Time Stands Still

Chapter 13

 It was strange how relationships can just fall apart. I had just worked on a case where a woman had hired us to uncover any dark secrets about her husband, so she would have a legitimate excuse for a divorce. The husband had asked us the same. In the end, I sat them around the table to tell them that they both had the same interests.

Sometimes it felt like I was more some type of relationship-expert than a private investigator.

When I entered the office, it seemed like I had just entered a teenage boy's bedroom. Rhys' desk was swamped with paperwork and his clothes were rumpled. I frowned. I had only been gone for an hour or two. How had he managed to make everything so disorganized?

"Storm passed through?" I asked.

Rhys gave me a ghost of a smile. "Something like that. I just got a case that definitely has priority, but I also still need to work on the case with the bail jumper and then there are all the other cases."

I chuckled. "So you were trying to finish that one in order to work on the other one."

Rhys nodded with an ashamed expression on his face.

"Well, you're in luck. I just finished my case."

His shoulders sagged as he fell back into his chair. I couldn't help but laugh. At my laugh, he quickly jumped and grabbed some papers from his desk seemingly at random before leaping towards me and shoving them in my hands.

"This is all the information I have on the case," Rhys said.

I looked at the papers. "So what did the people say?"

Rhys motioned with his hands towards the papers. "I wrote everything down. Just read that first and ask questions later. Let me finish my case."

"Okay," I told him. "You try to relax a little." He didn't hear me.

I sighed as I looked at the papers. Deciphering Rhys' handwriting was never easy. He wrote horribly sloppy. It was especially sloppy since he was in a hurry, but I pushed myself through it. There was no way that I was going to ask Rhys' anymore questions in his already frazzled and stressed out state.

The case was about finding a journal of a dead girl. The girl had recently committed suicide. The family was obviously devastated. The younger brother knew that his sister had kept a journal and he suspected that a reason for her suicide might be in the journal. However the journal was no longer in its usual place. It was gone.

It seemed like the cases even wanted to make me think about my past.

I usually would have sent a case of this nature to Rhys, but I couldn't do that this time. So instead I took a deep breathe and called the phone number of the parents to make an appointment in order to get more information.

They told me that I could come by the next afternoon. Their sons would be home as well so I could ask them questions if necessary.

In the meantime, I decided to look up who exactly Zoey Darnell was. Zoey Darnell turned out to be one of those ambitious high school students. She was almost a straight A student. Almost because she had some trouble in history class. She was an active tennis player and did very well in competitions.

She was a stereotypical well-rounded high school student.

It seemed like her suicide came as a surprise. Commentary of the teachers showed that she had many friends. There was no history of depression and she had shown no signs of it either. There was nothing that would have suggested that she would commit suicide.

At least my fake suicide had been convincing. I had some trouble with bullies. Well, that's what my family and friends thought had happened, but they needed to think that. They needed to have some reason for why I suddenly decided to jump off a bridge and turn my body into a mangled mess.