Chapter Two

I hadn't cared where I went as long as it met two conditions; it wasn't school and I wouldn't be found there.

It had been an hour and twenty minute bus ride from the Gateway Transit Center to the town of Forks. Another ten minutes on skates and fifteen on foot had brought me to a back porch overlooking the Calawah river. My headphones were clasped over my ears, steaming radio static. No other beings or buildings were in sight. According to local records, the property behind me was registered to one Carlisle Cullen. No one had lived there for months—seven, specifically—yet no efforts had been made to sell the home or its assets.

I turned to face the house. Three stories. Mostly white, clean, modern. A wall-length window ran along the lower-level family room. The view inside was obscured by dirt and water splotches on the glass. No fingerprints or artificial streak marks, so professionally cleaned prior to departure. The furniture was pristine, as was the floor. This was a mansion among bugs and mountain lions. If it hadn't been built for someone wealthy, whoever lived this far from society would've been considered a freak.

I pulled my sleeve over my hand and took a bump key from my pocket. I slowly slid the key into the lock, counting each notch until only one remained. I thrust the key into the door while twisting it simultaneously. The sudden pressure forced the pins in the lock to align, which allowed the mismatched key to turn and me to step inside. I slipped the key back into my pocket, set the lock and shut the door behind me. It wasn't as if I could draw the curtains, so I'd assume the lack of tire tracks, neighbors or English-speaking life forms meant being inconspicuous wasn't a huge concern.

Excluding the window, the primary point of interest was how little character there was to observe. No television. No food. Musty modern furniture that looked as worn in as it would if plucked straight from a showroom. Perhaps it had eyes shifted towards a mural on my left hand side. Graduation caps in any conceivable color had been pinned to the wall. The fabrics were faded differently, so they hadn't been ordered or made at the same time. Odd thrift shopping project, perhaps.

I walked towards that spot on the stairwell with the tentative hope upstairs would have more to show. Three steps up the staircase, the radio scanner in my backpack buzzed with an incoming call. The message passed through my headphones with unusually clear reception for the middle of a forest.

"Unit twelve, 597 at intersection of Forester and Main," the dispatcher reported. Animal cruelty case. Most likely not interesting.

"Animal and injuries?" the officer asked back.

"Deer. Two of them. Bite and scratch marks, looks like an attack dog." A hunter's pet, probably. Unlicensed, if they left the kill behind.

"Check. On route." The radio went silent.

I turned the dial back to the Port Angeles station as I rounded a corner in the hallway, entering the nearest room. A king-size bed rest in the center, still made. An end table stoold on either side. Texts and medical journals filled an overstuffed book shelf. Carlisle and his wife's room, presumably.

I walked to the left table and opened the drawer. Another medical text sat inside. The corner of a glossy photograph stuck out beneath it. I lifted the textbook to see the rest of the image. Seven unusually pale people with identically yellow-brown eyes stared back from the photo; two adults in their mid-20s and five late adolescents. They had no other consistent traits, so not biologically related. Coloration was consistent, so it wasn't photo-shopped, yet something seemed off.

I took my phone from my pocket, opened a facebook browser and ran a search on the graduating class from two years ago. When those profiles showed nothing familiar, I adjusted it to last year. Three profiles and twenty pictures later, I found one. A former classmate Jessica Stanley had posted a photo from an Edward Cullen's wedding on August 13, 2006. It was almost identical to the first picture. His facial expression had shifted, but his proportions, hair, ears-and-nose-to-face ratio, it was all the same. They must've been taken on the same day. This wouldn't help.

I kept clicking through her album until I found another photo of him, this time lurking at the back of a selfie from Jessica's prom. Edward was still the same. The date the picture was taken and had been posted was over a year apart from the wedding, yet he was still identical. Was I losing my touch at identifying doctored photos? If so, what was the point of maintaining a physical appearance to this kind of detail? Witness protection, perhaps?

My thoughts were disrupted by three muffled knocks. The firm thuds rose through the floor and into the room. Someone was outside.

I peered through the side of the curtain, observing the front entrance. A man was standing at the door. He was mid-twenties, blond, his eyes were sinking with faint dark circles from exhaustion, not allergies, and he held a cane in his left hand. His right hand hovered near the wood, about to knock again.

Time to go.

I folded the physical photograph in quarters and shoved it in my pocket while I ran from the bedroom to the stairs and finally to the living room. It would take at least a minute for the stranger to reach the back door with a limp. If I sprinted, and I was, then theoretically I should've made it out the door before he spotted me. I slid to a stop in front of the door, opened the lock and rushed outside. Unfortunately, the porch wrapped around.

"Ah, hello," the stranger called.

The second I heard his voice, I stepped back towards the door. I hadn't set the lock, so I knew it would open. Before I could reach the handle, the stranger stopped moving. My hand froze over the doorknob, recalculating.

"Is this your house?" he asked, his tone straddling the line between curiosity and tact.

Now that I was closer, I could see the wear on his clothes, particularly his jumper. With the exception of his legs, his stance seemed upright and unusually close together, possibly from nerves, more likely from habit. The haircut was uniform, vaguely military but overgrown, perhaps former by at least two months. Wearing at least three layers in moderate weather, so, accustomed to a warmer climate through extended exposure. Clothes laid flat, minimal pockets, so he couldn't have a weapon with him. Most importantly, his question meant he didn't know I didn't belong here. I could work with that.

