Jess Notices
Chapter 06 - Jess Notices
Sophie's roommate, Jess Okafor, noticed the silence first around seven thirty that evening, the specific absence of the text Sophie always sent when she was heading home, reliable as clockwork for the entire two years they'd shared an apartment.
She texted Sophie twice. No response.
She called. Straight to voicemail, the kind that suggested a phone either powered off or completely out of service range.
Jess sat with the uneasy silence for another thirty minutes before making the decision that would, over the following hours, prove considerably more significant than she realized at the time.
She called the police, providing Sophie's name, the approximate location she'd mentioned that morning, and the specific, growing fear that her roommate's silence represented something considerably more serious than a dead battery.
"She said she was going to an old family property," Jess told the dispatcher. "Outside the city. She didn't give me an exact address, but the family name is Ashworth. I think there's only one property registered under that name in the area."
The dispatcher logged the report, and Detective Wren Castillo, pulling the late shift that evening, flagged it immediately, recognizing the Ashworth name from an active missing persons case she'd been assigned three weeks earlier.
May you like
"That's the same family whose grandmother disappeared from assisted living nineteen days ago," Castillo told her partner. "If the granddaughter's now also unreachable at the same family's property, I want units there within the hour."
She dispatched two patrol cars toward the old Ashworth estate, understanding that whatever connected Eleanor Ashworth's disappearance to her granddaughter's sudden silence likely lived inside that dark, empty house at the end of a road nobody had visited, officially, in over a decade.
