The coffee was already cold when Priya noticed the smell.
Not the coffee — something beneath it. Damp wool, faintly chemical, like a darkroom or a flooded basement. She couldn’t place it, and the morning was already too full to chase the thought. She set the mug down and went back to her laptop.
The four of them had rented the lake house outside Duluth for a long weekend — Priya Selvam, her colleague Bastian Khoury, his girlfriend Zofia, and Zofia’s younger brother Tomek, who had tagged along with a duffel bag full of paperback novels and no explanation for why he looked exhausted before the trip had even begun. The house sat at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by birch trees that had already lost most of their leaves. October in northern Minnesota had a way of making the world feel scraped clean.
They had been there less than fourteen hours when the envelope appeared on the kitchen table.
No one had put it there. That was the first problem. The second problem was what was inside: a single sheet of paper, printed in a clean, unremarkable font, containing four paragraphs — one for each of them. Priya’s paragraph mentioned the specific route she walked to work every morning, the café where she always ordered the same thing, and the name of a medication she had never told anyone outside her doctor’s office. Bastian’s described the argument he’d had with his father three weeks ago, almost word for word. Zofia’s paragraph referenced a phone call she’d made at 2 a.m. two Saturdays ago — a call she had made from the bathroom of her own apartment, door locked, voice barely above a whisper. Tomek read his paragraph twice, then folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket without saying a word.
“We need to call the police,” Priya said.
“And tell them what?” Bastian set the envelope on the table like it was evidence, which it was. “Somebody left us a creepy note? We don’t even know how they got in.”
“That’s exactly why we call.”
Zofia had gone to the window. She stood with her back to the room, arms folded, watching the tree line. The birches were pale and still. Nothing moved. “The doors were locked,” she said quietly. “Both of them. I checked before bed.”
Tomek said nothing. He was looking at the floor.
The call to the county sheriff’s office produced a polite, unhurried voice that promised a deputy would come out when one became available. The nearest town was forty minutes away. It was a Sunday morning. Priya was told to stay inside and not touch anything, advice that felt both reasonable and useless given that they had already touched everything.
The hours that followed had the strange, pressurized quality of waiting inside a held breath. Bastian moved through the house checking locks and windows, not because he expected to find anything, but because doing something was better than standing still. Zofia made tea she didn’t drink. Priya sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open, pulling at every thread she could find — who had booked the house, whether the rental platform had any security issues, whether any of the other guests listed in the reviews matched anything she could find.
Tomek read his paperback in the armchair by the fire, which was when Priya realized she hadn’t actually seen him turn a page in forty minutes.
She almost said something. Then Bastian called from the hallway.
“There’s another one.”
It was tucked into the frame of the bathroom mirror — a smaller slip of paper this time, a single line: *You’ve already let the wrong person in.*
The room went quiet in a way that had weight to it.
“Okay,” Bastian said. His voice had changed. Lower, more deliberate. “We’re not all strangers here. Two of us booked this trip. Two of us were invited. And somebody in this house knows things they shouldn’t know.” His eyes moved to Tomek.
Tomek looked up slowly. “You’re looking at me.”
“I’m looking at the person who knew the least about this trip and showed up anyway.”
“Bastian.” Zofia’s voice had an edge.
“I’m not accusing anyone. I’m doing the math.”
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