"No. Cleaning service. Dr. Cullen brought me in. They didn't tell me to expect a visitor," I lied. I blocked the door by leaning against it, my hand still hovering just above the doorknob in case he noticed. He didn't.

"They wouldn't. I was just stopping in to say hello. Do you expect them back, soon?"

"It's been seven months. No reason to think that'll change now," I stated bluntly.

He paused, hesitating. "Oh. That's disappointing," he stated with too little change in intonation for him to have meant it. He was hiding something.

"If you have a message for them, you can always leave it with me."

"It's fine. I can call," he dismissed. His stance began to sway further back onto his dominant leg, bracing to leave.

I took two steps away from the door as I spoke, approaching him more closely. I made a point of speaking while looking straight at him as I spoke. "He disconnected his mobile when he moved. Landline, too, for obvious reasons. I have his email. I'd have to ask him for permission to give it out. What's your name?"

However he responded or chose not to respond, the answer should have meant something. No hesitance was a genuine answer, a moment's pause was likely a lie of statement and no statement at all a lie of omission. He didn't reply immediately. When he did, it was with a twitch-like shake of his head that mimicked a turn to leave.

"It's not that important."

My expression dulled with disbelief. "There's no car in the driveway. You walked here on a limp, of course it's important."

He paused, considering how best to lie.

"John Watson. I was going to apply for his old job. Wanted to be sure he wasn't coming back. We've never met. He won't know me—" No. John was too young to have finished residency. He wasn't qualified.

"Yet I wasn't who you were expecting," I interrupted.

"Well, yes—"

"So you knew the Cullens well enough to know I wasn't related to them."

"I saw photographs of the family, and you just told me," he rationalized, barely raising his voice past a conversational tone.

"No, you told me. You stopped yourself and looked to the upper right before you started explaining. That's image construction, also known as lying." I paused to watch his reaction. For someone who kept lying, John was unusually calm, which was both admirable and unacceptable.

I took another step closer, intentionally invading his personal space, grabbed him by the right hand and stared straight into his dark blue eyes, deliberately not blinking. If he was going to slip up, taking away the natural comfort zone would help cause it. "I know the Cullens were in witness protection. Some truly awful people would like them gone. Prove to me you aren't one of them or I call you in for trespassing," I guessed as if it was a statement.

John's forehead wrinkled with confusion. His stance leveled as he tried to gently pull his hand from mine. "I'm sorry, what?" he asked, his tone rising at the end of the last word. Genuine disbelief. If that theory were true, he hadn't known about it.

I released my grip on John's hand, stepped back and reached into my pocket to find the Cullen family photo. I unfolded the image and held it directly in front of him. "The photographs. They're dated through four years, yet every one of them's identical. Their facial proportions are supposed to shift, but they didn't. What do you think?"

The creases that had formed on John's forehead began to subside. He turned his head towards me. "They're of the same people. Aren't they supposed to look the same?"

I pointed at Edward's face on the picture, then reached into my pocket. I flashed one of the Facebook images of him at John to show him both simultaneously. "No. The size ratio. Ears, nose, hair to some extent. They should grow, yet there's no change. They had to be taken four months apart at most. Pretending they were here longer only makes sense if—"

"Dr. Cullen held his job for five years. That's not true," John stated matter-of-factly. His eyes were locked on me, his expression mildly perplexed, but calm. There were no signs he was lying, at least not intentionally. If that was right, then the photos had to be wrong, or this should have been impossible.

John swayed his weight onto his left leg, as if his consciousness of it was kicking back in. "Are you supposed to be here?" he asked, the very fact he was asking carrying the implication he already knew.

As I took a step away from the door, my headphones began to buzz. The broadcast from the police radio overlapped the world around me. "Seven, a four-five-nine at 221 Baker," the dispatcher recited.

By the time I'd heard the address, the rest of the world faded into the background. It was a break-in at Mrs. Hudson's house, and technically mine. I pressed my hand over the bottom of my mouth, suppressing my frustration. "The ways in which I'm not surprised," I muttered.

"Copy, suspects present?" the officer asked.

"Stand by." The line whirred with maintained silence.

"What's not a surprise?" John asked.

I jolted to attention. John was standing directly behind me, leaning on his cane. His head tilted as slightly as the rest of his stance, projecting even more confusion.

I pushed the door open with my elbow, veered to my right and slid directly past him without a second glance. If I'd looked, it was an opportunity to speak. Best to avoid that. I hopped off the ledge of the porch, landed cleanly on the ground and gave a tug at the strap of my rucksack.

"Lock the door on your way," I called behind me. I didn't hear any footsteps behind me. Good. He wasn't following.

As I was about to round the corner, I took one last glimpse behind me. The man named John was leaning over the railing and watching me overhead. From this angle, his eyes looked almost black in the dimming light. I could see the edge of a raised, boomerang-shaped scar from beneath his left trouser leg-a bite mark with uneven stitch imprints around it. Prior trauma, likely self-treated, but well. He did have medical training. Relatively fresh, if the reddish discoloration was an indication. That explained the limp. It must've been within the past few months since he still had the haircut, perhaps it was the reason he'd been discharged. If it wasn't, it was astonishingly bad luck.

"You know, when someone introduces themselves, most people answer with their name," John shouted back, atypically not hostile about this.

I tightened my grip around the strap and turned my back to him. A smirk crept over my mouth as I walked away. Finally, something interesting. "Think about it!"