‘Trevor Hoskins.’ Beth thought about the second name on the list, trying unsuccessfully to jolt free a memory that might help her find a missing link. Her hands hovered above the keyboard of her laptop, frozen with indecision. ‘It’s probably just a prank.’
The afternoon sun which bled through the patio doors warmed her bare feet. Beth turned to glance appreciatively at her little garden, which was so green, so lustrous. A tiny patch of lawn which she had ardently cared for since moving in. The washing on the line swung softly in a lazy breeze.
Josh had so easily served up an explanation for the list. Why was he so quick to come to a conclusion? Why not the level of intrigue which gnawed at Beth?
He’s worried about fixation.
Her cheeks burned as she recalled the events of the previous summer when she’d become convinced that their new neighbours hated her. She’d googled them relentlessly, stalked them on Facebook, become obsessed, all because the slim blonde had ignored her call of Good morning one sunny July day. Beth had feared they saw something in her, that they had a reason to despise her.
‘You’re driving yourself crazy,’ Josh had lamented as he’d snatched her laptop away from her, his tone like thunder. ‘Let it go, Beth. She just didn’t hear you, it’s nothing.’
And it had turned out to be nothing. Josh was right. But the note … that was something. From the location to the penmanship, everything about it seemed deliberate. Beth felt in her core that her happening upon it was no accident. Someone had intended her to find the note. But where was the prank in that?
With a sigh, Beth lowered her hands and began typing, punching each key with unnecessary force. She typed in a Google search:
Five names on a list, the third one is yours.
She hoped it would be a tag line from a film or a line from a song, something to connect it to some canon or zeitgeist that her co-workers ardently followed. But there wasn’t anything. A few unrelated websites were listed beneath her search.
‘Dammit.’
So the connection had to be the names themselves, there was nothing else. But Beth really didn’t know them. The only recognisable name on the list was her own.
It has to mean something.
With steady hands, she started with the first name on the list, the one neatly written above all the authors, and typed Joanne Rowles into her laptop’s search engine.
Four
Facebook profiles, LinkedIn pages, Beth scrolled through them all, reading about a plethora of people named Joanne Rowles, greatly diverse in age and location. Nothing shone out from the screen with any glimmer of familiarity.
‘Who are you?’ Beth wondered aloud as she read about a Joanne Rowles who was a doctor in Sydney, Australia. She knew this couldn’t be the person she was looking for since Beth had never even left the UK. Surely she couldn’t somehow be connected to someone on the other side of the world.
As the hours slid by, Beth tumbled deeper into the rabbit hole of strangers’ profiles, becoming increasingly desperate and willing to spot any possible link. If she found a Joanne who was the same age, she’d linger on their information, scour all their available images, without even knowing what she was looking for.
The sun passed across the room, leaving her feet bare and cold. Still Beth didn’t move, not even when her throat became parched and her hands began to ache.
There has to be something.
Increasingly, she couldn’t accept that the list was merely just a prank. Why would anyone do that to her when her presence at the cinema was so unobtrusive? She dwelt in the projection rooms, the shadows of the corridors. What gossip she heard uttered by the others she quickly forgot. Beth lived with blinkers on, focused on what was in front of her. Her friends had fallen away. It was her and Josh. And yet the note, it had been there, directly in her path. It wanted to be found, read, investigated.
On the twenty-fifth page of search results for Joanne Rowles, Beth finally accepted that she should probably stop. It was exhausting to slam her head against a succession of dead ends.
With a weary sigh, Beth clicked on the next listed link. It took her to a page for a regional newspaper, The Bridgnorth Bugle, and a small story from several months ago about a fire. The headline read:
WOMAN, 29, DIES IN SUSPICIOUS HOUSE FIRE
Beth’s eyes widened with interest. She was herself only four months away from her thirtieth birthday. And where was Bridgnorth? Wasn’t it a small market town in the next county over?
Gravel beneath tyres. A key turning in the lock. Staring at her laptop, Beth failed to hear the sounds which heralded Josh’s arrival back from work. He burst into the lounge, cheeks reddened by a day spent out in the sun.
‘Beth, what are you doing here?’ He was annoyed. And confused.
‘Huh?’ Beth’s gaze strayed away from the article to the lower right-hand corner of the screen and the little digital clock that was tucked away there in the toolbar. It was quarter past six. She was officially late for work. ‘Shit.’ Slamming the computer closed, she shoved it from her lap and hurried out of the room, squeezing her way past Josh, who loomed large in the doorway.
‘Beth, what’s going on?’ his voice followed her up the stairs. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I lost track of time,’ she quickly explained as she dove into their bedroom and began pulling open drawers, desperately seeking the items of her work uniform.
‘That’s not like you.’ The floorboards creaked in protest as Josh followed her into the room.
‘Like I said, I lost track of time.’ Beth pulled on her polo shirt with the cinema’s logo emblazoned in the top corner. Next came her plain black trousers. Then she’d need shoes. And her hair, what sort of state was that in?
‘What were you even doing?’
‘Just …’ she shrugged as she fastened the zip on her trousers. ‘You know, stuff.’
The washing. It was still out on the line. There was a lot Beth had neglected to do as she’d sat transfixed in front of her laptop, chasing a seemingly unanswerable riddle.
‘This anything to do with that list you found?’ Josh folded his arms, thick as tree trunks, across his chest. Was he concerned? Because he sounded annoyed. Beth couldn’t risk getting drawn into a heated debate with him, she was running late enough as it was. Each minute she procrastinated in the house was another minute that would be deducted from her wages.
‘I need to go.’ Finally dressed, she barged past him. Her hair was loose and full of kinks from being left to dry naturally, but there wasn’t time to care. Her footsteps thundered back down the stairs and in the hallway she grabbed her bag and slid into a pair of worn black ballet pumps.
‘You need to bin the damn thing,’ Josh persisted, following her. Now they were both in the hallway, the driveway beyond distorted by the mottled glass in the front door.
‘Josh, I have to go. I’m late.’
‘It means nothing,’ he insisted. ‘Don’t get obsessed about it, okay? It’s just names on a list. That’s it.’
‘Yes,’ Beth agreed as she reached for the door handle, ‘but one of those names is mine.’
Five
The door clicked loudly behind her as she was shut inside. Ruby glanced around woefully at her assigned room. Though calling it a room seemed overly charitable. It felt more like a prison cell. She rubbed at her arms as she shuffled towards the single bed on a wrought-iron frame that occupied the farthest wall.