excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins
I gave the IT department a sob story about my missing friend and nonexistent e-mail I “accidentally” deleted and I had to resort to actual tears but they checked Z’s university e-mail for me, since the police didn’t bother. Nothing after the day he disappeared but, like, nothing before that either. Nothing in January at all, which is super weird. I was positive I played e-mail tag with him over something or other the first week and I forwarded him my J-term class schedule so he’d have it.
I checked my own e-mail and there’s nothing from Z at all, not for months, and I *know* there should be.
I checked his room. I waited until no one was on his floor. His lock was easy to pick, all the interior locks on campus are crap.
His laptop was there and I booted it up but someone had reset it to factory default settings. It wasn’t even password-protected. His files are gone, his games are gone, that excellent Blade Runner wallpaper he had, poof. Standard-issue hi-def naturescape.
That doesn’t seem normal.
I looked for library books but didn’t find any, maybe he took them to NY. He always had a pile of library books.
The one weird-ish thing I found was a little piece of paper under the bed. It was under a sock so it was easy to miss (Z must have done his laundry like every other day, even the floor clothes were clean) but it matched the notepad on the desk.
It was covered in random scribbles, like he was taking notes while doing something else. Most of it is illegible but there’s a drawing in the middle. Well, three drawings.
A bee, a key, and a sword.
In a line down the middle.
They’re in a rectangle that looks like it might be a door or it might be a rectangle, Z’s not the greatest artist. The bee looks more like a fly but it has stripes so I’m guessing it’s supposed to be a bee.
It seemed like it might be important so I pocketed it.
Then I stole his PS4.
Bet they weren’t smart enough to wipe that.
* * *
—
Z was apparently not clever enough to leave clues hidden in game saves on his PS4. Or he didn’t have the time or forethought or whatnot but still. Disappointed detective face.
Nothing on PSN or anything.
Maybe he had his own secret notebook somewhere. He probably has it if he did.
I feel like fictional mysteries have more clues than this. Or, like, clues that actually lead to more clues. I wanted a trail and what I have is miscellaneous weird stuff that is not trail-shaped.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find, maybe someone he’d messaged and told about his plans or something. If he had a plan. Maybe he didn’t.
* * *
—
I found the charity that threw the party that Z went to—I’m working on the assumption that he did go to the party, I know he checked into the hotel because the police checked on that, so they’re not completely useless—but this charity is weird.
They give/raise tons of money for all these literary things and a lot of them sound cool but when I tried to trace them to a source or even a person—a CEO or anything—it loops around again, one charity is part of another and that’s listed as a subsidiary of one of the others but they’re Möbius strip charities that never end on a person. It sounds like a money-laundering front but I called a few places and they all confirmed receiving donations but couldn’t give me any other info.
So I kept digging. I found a bunch of addresses and tried a few phone numbers. One left me in recorded-message purgatory and another was disconnected.
The closest address that was buried in a subpage of a subpage on one of the websites (one of the ones that wasn’t search-engineable, BTW, so buried that it seemed like it wasn’t supposed to be findable) was in Manhattan.
I looked it up.
It burned down like, two days after that party.