PC : Arundhati Nair
NB: Dear reader, welcome to The Page’s first short story! This story is the result of a joint effort made by our entire writing staff. Make sure to read till the end for a surprise.
The night was heavy with silence, as is usual during Officer Naina’s daily patrol. But tonight, something didn’t feel quite right. The streetlights flickered, casting jagged shadows that seemed to bend and whisper. Her footsteps echoed louder than usual, as if the night itself was watching her every step. Just as Naina was going to compose herself and dismiss the eerie tricks of the shadows, a sharp sound shattered the silence. Frantic footsteps echoed against the pavement, and eventually a girl emerged, her face pale and her eyes wide with terror. With a quiet tremble, she shoved a damp, crumpled note in Naina’s hand and ran away quickly, as though she was being chased by someone (or something?). Shining her flashlight on the note, a chill ran down Naina’s spine as she read the hastily scrawled words, “Please meet me at the abandoned school at midnight”.
The piece of paper was as cold as the night, and I found myself confused. What a good officer would do is pay attention to detail. Instead, this one time my mind seemed to slip as not even a minute later I felt my phone vibrating and picked it up to a complaint by some grumpy old professor about a house party being too loud. I noticed the location was by some strange coincidence, in the same direction that the girl came running from. I decided I would have to put a stop to all the shenanigans unless I wanted the calls to keep coming.
After a long few hours of dealing with snobby teenagers who unsurprisingly didn’t understand the concept of being civil citizens, I saw a middle-aged man jogging towards me with an expression that carried a mix of concern and an odd nervousness. He explained how he was the driver of one of the attendees of this event who was supposed to be taken home by him. “She demanded that I be here by 10pm but I’ve been waiting in my car for about 20 minutes and there’s still no sign of her. I’m worried sick and if I don’t find her soon, I might as well kiss this job goodbye.”
His lack of care about the fact that a teenage girl that he was supposedly in charge of transporting was gone, combined with the rush in his storytelling led me to have speculations of my own. I asked the man to give me a few details about what the young girl looked like. The more he went into detail, the more my mind went back to the now quite important face that once escaped in fear, because this description by strange coincidence appeared to perfectly match the girl with the note from earlier tonight. Without a second thought we hurried to the location on the note. It was an abandoned school with a mood set up which made me think of all the worst possibilities.
Despite being hesitant and quite a bit terrified, the man tried opening the door to the entrance. I couldn’t make out what he had seen, all I saw was that he had turned around and ran as fast as he could into his car and started screaming with all the air in his lungs. There she laid, on the hard wooden floor, unconscious. With my right knee on the ground, I took a more clear look at the girl. After further examination the unfortunate fact that this child’s life had been taken after a hit to the back of her head, which was apparent from the heavy bleeding on the back of her head was confirmed. With the sound of a twig breaking from behind the bushes besides the right wall of the exterior, it was quite obvious that we had ourselves some extra company. And those two faces of heavy makeup and cold sweat that did a less than poor job at hiding, seemed to have “not a clue of what was going on.”
After I assessed what was happening and recovered from the initial shock—It’s funny how easily emotions can sneak up on you after 10 years at this job—I called for backup and decided to do my own quick sweep of the scene.
Of course the nature of my job demands that I look at everything with a layer of skepticism, and so I did, and pressed deeper into the girls’ apparently clueless evening. Unfortunately my skepticism never seems to outweigh my humanity, and a sense of pity crept in when I saw the faces of these girls. It was quite obvious they had never seen a dead body before, and fate being cruel, the first was their best friend’s. But after my humanity wore off, one thing became clear– their demeanor did not seem to reflect the horror written in bold on their faces. I asked one of the girls what happened, and she said her evening started at the same party I just shut down. And suddenly the note in my pocket felt like it had gained two pounds.
I took it out, “Do you know anything about this note?,” I asked, and her face dropped. She admitted that she dared her friend to give an officer the note and that’s why they were crouched behind the bushes, to see if I’d show up. But when they showed up, they were greeted by a less than pleasant sight.
But a simple dare was too simple for me to digest, in a scene as complicated as what I had apparently stumbled upon. “Stumbled upon” was a bit of a far-cry since I quite literally received an invitation. So I decided to press on. “Were you at the party the driver was at?” I asked, and she nodded her head in affirmation. “But I didn’t see you leaving.”
“After the fight, I didn’t feel like staying any longer.”
