# chapter five: sleuthing

Sep 8, 2025

Mom

> 12:37 – hey when are you getting home?

Dave

> You set the disappearing message time to 3 hours
> 12:48 – hey you doing better
> 12:48 – lol yea i really didn't sleep much
> 12:49 – what's up u didn't set timeout for that
> 12:49 – yea is what Brian said true
> 12:49 – what did he say
> 12:49 – about how Tom worked at operant?
> 12:50 – yea why?
> 12:50 – you know that's where my dad worked
> 12:50 – and he kind of went crazy too
> 12:50 – do you know what he did there?
> 12:54 – not rly
> 12:54 – my mom gets real upset when i bring it up
> 12:54 – it was some math shit with magnets
> 12:54 – wanna come over and ask her
> 12:54 – lol

I did not want to have a conversation with Dave’s mother.

> 12:55 – haha im good
> 12:55 – but im just chilling at home if you want to come by here

The doorbell rang again. Resolving to be less of a pussy, I answered it. I was prepared to talk to the cops. Polite, short answers, step outside and lock the door, find out what they want. Not a pussy. Not a pussy. Not a pussy.

It wasn’t the cops. It was my Mom’s friend Anne, and I told her she wasn’t here. It was always strange to me that that generation would just drop by. Like she didn’t text her first? She said she was in the neighborhood and had extra bagels she wanted to drop off.

I thought about telling her that I hadn’t heard from my Mom since yesterday and that she didn’t reply to my text, but decided against it. I didn’t know the dynamic of my Mom’s friend group. Maybe she is out sleeping with Anne’s husband or something. I didn’t want to be a link in the chain of Anne finding out.

I was vague but very polite. Anne left the bagels. I didn’t touch the bag.

I went up the stairs to my Mom’s room. Did I mention how much I like true crime? It’s probably done bad things for me personality wise. I know that the people on there are out of the normal distribution of people, but those podcasts are one of my only exposures to the outside world. The world beyond this little slice of Brooklyn. So you kind of start thinking everyone is like that.

I’d always just assumed my Dad was like, a Wall Street guy. Boring. Get money, fuck bitches. When I was little we had tons of money. We lived in a huge house in Cobble Hill. I flew first class to Europe when I was 7. We spent a week on a yacht in Monaco. My mom loved the luxury lifestyle, and would put up with a lot of my Dad’s eccentricities to keep it.

When he left she didn’t seem that upset though. I think the money was still coming in from him, which was the main thing she cared about. It clearly wasn’t as much, we moved out to Sheepshead Bay and never went back to Europe. But she didn’t work and I always got good birthday presents, and she never said anything bad about my Dad, so I assume that’s where the money was coming from.

The first drawer I opened had sex toys in it. I saw a vibrator and a butt plug before I quickly closed the drawer. The second drawer had socks.

The third drawer had tons of scattered papers. My college rejections. Some essays from high school. A note written in crayon about how I wanted a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. I guess this was the “me” drawer.

The fourth drawer was papers, but more organized. My parents marriage certificate. My mom’s birth certificate. My old passport. As far as I knew, they never got a divorce. He just left. Then, something I didn’t know. A document entitling one Jessica Baker to $10,000 per month, to be paid out on the first of every month by the Triangle Trust, for the rest of her natural life, or until the trust is dissolved.

That was nice of my Dad. I went through the rest of the drawers, but didn’t find anything else interesting. I put everything back as carefully as I could. I considered that someone might dust for fingerprints. I wondered if I did anything illegal. I live here, right?

I checked on the text message to my Mom and noticed that it hadn’t been delivered. This was really unlike her. Sometimes she’d go out drinking and meet a guy and stay out all night, but she’d always at least text me by the morning when she sobered up.

> 2:14 – are you okay?

Not delivered. Maybe her phone died? Nah but it’s the afternoon she probably would have charged it by now. I tried calling. Straight to voicemail.

I checked the Mercedes app to see where her car was. She’d let me take the car sometimes, so we were both on the app. It asked me to login. I copied the password from 1password.

Incorrect Password

Maybe she changed it? I tried to set her up on 1password but she didn’t get it. She’d just reset the passwords when she needed to login. Ugh, logging into stuff is the worst. I clicked the reset password and typed in the e-mail.

There is no account with that e-mail

Okay, that doesn’t make sense. My Mom and I shared an e-mail for this stuff, and she wouldn’t change it without telling me. I clicked forgot e-mail. It needed the VIN of the car. The title was in the fourth drawer with the other papers. I went and got it and typed in the VIN.

The e-mail associated with your account is: skinner666@gmail.com

A jolt of anxiety coarsed through my body. I’d never seen that e-mail address in my life.