Page 38 of The Midnight Knock

He wasn’t kidding. The stone was small, about the size and shape of a chicken egg, but it settled into Ethan’s palm with the weight of a rock twice its size. The stone was pale white, almost the color of limestone, but far denser than any limestone Ethan had ever encountered.

A whorl of fine grooves was carved into the egg. The grooves turned and turned around the stone, seemingly with no beginning or end. The handiwork was so good Ethan couldn’t find a single chink in the carving, an uneven groove, a seam. He wondered what sort of machine could carve a rock this dense in such fine detail, but in a way, he doubted it could have been machined at all.

The rock feltold, somehow. Almost prehistoric.

Ethan realized he’d seen a stone like this somewhere before. Two of them, to be precise, on the mantel of the fireplace in the motel’s office.

Hunter closed Ethan’s fingers around the stone.

“Hold on to that,” Hunter murmured. “It might be important.”

Hunter crossed back around the bed and opened the tall armoire, then poked through the pocket of a jacket Sarah had hung inside, shook his head. “You know what I can’t find anywhere? The satellite phone. Didn’t she say that Frank person had given her one? That he expected a call after dinner?”

“She did. Could it be in her Rover?” Ethan said.

“I guess it’s possible. I found her keys on her dresser. I could double-check.”

“But she’d have probably wanted to keep it nearby, wouldn’t she?” Ethan said. He opened the drawers of the dresser: all empty. “A cold night like this, you wouldn’t want to have to go back outside and get it.”

“Precisely. So where did it go?”

Ethan chewed his lip.

Hunter looked at something on the floor of the armoire. After pulling loose a spare blanket the twins had left folded up on the armoire’s bottom shelf—Ethan had seen one just like it in the armoire of their own room—Hunter shook the blanket open and draped itover Sarah’s corpse. Ethan was surprised how relieved he felt when the woman’s face was finally shrouded. When he didn’t have to see the woman’s dark eyes, staring in horror at whatever fate had come for her.

For the millionth time, Ethan wondered who could have donethatto this woman.

The door to the bathroom opened. Fernanda emerged with a roll of film in her hand and a disappointed frown on her face.

“Sarah developed this before she died,” Kyla said. “But someone’s beaten us to the good stuff.”

Ethan saw that the end of the film had been neatly snipped off. Fernanda said, “There are only thirty frames here. A roll this length would hold thirty-six.”

“The killer cut off the final six shots?” Hunter said.

“They might have taken them somewhere,” Kyla said, looking almost excited at the prospect of a lead. “We should check Ryan’s body. We should check the rooms.”

Ethan almost felt bad to disappoint her. “I don’t think they were hidden anywhere. Look.”

He returned to the corner table and plucked the pieces of burned plastic from the ash he’d spilled out of the dinner plate. Returning to Fernanda, he held one of the scraps near the film in her hand. There was no mistaking it: the burned scrap had the same even square holes along its edge as the border of the film.

“Someone burned those last six shots,” Ethan said. “Whatever Sarah photographed, they wanted to be sure we never saw it.”

KYLA

“Well, shit,” she said. “Just when I thought we were getting somewhere.”

The four of them lapsed into silence. Fernanda pinched the length of the surviving film between finger and thumb, held it to the light, pulled it from frame to frame to study the negative. After a moment, Hunter asked, “Anything good?”

“Desert shots. The mountain. The motel. Nothing interesting. Yet.”

Kyla took the charred scraps of film from Ethan’s hand. She said again, “Shit.”

A softclickdrew her attention to the nightstand.

Kyla dropped the film to the floor. She couldn’t contain a gasp.

The time was 9:52.