Page 42 of Everything After

“Are you leaving?” Bella asks.

“Jerald wants to sweep the house,” I say.

“Tonight?” Bella asks.

“I’ll stay here with them,” Ace tells me. He can sense that I am hesitating to do this. I don’t want to leave her, but I have a responsibility to keep her and everyone else safe.

“If she wakes…” I start.

“She won’t be alone,” Ace says sincerely. “We’ve got her. I promise.”

A while later, Mason and I pull into the driveway behind one of Jerald’s cruisers. The house is lit up like daylight. Crime scene tape stretches across the porch. Anthony’s body is gone. Only the dark stain on the wood remains. I’m making a mental note that I am going to have to either buy a new house or build a new porch.

When we get out, Jerald meets us halfway up to the house. “She okay?” he asks.

“Would you be?” I counter, and he nods. “You really think he meant bugs?”

“I don’t know,” Jerald sighs. “But I don’t want to take any chances.”

“Neither do I,” I say as he hands Mason and me a pair of gloves.

“Don’t touch anything unless I tell you to,” Jerald warns.

When we step inside, the house suddenly feels wrong, not because of what happened, but because somebody else might have watched it happen. Jerald points toward the living room. “We can start there,” he says.

One of the technicians slowly sweeps a handheld detector across the bookshelves, but nothing happens. Across the television. Lamp. He kneels beside the end table, and the detector chirps. Everyone freezes when he says, “Got one.”

He unscrews the bottom of the lamp and a tiny black square no bigger than my thumbnail drops into his gloved hand. “Audio,” the technician tells Jerald.

“Shit,” Jerald mutters, holding a bag open for the technician to drop it into.

Another technician steps up on a small ladder to check the smoke detector, and it starts chirping again. Removing it, this one looks different. It’s a bit bigger. “Video,” the technician says. It is dropped into another bag, and they move on.

Two more are found in the living room, audio and video, before they move on to the kitchen. They check the smoke detector, and yet again, another camera. Audio is found in an outlet by the refrigerator, on the top side of the cabinets, and taped to the underside of the dining room table.

Mason is so far past enraged at this point. Jerald is starting to realize that Anthony was right. This goes far deeper than we anticipated.

We move to the hallway and find one audio bug hiding behind a picture frame. Another is found inside the thermostat before we move to the bedroom.

I don’t want to follow them there, but I still do. I watch from the doorway as they check the smoke detector, holding my breath. The room is silent as they check the ceiling fan, nightstands, and all of the picture frames.

As he sweeps over the dresser, the detector chirps when he passes the alarm clock. “Got one,” he says, flipping it over to find another black box. “Video.”

“No,” I say, and Mason grips my shoulder.

“Bag it,” Jerald tells the tech quietly.

“No,” I say again, louder. “They watched us.”

“I know,” Jerald says.

“They watched her,” I growl. “They watched everything.”

The technician doesn’t stop. He continues on, and I feel genuinely nauseous when the detector beeps as he passes the wand over the headboard. “Another camera,” the tech says, bagging it.

They move to the bathroom, and the detector chirps when they pass over the air vent. The camera is angled to show the shower. I have to turn and get out of the house before I vomit.

The cold night air feels like knives to my chest. Jerald and Mason join me a few minutes later, and no one speaks for a while.