The “War Room” smelled of lavender stress-relief mist and stale kettle corn.
Chloe Vance’s pantry was less a place for food storage and more a shrine to organization and acoustic isolation. The walls were lined with pink foam tiles to dampen the echo for her TikTok voiceovers, and the door was heavy, solid core wood meant to keep the sounds of her crying children out of her content.
Tonight, it was keeping the secrets of the Cul-de-Sac Cold Case Club in.
Maya sat on a step stool, her laptop balanced on her knees. Elena leaned against the shelves of gluten-free pasta, her arms crossed, looking clinically exhausted. Chloe was pacing the small strip of floor, her thumb chewing a ragged hangnail.
“Sarah isn’t coming,” Chloe said, checking her phone for the tenth time. “She read the message. Double blue ticks. But no reply.”
“Sarah is comprised,” Maya said, her voice flat. She tapped the piece of paper she had stolen from the HOA shed—the noise complaint. “She filed a report about Juniper screaming three weeks before the murder. She knew something was happening, and she treated it like a noise violation. She’s terrified we’ll find out exactly how much she ignored.”
“Or she’s terrified of the person who left the note in her mailbox,” Elena countered. “Fear makes people irrational, Maya. Not necessarily guilty.”
Maya didn’t argue. She pulled up the spreadsheet she had started building at 4:00 AM.
“We don’t need the missing pages from the shed,” Maya said. “We have the internet. And we have tax records. The county assessor’s website is a public goldmine if you know how to navigate the terrible interface.”
She turned the laptop so the others could see.
“This is Bittersweet Court in 1994,” Maya explained, pointing to the four plots of land. “We know Juniper lived at Number 4—my house. We know Sarah and her husband lived at Number 1. We know the house at Number 2—Elena’s house—was occupied by a family called the Millers.”
“The Millers?” Elena asked. “I found a growth chart penciled inside the pantry door when I moved in. It stopped at 1994.”
“They moved out two months after the murder,” Maya said. “Fled to Arizona. But it’s Number 3 and Number 5 I’m worried about.”
Chloe stopped pacing. “Number 3 is my house. Rick’s family owned it back then.”
“Right,” Maya said. “Rick’s parents. But Rick was twenty-two in 1994. He was living here, in the basement suite. The same basement where you found the burner phone.”
Chloe paled, sinking down onto a crate of sparkling water. “He told me he was at college.”
“He dropped out for a semester,” Maya corrected, glancing at her notes. “I found an old graduation announcement in the digital archives of the Gables Gazette. He graduated a year late.”
“Okay, so Rick is a suspect,” Chloe whispered, hugging her knees. “Great. Just great.”
“He’s a person of interest,” Maya said, trying to soften the blow. “But look at Number 5.”
She pointed to the house directly next to hers. The one that sat empty, a “For Sale” sign currently rusting in the front yard.
“The Cursed House,” Chloe murmured.
“Why do you call it that?” Elena asked.
“Because nobody stays,” Chloe said. “In the three years I’ve been here, it’s sold four times. Bad plumbing. Weird noises. One owner said the house felt ‘heavy.’ It’s been vacant for six months.”
“It’s not cursed,” Maya said, her eyes narrowing at the screen. “It’s watched.”
She clicked on the property history.
“In 1994, Number 5 wasn’t a rental revolving door. It was owned by a single family for fifteen years. The Thorne family.”
Elena straightened up, knocking a box of quinoa off the shelf. “Thorne? As in Elias Thorne? The HOA president?”
“His parents,” Maya said. “Elias was seventeen in 1994. He lived right next door to Juniper Black. His bedroom window would have looked directly into her sunroom.”
The realization sucked the air out of the small, pink room.
“Elias,” Elena whispered. “That explains why he was at the shed at 2:00 AM. He wasn’t just protecting the files. He was scrubbing his own family history.”
“He told us to find the cat,” Maya recalled, a shiver running down her spine. “He said, ‘Things that wander off in the dark tend to disappear.’ That wasn’t a warning about coyotes. That was a threat.”
“But is he the voice?” Chloe asked. “The narrator? Elias sounds… reedy. Nasal. The podcast guy sounds like he gargles gravel.”
“Voice modulators are cheap,” Maya said. “But there’s something else. A linguistic fingerprint.”
She opened the audio file of Episode 2. “Listen to the way he describes the location of the body.”
She pressed play. The narrator’s voice filled the pantry.
”…She tried to crawl toward safety. She dragged herself toward the glass, looking out at the black water of the Sinks.”
Maya hit pause. “The Sinks.”
“So?” Chloe asked.
