For Nevermore Season 1

and turned on the shower, waiting for the water to get warm as she undressed. She could prepare for Detective Avery’s arrival, but it would be impossible to prepare for the truth captured on Keefer’s cameras.

    **

    Detective Avery was already standing in the living room, waiting for Noella when she crept down the stairs. He stood beside Randy, sipping a bottle of IBC root beer. “She’s here,” the detective said, looking up and smiling at Noella as she stepped into the living room. “Good morning, Noella.”
    Noella half-smiled, said good morning, then walked to the edge of the couch and sat.
    Detective Avery set his IBC on one of Josie’s coasters, the one that said: Give me the coffee and no one gets hurt! , then pulled a small square envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Randy.
    Randy pulled the DVD from the envelope, then glanced at Noella, then Josie. He slipped the DVD into the player, pressed ‘play’, then turned his eyes to Detective Avery and nodded.
    Noella’s heartbeat was the slow, clicking terror of a roller coaster’s climb to the top.
    She stared at the black screen as the DVD player made a series of defeated chugs and whirs. Something was wrong with the player, or maybe the disc. The DVD was spinning, and Noella was grateful for their cheap, off-brand Blu-ray player for the first time ever. Josie had bought it at Target on Black Friday the year before for $69.99, and while it played Blu-ray discs okay , it had a terrible time with regular DVDs. Sometimes the machine refused to play DVDs altogether. Noella sat on the couch with her fingers braided, praying this would be one of those times. Not that she’d get free of the interrogation altogether, especially if Detective Avery had already watched the security footage, but at least she would be able to buy herself some time, and maybe think of a better story than the nothing she had right now.
    Once the spinning disc started spilling its truth, there was no telling how that truth would change, or even ruin Noella’s life.
    Yet, for all the risks of her lie exposed, Noella couldn’t help but feel a twinge of excitement for the answers she might see on the video. Sure, she would get caught red-handed with her lie, but she would also get the chance to see whether or not the man who saved her was the same man from half a lifetime’s worth of dreams, and not her brain subconsciously weaving some construct to maintain a lie.
    Noella had read plenty about how malleable human memory was. She had seen a study from years before where a group of researchers showed people an identical video of a robbery, appropriately enough, then asked individuals from among the separate groups to recount as much information as they could about the robbery. Results proved that not only did most people remember the details incorrectly, their memories were easily influenced, and redirected by others’ recollections.
    The simple power of suggestion caused participants in the study to catalog erroneous details as correct. Noella wondered if she’d only imagined that the stranger who saved her was the same as the devoted visitor from her dreams because she desperately wanted him to be.
    Just like you imagined him being in the window across the street, you loon.
    But in her heart, the part that knew a truth her brain couldn’t yet comprehend, she was also certain that Dante had saved her. And if the video proved Noella right, it meant she wasn’t crazy, or at least not as crazy as Dr. Foster and his prescriptions insisted she was. Even if the man who saved her wasn’t Dante, he had said her name. Of that much she was certain. And that had to count for something weird going on which had nothing to do with her sanity.
    Randy was cursing the disk, the Blu-ray player, then Target, and all of China in that order, when he slapped the player on the top a final time, and it finally jerked into a simple title screen with a screen capture of the front of Keefer’s.
    Randy pointed his remote at the Blu-ray player, pressed play, and the security footage started to play. Josie sat beside Noella on the sofa, pulling Noella’s fingers into the cradle of her hand, eyes at the verge of tears, horrified at seeing the full-color reality of her niece in danger’s way.
    Noella considered quickly changing her story before the video turned her into a liar forever. Perhaps she could pull ahead of her fabrication and avoid the deepest depths of trouble. The truth was rising