Samford University — three days before Pluckley
The conference room smelled the way it always smelled by mid-afternoon: burnt coffee and the particular staleness of fluorescent light on paper that had been read too many times. A long table, cluttered with case files and cold cups. Two graduate students taking notes no one would ever read again.
Abigail stood at the whiteboard with a marker in her hand and seventeen photographs of Linda Marsh spread across the table like a hand of cards nobody wanted to play.
Dr. Helena Ward sat across from her, sixty-something, unhurried, a forensic psychiatrist who had built a thirty-year career on the specific skill of not being impressed by anything until she had a reason to be. Beside her, Detective Theo Briggs sat with his folder already half-closed, a man who had come here expecting an answer and was rapidly concluding he wasn’t going to get one he liked.
“Seventeen distinct behavioral episodes over eight weeks,” Abigail said, tapping the timeline on the board. “Each one triggered near her husband.” A beat. “Every one identical. Down to the second.”
“Dissociation can be consistent,” Ward said.
“Not like this.” Abigail turned from the board. “She’s present during them. Aware of everything. Just unable to stop it.”
Briggs leaned back in his chair, unimpressed in the particular way of a man who had sat through a hundred expert consultations and learned to recognize the exact moment one was about to circle a drain instead of land on a conclusion. “So what do you call it?”
Abigail didn’t hesitate. She had learned, over the last eight weeks, that hesitation only invited people to fill the silence with whatever explanation was easiest for them to live with.
“A pattern we don’t have language for yet.”
“What’s your recommendation?” Ward asked.
“Continued observation. She should not be discharged or left alone with her husband.”
Briggs closed his folder the rest of the way. This clearly wasn’t what he’d driven forty minutes to hear.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, standing, “the husband says she started acting like this after finding a book in the attic. Something old. No title. Just symbols on the cover.”
Something in Abigail went very still — the particular stillness Maya would later describe, with more accuracy than she knew, as going somewhere else.
“Do they still have it?”
“No.” Briggs shrugged into his coat. “They burned it. She got worse.”
He left. The door swung shut behind him with the soft, final click of a man who considered the meeting concluded.
Abigail stared at the board. At the timeline. At seventeen identical episodes that refused, no matter how many times she rearranged them, to resolve into anything her training had a name for.
“You think there’s something to it,” Ward said quietly. Not a question.
“I think there’s a pattern I can’t explain.” Abigail didn’t turn around. “And patterns that can’t be explained don’t stop existing just because we look away from them.”
Ward studied her for a long moment — the kind of look a mentor gives a student she has watched go from promising to something else, something she doesn’t yet have a word for either, and isn’t sure she likes.
“Abigail.” Gently. “How long have you been sleeping?”
Abigail didn’t answer.
She would think, later, that this was the moment she should have marked as the beginning — not the farmhouse in Pluckley, not the email that would arrive that same night, but this: the exact second she realized she no longer had an honest answer to a question that simple.
Three weeks earlier, sleep had still been something that happened to her rather than something she negotiated with. She could not now locate the night it had changed. There had been no single bad dream, no one case that broke something. Only a slow accumulation — case after case that almost fit the shape of something ordinary and then, at the last possible moment, didn’t. A woman who spoke in a language she’d never studied for four minutes and then forgot she’d done it. A man who described, in exact clinical detail, a surgery he had never undergone, on an organ that didn’t exist. A child, non-verbal since birth, who had recited — once, to a stunned pediatric neurologist, and never again — a psalm in Aramaic.
Each file went into the same drawer. Each drawer got heavier.
She had built her entire career on the premise that behavior, however strange, was information — that if you gathered enough data points, a pattern would eventually surface, and the pattern would have an explanation, because everything, eventually, had an explanation. It was the only kind of faith she had ever been able to hold onto without her hands shaking.
Lately, the drawer had started to feel less like a research project and more like a wound she kept picking at because she’d forgotten, somewhere along the way, that wounds were supposed to close.
She gathered Linda Marsh’s photographs into a neat stack, squared the edges twice though they were already square, and did not look up when Ward spoke again.
“Get some sleep, Abigail.”
“I will,” she said, and they both understood it for the kind thing to say rather than the true one.
She left the fluorescent light of the conference room for the ordinary gold of a Birmingham evening, seventeen photographs in a folder under her arm, a question in her chest she didn’t yet have language for.
By midnight, she would.