Julian takes a shaky breath, unlocks the door, and we walk inside. I expected signs of an investigation, drawers yanked open, tables overturned, but the house is just as insanely neat as I remember it. He tiptoes carefully down the hall like he’s watching for land mines, then stops outside his bedroom door.
“Nothing’s in there,” I say, stepping in front of him. “It’s already been cleaned out.” I don’t know if the trunk is still in the room or not, but I don’t see what good it would do to look at that.
Julian nods, then turns around. On the opposite end of the house, he opens a door to the neatest garage I’ve ever seen. Everything’s boxed in plastic containers and marked with typed labels. We search through the orderly rows but come up with nothing that looks like it belongs to Julian.
Julian starts shivering and breathing hard.
“You need to sit down?”
He shakes his head.
We go back inside, and again Julian pauses anxiously outside a door. This time when he opens it, it’s obviously Russell’s room. There’s an antique four-poster bed in the center, so enormous I’m not sure how it fit through the door, and a matching dresser and chest of drawers.
There’s something strange about the room I can’t quite put my finger on. Then it hits me. It’s just furniture. Like he moved in yesterday. Nice enough, but there’s no indication that someone actually lives here. I pretend I’m not creeped out, but I am. No one knows where Russell is. What if…what if he’s hiding inside the house?
“Jesus!” I jump at the sound of my cell. “It’s okay,” I tell a startled Julian. “Just Charlie.” Then I say into my phone, “We’re fine. Just a lot to look through.”
“Sure you don’t want us to come in?” Charlie asks.
“No, we’re cool.”
I end the call, then start yanking open drawers. Inside the dresser are neatly folded clothes. Julian hesitantly opens the closet while I peek under the bed. It’s totally empty and dust-free, like maybe Russell actually crawls under here to clean.
I stand up and find Julian getting bolder and more panicky, digging through the closet. “It’s not here!”
“Let’s keep looking. We’ve got a whole other floor.”
The guest room upstairs looks a lot like Russell’s bedroom—nothing but furniture. I open the drawers, which are totally empty, and it makes me think of this Twilight Zone episode where a married couple gets stuck in a strange, empty town and it turns out everything—the trees, the houses, the animals—are just props in an alien child’s train set.
When I hop up, I take one look at a too-pale Julian and tell him to sit down. He shakes his head. “Seriously,” I say. “Do it before you pass out.”
He sits on the bed while I pretend to look around, even though it’s obvious there’s nothing here. “I think he threw it away,” Julian says bleakly.
I’m starting to believe the same thing. “Where else can we look?”
“His office.”
“Think you can get up?”
“I never said I needed to sit down.”
I jump when my phone rings again. I open it and snap, “Jesus, Charlie. We’re fine.”
“Making sure,” he says.
Julian gets up, still too pale, but we head down the hall to Russell’s office. I open the door, Julian right behind me, and stop short. “Holy shit.”
I CATCH JULIAN’S expression—just as shocked as mine—then look back to the room. It’s the office of a diagnosed hoarder, crammed so full it’s hard to even walk inside.
I take a giant step over a crooked stack of boxes and look around. There are rows of glass-doored cabinets like the one downstairs, but instead of the contents artfully arranged like a store window, if you opened one, everything would probably fall out on top of you like in a cartoon. What’s really weird is that none of the cabinets are against the wall. Instead they’re staggered haphazardly around the room.
I dodge a teetering stack of books to get a closer look. One of the cabinets is full of ancient calculators—or maybe they’re cash registers. Another’s full of stick-figure sculptures twisted into weird metal poses. The walls are covered with more stuff—masks, coins, a huge white canvas with a thousand impaled butterflies. It makes me think of Emerald, all those butterflies she collects. But this man collects everything. Looking through all this could seriously take hours.
“I guess we should get started,” I say.
Julian nods uncertainly and kneels to open a cardboard box.
The room’s so crazy full that it takes me a while to even notice the desk against the wall. I yank open the top middle drawer—pretty typical office stuff except everything’s in multiples, like five staplers and eight pairs of scissors. The next few drawers are filled with the same kind of junk.
I tug the bottom drawer on the left. Locked. I grab a letter opener—he has a collection of those too—and stab it while Julian prowls the room, pushing aside papers and boxes. The drawer slides open just as he gasps, “It’s here!”