The Mind Virus

Chapter 5 - Part 2

Detailed daily entries going back almost a year adorned the pages. Settling on a random page, an entry from a few months back, he read. Nothing out of the ordinary stuck out at Jim, but then that wasn't surprising – Anne had said that Carol had only started acting differently no more than a month back. He flipped forward another few pages until he reached an entry with just one line for the day: I have met the love of my life. Jim looked at the date – just over one month ago. Could this be related to her change of mood? He didn't know, but he read on.

Dates and romantic moments littered the next couple of pages, and yet, strangely enough, not one mention of the man's name. Jim read intently – he was engrossed by this story. The unnamed man appeared to surprise Carol with all the things she loved, somehow without knowing about them beforehand, or so Carol seemed to have thought. He took her to see her favorite band, he took her to her favorite restaurants, he even bought her a bouquet of her favorite flowers.

This blissful romance lasted all of two weeks. From then on, the entries seemed to take a more morbid turn – lower and lower moods as the days went on, and eventually a refusal to meet with the unnamed man she referred to only as her boyfriend. Jim wondered why she would push someone she loved away in a time when she would have needed him most. In his place, she saw doctors and therapists, but got nothing meaningful from the experiences. The last entry in the diary was dated at about two weeks before her suicide. It read simply: I can't take it anymore. I need to be alone.

Jim flipped forward a few pages to make sure there was nothing written after this point, but all he was met with was blank paper. As he held the book by its spine, some loose pieces of card and paper dislodged themselves from the inside cover. With cat-like reflexes he never knew he had, Jim caught them with his free hand.

Looking through them, nothing useful popped out. A card from Carol's father was at the front of the pack. Beneath it was a printout of her class schedule for the semester. Following that were some bits and pieces from her various classes, and right at the end, a laminated printed photograph of an ugly-looking lighthouse on a bare cliff with the number "17" written with marker on the corner. Marveling at just how aesthetically displeasing the photo was, Jim looked at it for a moment before collecting all the loose papers and putting them back in the front of the diary.

With fresh eyes, he looked around at the room once again, but nothing quite as personal as the diary stood out to him. A television, a closet full of clothes, a small cabinet, a bed with some new shoes under it – Jim checked through it all, with predictably fruitless results.

"Find anything?"

Jim pulled his head out from under the bed. "Yeah, maybe." He pawed the diary that he'd placed on the pillow. Anne seemed to have simmered down from her earlier distressed state, so Jim took the opportunity to ask her a question. "Do you know if Carol was seeing anyone?"

"She was. She met him, I don't know, about two months ago or something. They seemed really happy together."

"Did you ever get a chance to meet him?"

"Nope. He never came around here. Wait, that's not entirely true. He'd come around sometimes to pick Carol up, but he'd always wait in the car outside."

"So you never met him?"

"No."

"But you saw him."

"From a distance, yeah. Handsome guy, I guess, but I'm not really into older men."

"How much older are we talking? One of her professors?"

"Ew, no. Thirties maybe, I don't know."

"What was his name?"

"Don't know. For all the times Carol talked about him – and believe me, there were many – she never mentioned his name."

"And you didn't ask."

"Don't get me wrong, I was happy for Carol and all, but I didn't really care about the guy that much."

"Is there anything more about him that you do know?"

"Yeah, Carol always loved a man in uniform."

"He was military?"

"Nope, I think Carol said he was in the police."

"Cedar Grove Police?" Jim was struck by the coincidence, thinking back to Colin's departed sister.

"How would I know that?"

"Right, OK." Jim was elated, partly from finding the diary, partly from the discovery of what was possibly the same man linked to two deaths so far, and partly from getting through the last exchange without having to control his crippling social anxiety.

"The other officer told me to phone him if I think of anything. Should I phone you instead?"

"Yeah, all right, do that."

Anne stared at him for a moment. "So are you going to give me a card, or..."

"Oh right. Uh, I don't have one."

"So do you want to give me your phone number?"

Jim didn't have a police phone, and giving his personal number might sink him too far down a hole that he didn't want to be in. "You know, why don't you phone the officer that you spoke to instead, uh, if you think of something, that is. He'll relay the information to me." His anxiety was flaring up again. Anne's suspicious gaze didn't help.

"All right, fine, whatever."

"Right, OK then, I'm going to take off."

"That's it? The other guy had a lot more questions."

Jim's face was going red. "Oh, yeah, no, that's fine. I can, uh, read his report for that. In fact, I've already read his report. I just had some more questions, that's all."

Anne laughed. "What, like 'Did you know the victim?'"

Jim could feel his fresh sweat pooling in his armpits. Was he busted? "J-just covering all the bases."

"Whatever."

"Thank you very much for your time," Jim managed. "If you think of anything, call me. I mean, call my partner. Call the guy that – right, OK, goodbye."