Chapter 4 Pulling the Backup

Margo's POV

I deleted the number before I even got through my own front door.

My thumb was shaking so bad it took three tries to hit the right button, like if I got rid of the message fast enough I could get rid of the fact that somebody out there had watched me lift that drive off the gym floor. Put it back before someone gets hurt. I read it maybe twenty times walking home, and it didn't get any less terrifying the twentieth time. If anything, it got worse, because the first nineteen times I could almost convince myself it was some dumb prank. By the twentieth, I knew it wasn't.

I didn't sleep much. I kept the drive in my sock drawer, buried under things nobody would ever go looking for, and every time the house settled or a car passed outside, I sat straight up thinking someone was in the yard.

By the time I got to the AV room Monday morning, I'd almost convinced myself the smart move was to march it straight to the front office and be done with the whole thing. Then Mr. Halloway called my name from his desk before I even got my bag off my shoulder, and the look on his face told me the day was not going to go the way I planned.

"Margo. Shut the door."

I did. My heart was already going fast, because teachers don't say shut the door for anything good.

"Detective wants Friday night's server backup," he said, not looking up from his computer, typing something with two fingers the way teachers always do. "Everything the booth recorded before the power tripped. Audio, any video pulled off the hallway feed, all of it."

"Okay." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I can pull that."

"I know you can. That's why I'm asking you and not fighting with this thing myself." He finally looked up, and there was something tired behind his eyes that hadn't been there Friday night, like he hadn't slept much either. "Wilhelmina's still not home, Margo. It's been three days. This isn't a rumor anymore."

Three days. I already knew that; everybody at Westbrook knew that; it was all anyone talked about between classes, but hearing him say it out loud in that flat, worried voice made it land differently. Heavier.

I sat down at the server terminal and pulled up the backup folder, my fingers moving on the keyboard the way they always do when I'm nervous, fast and automatic, glad for something to focus on besides the drive sitting in my sock drawer at home like a bomb I hadn't figured out how to defuse yet.

The folder loaded the way it always does, file after file, all named the same boring way, date and time stamps lined up neat and predictable. I've pulled backups for Mr. Halloway a dozen times. I know exactly what this is supposed to look like.

This didn't look like that.

Near the bottom of the list, wedged between two files from Friday night, sat one that didn't belong. No proper name. No sensible timestamp, just a string of numbers that didn't match anything, like whoever saved it had smashed the keyboard on purpose so it would blend in and never get noticed.

I almost scrolled right past it. I would have, if something in my gut hadn't gone tight and cold the second my eyes landed on it, the same feeling I'd had crouched under the soundboard Friday night with a hand still cold on my wrist.

"Mr. Halloway?" I kept my voice easy, casual, even though my pulse was doing anything but. "Is this file supposed to be here?"

He leaned over my shoulder, squinting at the screen. "Which one?"

I pointed. He frowned, tapped it once, and a little box popped up showing the file size, bigger than a normal clip, longer, like whatever was on it ran for real minutes instead of seconds.

"Huh." He said it slow, the way people say things when they're stalling for time to think. "That shouldn't be in there. Might be some corrupted junk from an old upload." He straightened up, checking his watch, already half-thinking about something else. "Pull the good files onto a drive for the detective. I've got a meeting with the principal in five minutes about the assembly. Just don't touch anything you don't need to, all right? Let the police sort out what's junk."

"Right," I said. "Of course."

He grabbed his folder off the desk and left, the door swinging shut behind him, and the second it clicked, I was already reaching for my headphones, plugging them in fast, my hands moving faster than my brain could tell them to slow down and think this through.

I should have waited. I should have handed the whole folder over untouched and let the actual police figure out what that file was. That would've been the smart thing, the safe thing, the thing that wouldn't come back to bite me later.

I clicked it anyway.

The screen went black for a second while it loaded, and then a waveform crawled slowly across the bottom of the player, up and down, up and down, the shape of somebody talking, somebody breathing hard, the file ticking forward one second at a time like a clock counting down to something.

I hit play.

At first there was nothing but static, thick and crackling, the kind of sound a bad recording makes when the mic's too far away or somebody's covering it with their hand. Then, underneath the static, a voice came through, quiet, scared, cutting in and out.

"...he's been in my room again... I know it sounds crazy, but things keep moving, and nobody believes me, and I don't know who else to..."

The recording cut hard, right there, mid-sentence, like someone had yanked the plug the second it started saying something that mattered.

My hands had gone ice cold on the keyboard. I sat frozen, headphones still in, staring at a black screen and a paused waveform that wouldn't move again no matter how many times I clicked it.

Because I knew that voice.

I'd heard it every single day of my life, in the shower, on the phone with Dot, talking to myself when I thought nobody else was listening.

It was mine.