When they got back to the two-story office building in which Max’s small design “studio” was located, Annabelle let Cassie off of the bike and then pulled it around to park it up on the sidewalk by a window that she knew looked out from Max’s office. He didn’t mind her doing so, since it wasn’t against building regulations and he didn’t want her to do anything that would cause her to be “indebted to Jack”. In that, at least, she and Max were of the same mind.
Cassie waited by the side door for her as she shut it off, kicked the stand down and turned the handlebars. But as she did, she chanced a glance into Max’s window. The blinds were shut. Normally, Max kept them open during the day, as he suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and in Minnesota, a body needed to soak up as much sun as it could possibly get.
Annabelle dismounted and walked around the bike, her gaze still locked on the windows. She knew that Max’s office was designed specifically to allow in natural sunlight without it affecting any of the screens in the room. So, even if he was hard at work and in a deadline crunch, she was pretty sure he wouldn’t close the blinds.
Maybe he really had gone nuts. Too many jobs. Too much pressure.
She moved toward Cassie. And then she stopped.
Or maybe it was the dog.
In which case, Annabelle made a mental note to be careful how she approached his office when they went back inside.
“Max’s blinds are closed. Have you ever seen them closed before?”
Cassie frowned. “You know, I can’t say that I have. Maybe he has a headache.”
“Maybe it’s Sam. Or maybe going through Teresa’s laptop was too much for him.”
Cassie nodded sagely and they went inside. The main entryway past the side door was communal. It served as a small access lobby and mail drop for four different businesses, all of them also small. Max’s business, Design Max, was on the lower floor, to the right. Door number 102.
Annabelle reached for the doorknob, but when she tried to turn it, it wouldn’t move.
“It’s locked?” She stared at the doorknob, disbelieving.
“Why the hell would Max lock us out?”
The warning bells that had sounded earlier in Annabelle’s head now began chiming much more loudly. Her gaze slid from the doorknob to the small stained-glass window beside it. It was impossible to make out anything beyond it but the warped and discolored shapes of a front desk and a hallway. Not much else.
“Something’s wrong, Cass,” she said softly, still trying to catch a glimpse of something – anything- through the window. “I left my key inside.”
“Wait. Maybe I’ve got mine.” Cassie began to rifle through the small back-pack styled purse she carried over her shoulders. “Yeah, here.” She pulled out a silver general key and Annabelle moved aside so that she could slip it into the lock on the doorknob. The lock clicked and Cassie turned the knob. The door swung outward toward them and they moved around to enter the office.
The office’s interior was unnaturally quiet. A stillness like that of a pre-dawn Sunday morning had stolen over the room, almost hallowed in its utter silence. The lights had been shut off. Annabelle looked to the left, felt along the wall, and found the switches that controlled the fluorescent lights above, which Max almost never used. Normally, the office relied on various standing and table lamps set throughout the room. Fluorescent lighting interfered with color correctness on the large flat screens, so Max had gotten used to leaving them off long ago.
However, at the moment, every single one of the lamps around the room had been switched off, plunging the room into total darkness. It would be a game of hide and seek, with Annabelle’s shins finding every table and desk corner before she would be able to locate the nearest lamp and shed enough light into the room to look around.
Once the garish lights flickered on, Cassie and Annabelle stood in the doorway, taking in the stillness, their eyes searching the large room as if they’d never seen it before. Although everything seemed to be in place, at the same time, it at once appeared to be entirely different. Alien.
Annabelle was the first to move into the room, tentatively taking step after step as if she were about to set off a mine with the toe of one of her boots.
“Max?”
There was no answer. Then again, she’d merely whispered the call. She tried again, swallowing first and clearing her throat, which had become inexplicably clogged with some something acidically similar to fear.
“Max? Are you here?”
Again, there was no answer.
“Maybe it really was Sam and he left the office to go home and take care of Dylan.” Cassie came up beside Annabelle, brushing close to her. Annabelle said nothing. Her gaze was fixed on the door to Max’s office down the hall and to the right. It was also shut, as Annabelle had left it. But obviously, Max had been out since then. He’d turned off all the lights.
Annabelle’s heart beat hard against her rib cage. Her breathing quickened and her throat felt tight. It was an unwelcome feeling, but not unfamiliar. Annabelle suffered from an anxiety disorder that she’d managed to keep under control for the last several years, without medication. She simply never got on an airplane, ate undercooked meat – since she didn’t eat meat at all – and she never took her work home with her. The occasional binge drink didn’t hurt.
However, right now, it rode the fringes of her consciousness like a warning. It was just there, within reach, threatening to take her breath completely away and send her vision into blackness.
And, why?
Annabelle swallowed against the tightness and realized that she was well and truly scared. The warning bells that had begun to sound earlier were all but deafening in her eardrums now. There was something in the air of that office that she at once recognized, even though she’d never felt it, personally, in her life.
Later, she would look back on this moment and understand it. She would realize that she’d known all along what it was she would find behind that door.
At the moment, however, she reached out for the knob unknowing, consciously ignorant. The knob turned and the door swung inward.
Cassie was the first to make a sound. Something between a shriek and a moan. Annabelle stared in silence. Her throat had closed up. She was no longer really breathing.
And neither was Max.
Jack Thane turned away from the police officer he was speaking to. His gaze once more fell on the woman who sat across the room, a blanket over her shoulders, her own gaze far away and unseeing. Her long, thick hair fell in shining waves of blonde, gold and strawberry red. Her lovely face, ever so slightly freckled across the nose, was more pale than usual. Her brown eyes seemed darker.
Annabelle Drake was an exquisite portrait of shock, a painted mural testimony to beauty in pain. And she hadn’t said a word to him since he’d arrived an hour ago, on the wings of speed, responding to a phone call she’d managed to make before she’d slipped into that dangerous grasp of stunned nothingness.
“You can take her home, Mr. Thane. I fully advise that she be taken to the hospital, as she’s obviously in shock and not coming out of it, however you’re the only one she’s responded to, so…”
“I understand.” Jack cut him off, sparing the man any further awkwardness.
Jack had been the one to phone the police. He’d arrived at Design Max to find Annabelle seated and unresponsive in one of Max’s office chairs, Cassie standing over her, ashen and shaken, but in control, and Max Anderson dead on the floor beside his desk, an open and spilled bottle of Klonapin in his right hand.
It was not the first time that Cassie Reid had dealt with death. As a medical assistant, she’d experienced an unfortunate number of heart attacks and the like, so Jack wasn’t surprised to see that she had been more or less in control of her faculties. Because she seemed to be willing to talk and was handling the situation so much better than Annabelle, the police had already carted her off to the station for questioning.
