Chapter 3: What Mr. Halloway Already Knew
Once I’d copied the files and photographed Roland’s notebook thoroughly, I returned everything exactly where I’d originally found it. I couldn’t risk letting him know I’d discovered what he was actually doing, but I also understood clearly I couldn’t handle this entire situation entirely alone.
My first call went to my sister, Marnie. She was working a night shift over at the hospital, so the call went straight through to voicemail instead. “It’s a genuine emergency. Call me back the instant you actually can.”
While waiting, I thought about our elderly neighbor, Mr. Halloway. He spent considerable time out on his front porch, and if Roland had genuinely been leaving the house in the middle of the night for months straight, there was a real chance Mr. Halloway had actually noticed something himself.
It was almost five in the morning, but I saw a light glowing inside his kitchen window. I crossed the street and knocked. When he opened the door in his bathrobe, his expression changed the instant he actually saw me. “Paloma, dear, what’s genuinely wrong? You look like you’ve seen an actual ghost.”
We sat together at his kitchen table while I tried controlling my badly shaking hands. I didn’t tell him absolutely everything immediately, because I genuinely needed knowing whether his own observations actually matched what I’d already discovered. “Mr. Halloway, I need asking you something specific. Have you noticed anything genuinely strange happening at our house at night? Anything unusual involving Roland?”
His face turned serious instantly. “Paloma, I’ve genuinely been wondering when you’d finally ask me that.” My stomach tightened hard. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
Mr. Halloway explained that for months now, he’d seen Roland leaving at two or three in the morning regularly. Even more disturbing, unfamiliar visitors sometimes parked farther down the street and approached our house on foot, after dark had fully settled in.
“Why didn’t you ever say anything to me?” He told me Roland had already prepared a ready explanation. According to my own husband, I suffered from severe sleep problems and was taking powerful medication, meaning he occasionally needed checking on me, or taking me to emergency medical appointments late at night. “He asked me not mentioning it to you directly. Said you were genuinely embarrassed about it.”
