Night, Forgotten: Draft 1

Chapter 24: Now

Muted scenes from different rooms in the Dolans' home flash across the wide computer monitor in Marcus's office. From the look of it, he has installed discreet cameras in nearly every room of their house; somehow, Carmen never noticed over the past year that she was being recorded. The gross violation of privacy makes me angry on her behalf, but then I remember why he felt compelled to set up the cameras and I'm not really sure whose side I'm even on. I really hope they don't ask me to choose one.

Marcus sits at the monitor; Carmen and I watch over his shoulder as he takes us back in time over a year, through candid security footage of their everyday lives:

Marcus and his crew shooting their YouTube videos in the basement studio.

An elderly gentleman – Carmen's father, maybe? – unknowingly coming very close to pressing his nose right into a camera that must be positioned over the toilet in their downstairs powder room.

Carmen and her sister cooking in the expansive kitchen, wandering in and out of the frame of a camera hidden in some inconspicuous appliance.

Marcus and Carmen making enthusiastic love in their giant bed.

Before I can look away from that last scene out of politeness – although, to be honest, we are far past the point of politeness – Marcus clicks over to a view of their backyard.

He freezes the video and says, without looking over his shoulder at either of us, "This is the night of the party."

"Good," Carmen responds. "Play it."

The mouse clicks again and the screen blurs to life.

Nothing happens at first. The camera seems to be positioned along the railing of their back porch. The staircase down to the yard is visible in the upper left corner of the frame, and the rest of the screen is just grey, a back lawn obscured by darkness.

Impatient, Marcus begins to click along the timeline at the bottom of the screen, speeding up the playback of the recording. We fast-forward through the last minutes that I can remember, barreling toward a truth I have been avoiding for over a year.

As the milliseconds tick by along the bottom of the screen, I imagine what I must have been doing during the party right then, at 1:56, 1:57, 1:58am, perhaps even being recorded on another camera inside the Dolans' house.

Was I accepting someone's seemingly friendly offer to bring me a new drink? That was the first question the police had asked me.

10:35pm. Was it already too late for me?

We see it at the same time. "There," Carmen yells, gesturing wildly with her hand at the monitor. "There's a light or something. Pause it!"

Marcus clicks to pause the video.

"Go back," she instructs.

Marcus sighs heavily, making a show of being quite put out by the whole exercise. "Fine," he says, trying to make his voice sound exasperated. But I can tell from the look on his face that he is genuinely curious about what we're going to find. He scrolls in the opposite direction, taking us back, back, back to the time before I was raped.

Then he clicks again and we all hold our breath.

First, the staircase down to the backyard seems to flash. Then it suddenly comes into clearer, brighter view.

Whoever it is carries a flashlight. It mostly serves to illuminate the greyish patch of lawn just ahead of him as he moves across the computer monitor, but at one point the beam of light widens and dulls, as if he has tripped and dropped the flashlight. In that moment, when he leans forward to retrieve it from the ground, the light flashes across the face of the woman slung over his massive shoulder.

It wasn't even clear until now that he was carrying another person; she might have been an old, threadbare carpet, rolled into a heap to be discarded. Her arms hang uselessly down his back and a mess of long, dark curls obscures her face. Her head dangles on the end of her spine. It bobs up and down, up and down as he walks, as if nodding to confirm what I know to be true.

"It's Julie." Carmen almost whispers my name.

The relief in her voice is unmistakable: The man we are watching carry my limp body out of their house into the night is not her husband. "Who is that guy?"

All of Marcus's crew members, the ones who were there that night, are big, hulking men, their forearms crisscrossed by veins bulging from years of hoisting boom mics and propping up cameras. The man who descends the stairs at 2:04am (according to the time stamp on the video) has that recognizable body type. It could be any one of them.

"I don't... I don't know." Marcus's voice sounds very small and far away, suddenly.

The floor of the office seems to tilt upward and spin away from me and I fall off of it, plummeting downward into a void I cannot see. Another voice, low and threatening, emerges from somewhere deep in my memory and fills the darkness in my head.

"Come with me," it says.