“Do you call the wetlands ‘The Sinks’?” Maya asked.
“No,” Chloe said. “We call it the marsh. Or the swamp.”
“I looked it up,” Maya said. “Before The Gables was developed in the late eighties, this area was a limestone quarry that flooded. The original locals—the townies who lived here before the gates went up—called it ‘The Sinks.’ It’s a hyper-local term. Only someone who grew up here, specifically in this patch of land before it was gentrified, would use that word naturally.”
“Rick grew up here,” Chloe said softly.
“And Elias grew up here,” Maya added. “They are the only two men on this street with that specific geographical memory. The Sinks isn’t a name you learn from a map. It’s a name you learn from playing in the mud as a kid.”
Elena rubbed her temples. “So we have two suspects. Chloe’s husband, who has a temper and a secret phone. And the HOA president, who catches people breaking into sheds and threatens them with eviction.”
“And who lived next door to the victim,” Maya added. “Proximity is everything. If Juniper was being watched, Elias had the front row seat.”
Maya stood up and walked to the pantry door, cracking it open an inch. The house beyond was silent.
“We need to get into Number 5,” Maya said.
“The empty house?” Chloe asked.
“If Elias lived there, maybe he left something behind. Or maybe the reason it keeps selling is because he’s still using it. Maybe that’s where he records.”
“Maya, that’s breaking and entering,” Elena warned. “Again. And this time, it’s a residential property.”
“It’s empty,” Maya argued. “And there’s a lockbox on the door for realtors. Chloe, do you still have your license?”
Chloe hesitated. Before she was an influencer, she had briefly tried her hand at real estate—a failed venture that had left her with a lot of business cards and a distinct hatred for open houses.
“I let my license lapse,” Chloe said. “But… I still have my Supra key app. It might work on the digital lockbox if they haven’t updated the firmware.”
“We check it,” Maya said. “Tonight.”
“Tonight?” Chloe squeaked. “It’s midnight.”
“The perfect time for ghosts,” Maya said grimly.
But before they could move, a sound pierced the silence of the kitchen outside.
It wasn’t a scream. It wasn’t a siren.
It was a notification sound. But not from a phone. It was coming from the Alexa unit mounted under Chloe’s kitchen cabinet.
Ding.
Then, the digital assistant’s voice spoke, cool and robotic.
“Drop-in from… The Gables Ghost.”
The three women froze in the pantry.
“Did she just say…” Chloe whispered.
“I can hear you,” a voice rasped from the kitchen speakers. It was the podcast narrator. Live. “You’re getting warm, ladies. But the pantry isn’t as soundproof as you think.”
Chloe clamped her hands over her mouth to stifle a scream.
Maya shoved the door open and ran into the kitchen. The Alexa ring was glowing a pulsing yellow-green—the active call color.
“Who are you?” Maya shouted at the plastic disc.
“I’m the neighbor who hears everything,” the voice replied. “You figured out ‘The Sinks.’ Very clever, Maya. But you missed the most important clue.”
“What clue?” Maya demanded, staring at the device as if it were a poisonous snake.
“Why Juniper was screaming three weeks before she died,” the voice said. “Ask Sarah. Ask her about the baby shower that never happened.”
The connection cut with a cheerful bloop. The light on the Alexa went dark.
Maya stood in the center of Chloe’s immaculate kitchen, her chest heaving. He wasn’t just listening through hidden bugs. He was hacking their smart home devices. He was in the Wi-Fi.
Elena and Chloe stumbled out of the pantry, pale and shaking.
“He heard us,” Chloe whimpered. “He heard us talking about Rick. About Elias.”
“He wanted us to hear him,” Maya said, her fear hardening into cold resolve. “He’s reacting. We rattled him.”
“He mentioned a baby shower,” Elena said. “If Juniper was only eight weeks pregnant, nobody throws a shower that early. Unless…”
“Unless she wasn’t keeping it,” Maya finished. “Or unless the father wanted it gone.”
Maya grabbed her laptop. “We’re not going to the empty house tonight. He’s expecting that now. We’re going to find out what Sarah knows about a baby shower. And we’re going to do it before he cuts her line.”
She looked through the kitchen window at Number 1. Sarah’s house was dark. Too dark.
“Lock your doors,” Maya told Chloe. “Change your Wi-Fi password. Unplug the Alexa.”
She turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” Elena asked.
“To buy a typewriter,” Maya lied. She was going to stand watch. Because if Elias Thorne was the boy next door, and Rick Vance was the boy in the basement, then the cul-de-sac wasn’t a neighborhood. It was a shark tank. And the sharks were circling Sarah.