DAY 365
One year. Alric was still missing. The police had found no trace of him, and maybe at this point had given up, likely storing the case in a file cabinet for missing persons. The detective had said the apartment Alric had been living in had been empty, save for one shoebox. There had been no evidence of a struggle, no clue as to what had happened; even Alric’s coworkers didn’t know his whereabouts. Jemma had even gone to the apartment in person after being granted a weekend leave by Matt and saw they had been right. The only thing Jemma had come home with was the shoebox with tiny notebooks that had scribblings she couldn’t make sense of. Every day she checked in with the department for updates, hoping the report would be different. It never was. Everyone had seemingly moved on, not even noticing his disappearance from the world, but Jemma didn’t move on. She couldn’t forget.
The number tallied across the screen, blinking with its digital gleam, as if mocking her.
Jemma stared at the number on the screen, fixated on its glow, as if that could somehow change the circumstance. She glanced at her wall, slapped over her old picture frames were news articles of missing person cases, strange stories of people vanished without a trace, stories that somehow were kept out of major headlines. She had pinned statements of co-workers of Alric, trying to figure out what they knew about what he had been doing before that phone call, but nothing stuck out.
What bothered Jemma the most? Was the deleted automail. With all the police’s fancy tech gadgets, no one could retrace it. They couldn’t trace a phantom call, and some had hinted to Jemma that perhaps she had been overworked and stayed up too late on a shift, as if she had imagined the call.
The phone buzzed. Jemma twitched.
8:01 AM
ID Caller: Matt Muster.
Jemma wasn’t logged on yet. The number 365 continued to blink at her. Would Matt even remember what happened a year ago? Ignoring the call, Jemma logged into the network. Her icon popped up. A wall of unanswered, unfiled messages rolled across the screen. She cracked her knuckles, breathing out a frustrated whisper. “It never ends.” The workload had increased tenfold over the last year, almost as if it were to create a distraction, but that, again, some would say was merely her overactive imagination.
The phone continued to buzz. She rolled her eyes, glancing at the screen.
Matt Muster really wanted to talk today, didn’t he?
8:02. AM.
Jemma let it ring until the last possible second then swiped the bar across the screen to answer. “Hello?” her tone was flat.
“Jemma. You’re late,” Matt said, mildly irritated. “This is the sixth day in a row.”
I guess I can’t use the computer malfunction excuse again. She thought to herself as she stared at the monitor and the list of messages she would have to get through today, if she could get through them all. It gave her less time to do other research. She refused to believe that Alric had disappeared without a trace. She glanced up at her article-filled wall and huffed.
“Sorry, boss,” her tone remained detatched.
“Is there something we need to talk about?” he demanded.
“Not at all,” Jemma shrugged, gaze falling back on the number 365, then on the messages, and continued to scroll through the endless list, trying to figure out which was the most urgent message to get to.
“Jemma,” Matt was brisk.
“What?” Jemma snapped, then bit her lip. That was no way to talk to her boss, no matter how annoying he was.
Matt let out a sigh.
“I’ll make up for it,” Jemma said, trying to pull back on her dismissive behavior. Even if she was Matt’s best worker, even he’d have his limits. She didn’t want him to bring up the contract again.
“I can’t have you keep going like this.”
She didn’t want to find out what that meant. Jemma leaned back in her seat, pushing a finger against her forehead, and debated whether she really needed to remind Matt that it had only been one minute, in which she was going to work overtime to make up for that loss. And that wouldn’t even get her through the millions of messages she would respond to today. A million —
A message with a headline typed in call caps caught her attention.
CAN YOU SAVE ME. 365.
She sucked in a sharp breath.
“Jemma?” Matt said.
She stared at the message. There was no sender ID.
“Have you been seeing your therapist?”
Jemma stiffened. HR had assigned her this mandatory way to cope with…well, her brother’s disappearance and, according to the therapist, her apparent ongoing obsession with finding where he had gone. The sessions hadn’t helped much, but she had thought those meetings were confidential. Matt Muster had no business in asking about that.
“Yes,” Jemma lied, though she had stopped seeing the therapist months ago when they suggested she stop hounding the police station about Alric’s disappearance.
“Do you need a day off?”
She rolled her eyes. How generous of him.
“I know it’s been hard for you,” he said, voice softening.
It made her skin crawl. “I’m fine,” Jemma said, then hung up before Matt could say anything else. She wondered how angry he was for prematurely ending the call. Jemma stared at the message headline, then clicked it open.
One line.
I’ll see you tonight.
Every part of Jemma froze, double-checking for the sender. There was none. Her heart pounded. What was she supposed to do? Report it to the police? They’d politely record it in their little book and file it away. Maybe it was sent to the wrong inbox. Yet the headline said “Can you save me. 365.” That was too specific. Whoever sent the message knew something about Alric. Unless it was just some sick joke. Jemma paused, squinting at the text. Could she reply back? If it were an unknown address, it wouldn’t go through but…
Jemma typed.
Where is my brother?
Her finger hovered over the send button, then she clicked. Might as well play along. Jemma kinked her neck, cracked her fingers, and moved on to another file. She didn’t want Matt to start watching how many messages she was getting through in one shift.
A sound pinged. It was a response.
You will know soon enough.
Jemma nearly choked, and pushed back her chair, and leaned closer to the screen. It pinged again.
Alric won’t be coming back.
Jemma called the police.
Gettin' Real 