Chapter 2

Mr. Wesley’s teasing words echoed in my mind, but I could not focus on anything he said as I turned back into my apartment. Who screamed like that last night? Where was that electric drill noise coming from?

Could that blind woman really have been moaning in her apartment alone in the middle of the night? Impossible! There had to be a man!

I had not been sitting long when someone knocked on my door again.

This time, it was Officer Zane. Lately, he had been stopping by almost daily, claiming routine follow-ups on Zach’s disappearance. However, he was trying to pry information out of me.

“Lindy, how’s your leg?”

The moment he stepped inside, his eyes darted around the room, sharp as a hawk’s. It was as though he wanted to lift every tile on the floor to see what was hidden beneath.

I pointed to my plastered leg and forced out a few tears. “No one’s taking care of me. I can’t recover any quicker on my own. Officer Zane, when are you going to find Zach? Day after day, there’s no sign of him. I’m really worried…”

He did not answer me. Instead, he walked around the room, sniffing the air.

“Some neighbors complained yesterday that there’s a strange smell on this floor.”

A chill ran through me, yet I wore a mask of innocence on my face.

“I’m a wounded woman with no one to look after me. The trash hasn’t been taken out in days…”

Officer Zane stopped at the bathroom door, staring at the tiled wall for a long time. The wall hid the space behind the bathroom. It was a little crawl space I had built myself when I expanded the bathroom. It was also where Zach was now.

“It’s not the smell of trash. It smells like… a dead rat rotting in the wall.”

He turned to look at me and gave me a faint, unsettling smile.

I could feel the hairs on my neck stand on end. I quickly waved it off. “Could be. Apartments like this always have dead rats. Maybe it’s from the blind woman next door.”

He stared at me for a long moment before slowly turning away.

“Alright.”

He turned around to leave, and I secretly let out a sigh of relief, until he spoke again.

“But Lindy…”

I straightened in my seat. He turned around. His eyes pierced me so sharply that I could barely breathe.

“Don’t worry. There will be news about Zach sooner or later. I will find him, alive or dead.”

The last four words carried weight that made me feel like he had discovered something I did not even know. Then, he left without lingering. The door clicked shut.

One, two, three seconds… There was nothing.

Finally, I let my tensed nerves relax and collapsed onto the couch, gulping for air. That smell was definitely getting worse. At this rate, it would not stay hidden for long.

I needed to know exactly what was going on next door.

Was that blind woman really blind? What were the sounds I heard?

The walls in this old apartment were fragile, crumbling like cookies. I found a tiny watchmaker’s drill and picked a small, inconspicuous crack in the shared wall, drilling slowly and carefully.

Half an hour later, I had made a hole. I pressed my eye to the tiny opening. The blinds in the next apartment were drawn, leaving the room dimly lit.

A pile of wood sat in the center, and a half-finished shoe cabinet stood nearby. It was identical to the one at my door.

A man in a blue shirt bent over a drill, focused on the wood in front of him. That figure, that posture—it was unmistakably Zach.

As my heart pounded, the man stopped. His head rotated like a mechanical part, snapping a full 180 degrees. The face staring back was ghostly pale. There was no nose, no mouth, only one eye.

It was a crudely made prosthetic eye, staring fixedly through the tiny hole I’d drilled.

I jerked back in fright and toppled off the chair. My tailbone slammed into the floor. The pain nearly knocked the wind out of me.

I knew that eye too well.

Zach lost one eye to illness when he was a child, and that was the prosthetic he had worn ever since. It was cheap and poorly made, mostly white with very little black, so it always looked creepy.

The night I killed him, that prosthetic eye popped out and rolled across the floor. I was so disgusted that I kicked it under the bed.

Now, it was on the face of the man next door, staring at me through the wall.

I gasped, clutching a fruit knife from the table with white-knuckled hands. There were no ghosts in this world. It was all just a human playing tricks.

That man was definitely not Zach. Zach’s body was in the wall behind me. If he were not unkillable, he would be nothing but a skeleton by now.

Was it the blind woman? Or her accomplice?

Whoever it was, they clearly knew something. They were trying to scare me, trying to make me slip up.

Not a chance!

I had a micro camera set up by my door, pointing down the hallway. I had originally used it to check if Zach was sneaking women into the apartment. I never thought it would come in handy like this.

I watched my phone screen all day. Finally, the blind woman left. She wore sunglasses and carried a cane, stumbling a bit as she walked. She definitely looked blind.

However, the man with one prosthetic eye was not with her.

No sooner had she gone than a delivery guy knocked on my door. “Lindy, right? Your package.”

I frowned. I had not ordered anything in weeks to save money. Where did this come from?

As soon as I signed for it, a wave of putrid, bloody stench hit me.