As soon as she said that, my eyes narrowed and her expression tightened, as if she knew she revealed too much.
I kept pressing on, this was a crucial detail and I had to milk it as much as I could, “We’d had enough of her at college and the invitation to the party seemed like an attempt at patching things up, but old habits die hard, and we realized staying any longer would mean-” and she broke down in tears. Her face was now completely different from how she started, her quiet and composed shock had given way to raw, frantic fear. At this point I realized that my curiosity did outshine my humanity, and I had to remind myself that the poor girl had just seen her friend dead in front of her eyes.
And whether she did it or not, I had to end my trail of questioning for the moment if I had any hopes of getting to the bottom of this.
I gestured to the officer who had just arrived who then took the girl to the car, calmed her down, and made sure she was safe until we could make some sense of what was happening here.
I turned my attention to the second girl. While the first was a mess of tears, mascara, and frantic expressions, this one was eerily still, a statue carved from ice. “Is that also your version of events?” I asked in a level voice. “Just a prank gone wrong?”
She nodded stiffly, her eyes focused on the corpse of her alleged best friend on the ground, rather than on me. She muttered. “We weren’t supposed to be at the party tonight, but her friend… whose name I can’t remember convinced her, and in extension us. She always got what she wanted.” with a bitterness that was much too intense for mere sorrow. “Always had to be the main character, the centre of attention. Being the social butterfly she was, she didn’t feel out of place at the party, but I did. While all the guys and girls there revolved around her and her charm, I was waiting at the other end of the room with an empty red cup and tired legs”. She hesitated, then in a cold clipped tone, added a detail that her friend had left out. “She came up with the plan to hide behind the bushes and wait. She insisted that we observe”.
My eyes narrowed. That was no eulogy. Her right hand was clenched, her knuckles white. A tiny crimson bead formed, as she dug her nails into her palm. One girl was terrified of the situation; This one seemed terrified of her own calculations.
I took a note and moved aside as the first backup car’s red and blue lights flashed behind us. I gave a junior officer custody of the second girl, and gave them strict instructions to keep the girls separated. My mind however, was back to the phone call that had started the evening. The noise complaint from the grumpy professor.
Yet, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that there was something odd about their reactions. Not a typical trauma response for two teenaged girls who’d seen their first corpse, and that too, of their friend’s. Taking a mental note to question them about this later, I pulled out my phone to dial the curmudgeon who’d complained to me earlier.
The professor seemed to spend most of his free time people-watching, with an avid compulsion to bark at the mildest offenders. With a paranoia heightened by an intense consumption of true crime media, he rarely ventured out of his house. Day after day would be spent at his window, with a notebook in his hand to scribble down “suspicious activities”.
He’d had a long harboured grudge for the victim, who was “loud, squealish and indecent”, as read from his notebook. She’d often been seen meeting up with her friends at strange times. The very last time she was mentioned in his notes was the night before the party. She’d been seen frantically conversing with another girl, and had left quite abruptly, seemingly distressed.
“That notebook of his could be handy later on”, I thought to myself. If there was more to the story than an innocent prank gone wrong, perhaps the ramblings of this tin-foil hatter could help the investigation.
“Do you know what this girl looks like?”
“They all look the same these days…No respect, no respect…I believe the other female had short curly hair. They were huddled at the corner of the street, clearly with something to hide. I wouldn’t have noticed without my trusted night vision goggles.”
“And why, sir, do you even have night vision gog- nevermind, I’ll deal with that later”, I sighed. “Would you happen to know the “female-with-short-curly-hair’s identity?
“Isn’t finding that out your job, officer?
I hung up. I mean, what else do you say after that?
After waiting for what felt like an eternity at the crime scene for the forensics team to be done, I made my way to the station. Surely the girls will know who the curly haired female is, right?
I found the driver sitting in the reception. Something about him seemed… off, I don’t know how else to put it. Sweat beads rolled down his face in the air conditioned room. He kept rubbing his brow, and stood up in a fright when he saw me looking at him. He trudged towards me.
“Officer,” he rasped, “did you find out who it was?”
I laughed, and shook my head— if only it were that easy.
“Please si- I mean, ma’am, I need to leave, I have someplace else to be”, he said, wringing his hands.
“When was the last time you saw the victim?”, I asked. This man was way too obviously nervous, it was like he was asking to be questioned.
