Strangers (Fighting the Darkness series)

Preparing for the worst

MUM CAME TO PICK ME UP AT ABOUT TWELVE O’CLOCK. CLAIRE HAD LEFT WITH Louise and Crystal was spending the day with Teddy at home. When I got into the car, I noticed a small box on the floor. I picked it up and realised that it was the box from last week; the one from the hotel. And it had Jordan’s handwriting on it.

“What the hell is that?” asked Red. I told her that it was a gift I got at the hotel, but I’d forgotten all about it.

“The thing is that I don’t know who sent it. I mean, if you were there you’d have known about it.” I said. Then I looked at mum who was waiting for me to close the car door and buckle up. After she was being distracted by the driving, I told Red about the feeling I had at the hotel when we first arrived. Like it was someone watching us. She said there was most likely a connection but she stopped and hesitated for moment, like she wanted to tell me something, but wasn’t sure if she should, so she stopped talking. She didn’t start talking until we got home. 

I was in my room, contemplating whether or not to open the box. Red said that the writing looks a little like Jordan’s of what she had seen before, but needed something to reference it by for a complete match.

“What about your mum’s documents? Doesn’t the Mayor have to write on them before she can finalise them?”

“That could be a possibility. But will she let us look through them? They are strictly confidential.” 

“Look, you need to prove if this gift is really from Jordan or you’ll never prove that he’s stalking you or open the damn thing. It’s not like your mum’s gonna bound and gag you just for looking at some papers.”

No matter which way she put it, I knew she was right. I had to know if the box was from Jordan. I’d have to stay paranoid for the rest of my life and I didn’t want that. Not for my future. I planned for big things to happen and I didn’t want to go around not trusting people, looking over my shoulder around every corner. I was already doing that now, more or less. So I had to look for a document. Even if it meant punishment afterward.

The room was right next to mine. The door was usually locked because the room was conjoined with the master bedroom, where my parents slept. They were in the main ensuite because my sister needed the office space for work and my mum left her work at her office. Then when she moved out with Richard they moved in there and soon after that was when mum got the promotion from Jordan after I saved him in the elevator. So now most of it is here, mainly for safety issues.

Mum’s job was to make and note official documents for the Mayor so that he could, for example, be out of the country on either official or unofficial business. Or make a specific document, handwritten and given to my mum to type up if his secretary was busy. Well, that would be the case, but for some reason, he didn’t want a secretary, but the position was kept open if he wanted one in the future, like if I was looking for a job. Like that would ever happen.

I snuck into the room from the master bedroom. The locks were only on the inside of the office doors, so I could lock myself in if I wanted to. The office was rather small. I think it was a spare storage space before we renovated the house. There was a bookshelf along the far wall stuffed with books and boxes of papers. On the smallest free wall was a dark wooden desk with a green velvet table cloth in the middle and a small silver metal lamp in the right hand corner. There was a computer on the left side of the desk, with the mouse and keyboard stored under the desk on a slide out shelf. There were a few pieces of paper already on the desk which mum had left out, and a few that were stuck out of the draws and the printer under the desk. I pulled out the swivel chair, sat down on it and decided to look through the desk draws. 

The first few were about tax revenues and social donations here and there. One was about the presentation he’d done at the charity fairground to Raise money for the S.S.E.A. association. But they were all printed and what I feared was the actual handwritten documents were in the shredder that caught my attention next to the printer.