The air in here was stifling, it smelt of musty old books, moth eaten pages, squeaky leather shoes and fresh black stamp ink. The heavy door sucked open, she crossed the threshold and instantly could have gagged, perhaps that could have been due to her utter lack of an appetite, or more specifically, lack of appetite for booze and cigarettes, Claire scarcely bought anything else. Lil unbuttoned her coat to reveal a tight, strapless black corset underneath and with two fingers she loosened her scarf, the long woollen ends hung by her hips and swept about her almost valiantly as she rushed past the librarian in an attempt to avoid meeting her skeletal bird-like features. The woman stared at her over a pair of wire frame glasses, pursed her lips and squinted, it gave Lil the unnerving impression that she was examining her as if she expected to see a worm crawl out her ear – that at least would give the vulture a reason to attack her. She ducked out of sight behind a crowded, far too organized bookshelf, shivers ran up and down her spine, she breathed as if a weight had been lifted from her small, narrow shoulders and walked confidently through the aisle of bookcases. Her eyes trailed along the shelves and book spines with a feigned interest, fiction, non-fiction, encyclopaedia’s – she wasn’t here for any of these.

Then she saw them, the many gleaming silver towers that housed an immense amount of files, newspaper clippings, town records…old police reports? She could only dream. The crisp sound of the drawer opening was music to her ears, her fingers flittered through the folders from A to B to C and landed finally in D.

DISASTERS.

How perfectly blunt.

Lil pulled the folder from its home and shoved the drawer closed with a butt of her hip, sidestepped to the nearest desk and dropped into the chair. The folder was a treasure trove that fed her greedy over-inferring nature. She pulled a notebook from her canvas bag and parted the poster collaged cover, flipped through pages upon pages of notes, quotes, vague sketches, sticky taped polaroids and doodles until she found a clean fresh, virgin page. With a black biro held in her left hand she used her right to sift through the mundane until she found the intriguing.

MURDER.

Her eyes gleamed. A wicked grin broke across her face and her hand scribbled across the paper. Dates, number of victims, locations, there weren’t many and therefore there wasn’t much to go on. Small towns were nothing like big cities, bodies weren’t pulled out of dumpsters every morning and those murders that did occur seemed to have their facts over-emphasised in the media. Were these people so pathetic that they had to turn the accidental death of a farmer into a soap opera story of motive and greedy nephews? Was she so pathetic that she actually found it hard to contain herself as she savoured each word? It was entirely possible that this was better than sex. Lil scoffed, now she was over-emphasizing the facts. She brushed away the trash stories and focussed on the truly heinous and it was then that her eyes crossed the heading:

COMMUNITY SHOCKED BY MURDER SUICIDE.

Her chair creaked as she rocked forwards and leant in over the page like a teenage boy ravaging the same old, dirty scrap of an edition of ‘Penthouse.’ She stopped writing and bent her elbow against the tabletop, her wrist went loose, she gripped her pen with her fingertips and touched the tip to the soft flesh of the underside of her jaw. Her pale skin dimpled inwards as she pressed the tip up, pulled it away, let her skin bounce back then pushed it in again, harder and harder each time.

“…shotgun was found alongside the bodies, it had recently been fired. I mourn for the loss of such young lives by the hands of a man who should have cared for and protected his family – that is all.”

The sheriff’s statement.

Her pupils dilated. The trance found her again.

He’d been such a quiet man, at the time he had seemed so gentle, she never noticed how his tender strokes of her cheek or hair would turn stressed and stiff within seconds of contact with her. She never noticed how eagerly he’d sit by her bed and wait for her to fall asleep. She never noticed the smell of blood on his hands. She never noticed the look of pure, animalistic lust in his eyes.

“Ah!” the tip of her pen broke her flesh, Lil blinked hard, the pen hit the desk, a thin line of blood weaved through the many black ink dots on her jowls and ran down her neck. She inhaled sharply and licked the pad of her thumb as if it were a postage stamp and pressed it to the small, insignificant wound until the bleeding stopped.

“This isn’t it,” she whispered, eyes scoured the newspaper clippings. “This isn’t what they’re hiding.” She pushed the papers back into the folder without care that they stuck and hung out the edges in a horrible mess, she didn’t care that she put the folder back out of order and slammed the drawer closed. She leant against the towers with her ankles crossed, eyes vacant, she licked her thumb again and wiped the ink from her jaw.

“Something else,” she muttered the words between her teeth. “Less obvious.” Her eyes sparkled, she turned about, bent at the knee and crouched low as she scanned through the letters with the tip of her index finger.

M.

MISSING.

It was like being in a milk carton factory. She couldn’t believe how many smiling faces stared at her from the contents of that folder.

“Deja – fucking – vu.” She touched the side of her face, slapped herself, her cheek stung and turned pink – she wasn’t dreaming. She bundled them up in her arms and made her way over to the photocopier – this was going to take some time.

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