted. "Why would you do this?"
"I had reasons," Jade answered calmly, in a voice that didn’t reach as much as it tried to. "I'm tired of people gambling with my life and with my body. I decided to price the trades. They were paying less than what they owed."
"For the record," the prosecutor continued, "we found similar setups used on other victims. Two other bodies were discovered in the eastern hills with five hundred and eight hundred dollars respectively in their hands. Each had been lured with a price tag, and each had been taken."
I watched Jade's calm peel away in strips. She went through the recognizable sequence of the guilty: smugness, explanation, denial, squeeze, collapse.
"No, no, you don't understand," she said at first, the words slipping through her fingers like oil. "I didn't—"
"This can't be true," a man near the front whispered.
"It is true," said Lauren, her voice even and loud enough for the crowd. "We will show you the notes, the recordings, the messages. She called them. She negotiated. She planned."
Jade's reaction changed rapidly. The first thing to go was her smile. Then cunning. Then the posture she had held in all the little confrontations. She started to look like someone who had been trying to hold a dam back with her hands and realized the water would not care.
"But you were vulnerable," someone in the crowd said, voice shaking. "How could you—"
"I had to be visible," Jade snapped, the first time she raised her voice. "I had to make them see that they were the same as the rest of them. And if they didn't—"
Her voice was a cut-off cigarette. It didn't resolve.
The crowd shifted. At first they were shocked. Then murmurs of disgust. Then anger. People snapped photos, voices rose. An old woman threw up her hands and said, "You took our children. You took their lives." Someone else, a young man who had lost a cousin on a mountain road years ago, shouted a name I couldn't hear. Jade's eyes moved among the faces like a shark's.
"Are you sorry?" a reporter asked.
"Yes," Jade answered, suddenly brief and brittle. "I am. I am sorry for the bodies. I am sorry for the lives. But—"
She tried to finish and failed. The crowd refused to listen.
"You're a monster," someone screamed.
"You're a coward," another voice answered.
Her composure fell entirely. Jade's expression crumpled. She began to sob, long, shaking sobs that made the machine-gun flashes of cameras look like a heartbeat. People took out phones and recorded, some to capture justice, some to capture the collapse of something they once might have pitied.
At that moment, a man in a dark suit came forward—Edgar Elliott, a well-known developer whose name had been whispered in connection to several land deals here. He had been present at the motel in the days after the body was found; rumors said he moved the corpse to the hotel to create fear and devalue plots. He had used influence to get what he wanted. He was part of the network that reduced human beings to coin.
Edgar had tried to look unbothered. He stood back, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. Then Lauren unveiled documents: a chain of payments, voice messages in which Edgar's assistant acknowledged moving items, and a witness who had seen Edgar's car at the scene where the body was first dragged. The public didn't need anything else. Their fixation shifted.
"Edgar Elliott," the prosecutor boomed. "You facilitated the move of the corpse to the motel to create spectacle and manipulate land values. You are charged with obstruction and conspiracy."
The sound that came from the crowd was not exactly applause. It was the sound of cages opening.
Edgar's face turned from iron to rust. He stepped forward like a man going to the gallows. The wave of the crowd was palpable—anger, betrayal, the sense that a man who had cast shadows over small lives was being called to light.
"How could you?" a woman demanded. "How could you use a dead man's face to profit?"
Edgar swiveled, tried to be indignant, then tried to deny. His voice, at first controlled, cracked into that thin skitter of bluster men use when they have nothing left.
"It was business," he said. "It was only to—"
"You used fear like fertilizer," Lauren said coldly. "You turned death into a commodity."
People began to chant. Not that kind of chanting you see at games. It was accusation, a rolling thunder: "Shame! Shame! Shame!" They needed to be seen. Edgar's colleagues, who arrived to show token support, melted and left. Photographers pressed closer, faces gleaming with the salt of the city. A neighbor snapped a photo and said, "You ruined this place."
Edgar's denial crumpled.
"I'm innocent," he tried, then it sounded ridiculous to his own ears. The whistle that had kept his life afloat was gone.