“I dropped her off at the party, well, she wasn’t actually, um, allowed to, to uhhh, to go to the party, my boss didn’t want her to, you see? But she told me she’d pay me extra, and I mean, who could refuse that right??”, he paused, letting out a nervous chuckle. “I picked the girls up from their homes and we headed to the party.”
“The girls? You mean the ones we saw at the school?”
“Yes, ma’am, them lot are inseparable, always been together since they were in diapers, you could always see the four of them toge–”
“Four? Who’s the fourth?”, I had to interrupt.
According to the driver, the three of them were headed to the fourth’s house, where the party was at. I asked for a description. This one had curly hair too.
The moment the driver mentioned the fourth girl, something in my gut twisted. Why did the second girl pretend not to know her? I asked for her address, and within minutes, I was on my way – the rhythmic wail of the siren slicing through the fog.
Her house was quiet, too quiet for someone who’d just hosted a party that could wake the dead. I rang the bell, and after what felt like an eternity, the door cracked open. A girl with curly hair peered out. Her mascara was smudged, but not from tears – more like she hadn’t bothered to wipe the night away.
“Officer Naina” I introduced myself, flashing my badge. “I’m here to ask about your friend.”
Her expression didn’t change. “Which one?” she asked, voice flat.
“Don’t play coy,” I said, stepping inside. “The one who never made it back from the party.”
Something flickered across her face – annoyance, not grief. “I already told everyone everything. I don’t know what happened to her.” That was a lie. Her tone had the polish of someone rehearsing.
“Funny,” I said, glancing at the broken glass near the table, “the others said you two weren’t exactly on good terms last night.”
Her shoulders stiffened. “People say a lot of things.”
I walked over to the window. There was a smear on the sill – reddish-brown, faint, almost wiped clean. “You fought, didn’t you?”
She laughed softly, but it was hollow. “She liked to make enemies. It’s what she was good at.”
“And what exactly did she have on you?”
She froze but then she recovered quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do. Because whatever secret she was holding, it made you scared enough to follow her to that school.”
“You think I killed her?” she asked, finally letting emotion crack through her cool facade.
“I think,” I said, meeting her gaze, “you’re hiding something.”
I was about to press further when a knock echoed from the doorway, one of my junior officers, pale as the moon.
“Ma’am,” he said, breathless, “you might want to see this. We just found something in the driver’s car.”
I looked back at the girl. She was staring at me – not afraid anymore, but smiling. Just faintly.
I hear the faint hum of police sirens and rush to the site.
“No! I swear! It wasn’t me!” The driver shouts as he is slammed against the door of a cop car, “Trust me on this!”
I shift towards my junior officer, “What did you find in his car?”
He points at the bloody brick, a mosaic of long brown hair curled around it. My eyes flickered. I recognized that brown hair immediately — it was the victims’.
“Officer!” The driver calls out for me, tears pooling his eyes, “Officer, tell them I was with you when you found the body!”
I feel heads turn towards me. With a nod, I answered “Yes. He was with me.”
There was a shift in mood, evident by the way the officer loosens his grip on the driver’s wrists.
“He could have hidden the weapon and come to find you” My junior officer speaks up.
“No. The murder scene was too fresh, and this kind of violent crime would leave some kind of blood stain on him.” I shook my head, “It’s just too improbable.”
“Well…” He sighs, “If not him, then who?”
I look out towards the myriad of trees around us.
The killer must have been close enough with the victim to know that this specific car was hers — a ploy to frame the driver. My mind wanders back to those two girls at the crime scene, her supposed best friends. The ones who are expected to know her ins and outs like the back of their hands. They did know her — a little too well I suppose.
They aren’t the only ones who knew that this car belonged to the driver. The curly haired girl who hosted the party must have had a glance at it too. Given her fixation on the victim, I wouldn’t put it past her to not remember the car the victim came in from.
I furrow my eyebrows, “But wait…”
What if I’m limiting myself with this line of thinking? What if the killer wanted to frame someone and placed it in a random abandoned car without thinking much of it. A car that just so happened to be the one belonging to the victim.
I feel my head throb as I caress my forehead.
“So,” My junior officer asks, “Who do you think it is?”
I clench my eyes shut. There is a clear answer behind all this mess.
I click my tongue before turning to him, “I know who it is. It’s — ”
As frustrating as this may be, it’s up to YOU dear reader, to decide how this ends. Send us your interpretation of the events that unfolded, in the format of a news report. The best one will be featured on the website, and you may be shortlisted to be a part of The Page 2026!
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