18 April.
Mr. Page walked into the house with a long face. Well, it was longer than usual. It might have been squeezed through a wringer.
He would have slammed the door if Mrs. Page hadn't peeked from the kitchen to see who it was, and given him a warm, "Hi, honey."
Mr. Page gave a spiritless response that immediately called his mood into question for his wife.
"What's wrong, dear?" Mrs. Page strode after him into the lounge, a wet towel in her hands.
Mr. Page plopped onto the couch and gave a hefty sigh. He wished it would relieve him some, but it didn't. His face grew graver.
"Are the girls home yet?" He skipped over his wife's inquiry. Mrs. Page, with an odd look, sat by his side and held his hand.
"No. Bridget might be here in a few, but Maeve will probably be a while," she replied. "Why do you ask? Tell me what's going on."
"Good, good," Mr. Page seemed to hear only what he wished to hear. Mrs. Page grew increasingly impatient. Her husband must have sensed it because he finally looked at her and spilled the beans.
"About Maeve's incident… I had a private investigator – a friend of mine – look into it, remember?" he said. His voice was strangely heavy.
"Yes." Mrs. Page grew anxious at once. "What did they find?"
Mr. Page gave no verbal reply. He simply produced a flash drive from his pocket and stood up to plug it into the TV. He then grabbed the remote and sat back down on the couch.
Mrs. Page hurried to grab his wrist before he accessed the contents of the flash drive.
"What am I about to watch, Stephen?" she asked with a shaky voice.
Mr. Page held her hand tenderly. The gesture itself was warm, but the look on his face was so dark and cool that it stole away any reassurance that he might have wished to convey.
"I couldn't even begin to put it into words," he said to her and played the first video file of three displayed on the television screen.
Mrs. Page swallowed hard.
So Maeve had been lying to them after all, when she brushed away the incident as some prank by a bunch of bloggers, was where his thoughts immediately went.
The video showed footage from the entrance to a supermarket and into the aisles furthest to the right. Customers were walking in, grabbing trolleys, and chatting as they perused goods. One of these customers was Maeve.
It pleased Mrs. Page to find that Maeve had indeed gone to the supermarket as Bridget had instructed her, but the look on the girl's face was unsettling. She kept sniffling or perhaps sniffing and at one point, deeper into the isle, she looked behind her seeming rather anxious. The footage ended there.
"What was that? That's all? Why does she look so nervous?" Mrs. Page fired her anxiety into questions.
"Let's watch the next," Mr. Page simply said. "This will be… stranger."
Mrs. Page drew a sharp breath.
The second video file began with Maeve walking through another aisle. She looked frantic at this point, terribly paranoid. She was looking behind her and peeking over the other isles to her left with wide eyes. She nearly pressed herself against the glass doors to the fridges on her right. They showed her reflection.
Mrs. Page clapped her hands to her mouth.
"Do you see how frightened she is? Who is after her?" she cried and rose from her seat.
Mr. Page didn't answer. He knew the answer came in the next second of the video.
Almost as though a frame to the footage was missing, a man suddenly appeared behind Maeve, his arm slung tight around her waist, and his body intimately pressed against her back. Because of how the man hung his head, his face couldn't be seen, but the terrified look on Maeve's visage was all too clear. She turned stiff as a rock. The footage ended there.
"Stephen, this isn't some prank! This is assault! How did anyone not notice this? There are people in that aisle!" Mrs. Page exclaimed while pointing at the screen.
Stephen hesitated to answer. All he could think about was how his wife had missed that from the footage. Hopefully, she got the hints about something even more sinister than some horny thief in the next footage. He immediately played it.
The camera was pointing outside the supermarket. Maeve exited with the mysterious man behind her. Everyone just seemed to ignore them even though it was clear that Maeve was being coerced and kidnapped before their eyes.
And then it happened.
The man knocked the back of Maeve's neck and as she collapsed, she and the man seemed to just vanish from sight.
Mrs. Page looked horror-struck. Tears were welling in her eyes, as was a staggering amount of fear. The footage continued to play long after Maeve had mysteriously vanished, likely to emphasize how authentic the sudden disappearance was.
Mrs. Page didn't know what she had just seen. She didn't dare believe it all.
Suddenly, her thoughts scrolled to Maeve's expression on that day she had returned late. How she pretended to be alright, how she woke up the next day seeming completely unbothered. It didn't make sense. Something wasn't adding up.
She had no words.
Mr. Page held her hand and played the second clip back.
"Look at the glass doors on Maeve's right," he said. Mrs. Page looked. "You can see Maeve's reflection, right?" He fast-forwarded to when the mysterious figure appeared behind Maeve. "Now look at those glass doors."
Mrs. Page saw… and she looked at her husband with a face that seemed to defy its own textures to create a very complex expression.
"Believe me, it wasn't my first guess," Mr. Page said to her, "but just like I just did for you, my investigator friend pointed it out to me. And just like you, I have no idea what to make of this."
A car pulled into the driveway right then. Its headlights cast bright beams through the windows of the lounge. By the time its driver had walked in, Mr. and Mrs. Page's faces looked even graver than before. They had left the video files displayed on the TV screen.
Bridget sensed the unusual atmosphere at once. She forgot to place the car keys in the bowl in her panic.
"Mom? Dad?" she said frowning upon reaching the lounge. "What's wrong?"
Mrs. Page gestured for her to sit. Her eyes were dim.
"Honey, we need you to see this," she said.