The scenes turned ugly in a crowd way—people spat at his car, someone threw a paper cup, someone else began to record and shout details of his past shady dealings. Edgar's small network of protectors evaporated into the crowd's noise. He couldn't hide behind lawyers and donation checks any longer.
"Don't touch him!" London—the ever-proper legal adviser—shouted, trying to hold him back, but the protection felt flimsy and absurd. Edgar's face showed panic. He made a run for his car, but cameras chased him like hawks. Half a dozen officers grabbed him and put him in cuffs. He screamed for mercy the way only a privileged man who lost his veneer can scream.
For Jade, the punishment would be her trial. For Edgar, a public humiliation, arrest in front of the town he thought he owned, and the loss of any support you can buy with money. The lawyer's face was a pale mask. He would now have to stand on the steps he had used others to climb.
"You're finished," someone said into a phone. The judge's gavel in later proceedings would echo that day.
I stood at the edge, soaking it all like a man who had been standing in the rain and finally felt the storm let go. I watched the woman's broken face and the man's fall from grace. I felt odd sympathy and an even stranger relief.
Later, they would say the village had been cleansed. They would argue over whether the storm could be enough to wash away what had been done. They would praise Lauren and the whole team. They would praise Elijah's intuition and Boston's weird energy that did not stop at accuracy but transmuted into care.
At home that night, in my small bed, I found a little triangular amulet Elijah had left on my pillow: a folded scrap of paper, ink-smudged, with the faint scent of mandala incense I recognized now—"舍子香"—the same kind that had been placed under my bed. The amulet was small and humble. I held it and thought of how many things had to be discovered, how many pieces had to fall into place.
"I won't forget this place," I murmured to the dark. My voice felt small.
"Good," Elijah answered from his corner, voice soft. "It had to be seen."
The next morning, the mountain was bright and indifferent. I put the amulet in my pocket and walked the path back to the town. I knew the trial would take months, and reputations would die slower than justice. I knew we'd still carry mud on our shoes a long time. But when Lauren's face appeared in my mind—firm, unafraid—and when I heard the crowd's roar that had toppled a man who bought silence with money, I felt, for the first time since all this began, measured.
"Do you think it changes anything?" I asked Elijah later as we walked.
"It changes people who are brave enough to tell the truth," he said. "And people who are not brave enough to hide."
When they brought Jade in front of the town for sentencing—when her punishment was read in a full courtroom open to the public and streamed—the judge's words were precise, the evidence overwhelming. Jade wept then, not for sympathy but because the life she'd been trying to tame unraveled into the small, cold rooms of law, followed by the long, slow rooms of imprisonment.
The final act stood out because of who came. Families of the victims came forward. People we thought we'd know only as names spoke; they sought to reclaim their loved ones out of the spectacle. They demanded a memorial for the three lost bodies discovered in the hills, and Lauren promised they'd place a stone by the path.
At the closing, a quiet child—Zion Barrett—stood before the crowd and read a short note he'd written on behalf of the village: a line about how a place should not be used for profit, about how the lives lost had weights the world couldn't pay. The crowd listened like they were in church.
As they led Jade away, someone in the gallery hissed a warning—that people like her never found peace easily. But for that moment, the town felt lighter. The wind moved, and the cedar branches sighed. I felt the amulet in my pocket warm against my leg.
I had started this whole nightmare as a man who'd pressed the wrong elevator button. I left knowing the mountain had secret rooms, that some people priced people like they priced goods, that evil could hide in the politest smiles. I left with names scrawled on paper and photos in a case file and a strange faith that, sometimes, justice could be turned into something performative and then into something that belonged to survivors.
The last thing I did before boarding the bus back to the city was put my hand into my pocket and touch the mandala-scented paper. I smoothed its crease.
"Keep it," Elijah said, watching me. "It keeps you steady."
"I will," I replied.
We stepped onto the bus and the town fell behind us, a cluster of roofs and a string of lights. The trail of justice stretched ahead as much as it stretched behind. I had my notebook in my hand and a file stamped with the case number. I also had a quieter conviction: some things—like the scent of that mandala incense, the smell of rain on iron-rich soil—stay with you, and they map the ways we can be brave again.
The End
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