Dark Favors

“Where the hell are you?” I muttered.

I looked around again, as though doing so would produce him out of thin air. Maybe this was some sort of test, I realized. Did he think I was going to rummage around in his desk? Did he suppose I was going to sort through his belongings?

It wasn’t that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. An office like this had a lot of secrets. I didn’t think Locke was so crazy as to have something like a secret passageway, but I bet he had other things. I’d seen enough movies to know that men like him had a safe in their office that was located behind a beautiful painting. They had documents and they had files, and if they were really stereotypical, they had a flash drive that contained horrible secrets.

What secrets did Locke have?

What things were there to know about him that nobody else knew?

I walked around his office, waiting. There were lovely paintings that hung on the walls. They were gorgeous and wild. Most of them seemed to be from the same series. They had two people in them: a man and a young girl. Maybe they were father and daughter. The people in the paintings were running through the woods. They were standing by the ocean. In one scene, they were playing with a dog.

The paintings were lovely, and I couldn’t look away.

There were other pieces, too, pieces from popular local artists and a couple of very expensive pieces from famous artists I’d learned about in high school, but the series of father-daughter paintings kept drawing my attention.

Who had painted them?

I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of the signature. I couldn’t quite make it out. I wasn’t much of an art professional, but maybe I’d want to know more. I was taking several art classes after all. Even if I couldn’t figure out who the artist was, one of my professors might know. I wanted to know about the series.

There was something I’d been learning about in school: art always told a story. Writers penned books, and they crafted these lovely, gorgeous stories, but artists painted, or they drew, and they weaved something just as wonderful and lovely.

I put my phone back in my pocket and walked around some more. I stayed away from the desk. There was a part of me that didn’t want to know what secrets Locke had in there. Maybe he just had pens and pencils, but there was a part of me that worried there was something else locked in the depths.

Besides,

he probably had cameras in the room.

Another ten minutes passed, and I felt like a huge idiot for waiting for him. I opened up the contacts on my phone and found his number. Locke and I didn’t talk much.

Scratch that.

We never talked.

Not on the phone, not via text. Not at all.

But I typed out a quick text.

I’m in your office. Where are you?

Then I waited.

And I waited.

Finally, I waited a little bit more.

Realizing that I was a huge schmuck for waiting around on a guy who was standing me up, I decided to go ahead and leave. I grabbed my jacket off of the chair and headed toward the door. Just as I was about to leave the office, my phone buzzed.

I pulled it out and looked.

SORRY. SOMETHING CAME UP. COME TO 532 CHERRY VALE LANE. SEE YOU SOON.

I didn’t know why his texts were always in all caps. It was weird, but that was Locke. I looked at the time. It was already eight. I’d waited for an entire hour for him, like a total loser.

What the hell had come up at seven in the morning that had kept him from meeting me?

And why was I actually considering going to the weird address he’d given me?

I closed up his office, wondering why he hadn’t locked it, and I headed back downstairs. I passed Amber in the lobby. She seemed surprised to see me leaving so soon.