The house was quiet. Emily stole through the hallway, conscious of the floorboards beneath her feet, the rustle of her clothes against her body. She passed the meditation room, the art room, Pamela’s office. The table was still on its side where Helen had fallen. Her blood remained in a pool on the floor. Grimacing, Emily skirted around it and rechecked the front door locks.
Shadows cloaked the top of the stairs. She climbed, one foot silently placed in front of the other. Rained drummed on the slate roof above. Reaching the top, she peered down the length of the corridor, then turned a hundred and eighty degrees, heading towards Melody’s room.
The tablet lay on the bed, the ceiling reflected on its glossy screen. Emily picked it up, circled the power button with a finger, then pressed it. The screen lit up. Seconds later, she was staring at the orange and charcoal face of a cat.
“Derek,” she whispered.
Derek was grossly overweight and pissed off. His yellow-green eyes glared at the camera, daring the viewer to come an inch closer, to feel the sharpness of his claws. Emily scanned through the folders on the tablet’s desktop, located the pictures folder and opened it up. Melody had arranged her photographs into subfolders, which were categorised by months and years.
Opening 2015, Emily picked a month at random—February—and scanned through the pictures. It didn’t take long to build an image of Melody’s life. In this modern world of technology, it seemed that every minor detail of a person’s being begged to be captured on camera and paraded on social media. Emily was yet to decipher if it was out of a need for attention, of acknowledgement that one’s life was interesting and worthy, or if it was because technology had paved the way for a whole new language of communication. Uncharacteristically for a member of the Millennial generation, Emily had never been interested in sharing images of her dinner with the world or uploading a hundred selfies.
Melody, on the other hand, appeared to be an obsessive fan. In picture after picture, she posed for the camera. Sometimes she was alone, pouting her lips or demonstrating a range of smiles. Other times, she held Derek tightly against her cheek or up in the air for all to see. Except there was no all. There were no pictures of friends or family, of social gatherings or celebrations. There were only Melody and Derek, holed up in their small but meticulously-kept flat.
As she flipped through the images, Emily felt tendrils of loneliness reach out from the screen and pierce her chest. Melody’s life was a solitary existence that reeked of unhappiness. It was no wonder she had so desperately attached herself to Meadow Pines.
Emily’s mind wandered back to yesterday evening, when, sat on the edge of the jetty, Melody had seemed so sad and alone. She reached back further to dinner, to when Melody had arrived late and had looked as if she’d been crying.
Exiting the February folder, Emily tapped on June. There were more self-portraits. More shots of Melody and Derek posing in their cramped living room or sharing a pillow in bed.
But there were other photographs here too. Candid photographs taken of the guests at Meadow Pines.
Emily examined each one: a picture snapped from the front door of Janelle and Marcia toiling in the vegetable garden; an image taken from the treeline of Jerome and Daniel sat on the back porch, their bodies turned to one another in an obvious display of attraction. A series of shots had been captured through the kitchen window, showing Sam slicing onions with a sharp knife, then wiping sweat from his brow while hunched over a bubbling pot, then rolling a joint on the kitchen island. They were followed by a photograph taken from a bedroom window, showing Sam now smoking the joint at the edge of the forest.
Bringing the tablet with her, Emily moved over to the rain-covered window and stared out. The porch roof was directly below. Beyond, the forest was black and murky; a series of sharp points and angles in the shadows.
If Melody had sneaked her tablet into Meadow Pines this weekend, it was more than likely she’d done it before. Returning to sit on the bed, Emily worked her way backwards through the folders of 2015. Her intuition had been correct. There were several photographs of past guests, each one secretly snapped from windows, doorways, and corners.
Moving into December 2014, Emily lingered over photographs of Christmas Day—of Melody and Derek wearing matching Christmas sweaters at a dinner table set for one.
November revealed yet more photographs taken at Meadow Pines: guests making sculptures in the art room; rusty leaves decaying on the forest floor while the pines stood bold and green. Emily moved back through the months, her finger swiping again and again across the screen. She had no idea what she was doing, no idea why she was so wilfully invading Melody’s privacy while she was out there in the forest, possibly enduring all kinds of horrors at the hands of a psychopath. But instinct told her to keep searching. There was something here, she was sure of it. The missing element that connected what was happening right now at Meadow Pines to the terrible events that occurred one stormy night in April 2014.
She found it minutes later in an unnamed folder. What she saw made her eyes grow wide with shock.