Soul Tides

SIX || melting magnets.

She'll start by kickin' outta her shoes, lose an earring in her drink...'

Singing aloud to herself, Mara was finally getting around to cleaning up the glasses from earlier; the tequila song had been stuck in her head since this afternoon.

Hmm, where did my earrings go?

She couldn't remember the last time she'd worn them. Along with her necklace, they'd been a birthday gift from her mother the year her parents passed away. Sifting through her jewelry box, she could only find the set of diamond studs her ex-boyfriend had given her. The weeks had blurred since then, and this late summer trip back home was becoming more permanent as the days slipped by.

Mara rummaged around in the drawers of the antique vanity in her room, hoping to find the earrings, but only found old photos of her parents. Even while staring at them in the pictures, their faces began to fade in her memories; their voices fell mute. This summer marked twenty years without them. What was even harder to grasp was that Mara was now the same age as her mother when she had died. She tossed the photos back into the vanity and shut the drawer. Giving up on the earrings for now, she went to the dining room and laid out everything she had in Laurel's file.

Working her way backwards through the case, she traced Laurel's steps with the information she knew. The teenager's phone and the bathroom key were both found in the sink basin. The bathroom door automatically locked and the key was needed to get out. A spare key or two would most likely be stowed away behind the counter, which meant the creepy kid or his dad could've followed the teen back there and attacked her. Trying not to get too hung up on the obvious suspects, Mara continued to think back through.

Laurel hadn't gone to the truck stop just to use the bathroom or she would've used the normal one inside. 'You have to ask for the key,' the kid told Mara. Which meant she knew going into the truck stop to ask for it, like it was some secret code. Mrs. Deneb mentioned the teenager's sexual behavior as a possible motive, maybe she'd gone to the truck stop to hook up.

But the Denebs weren't from around here so how had a sixteen year old girl met someone so quickly?

A dating app.

As Dylan said earlier, they were just tools for easy hookups. And the teen's generation grew up with technology in their hands. Opening the phone, she went through every app one by one until she came across a calculator that required a login. Oddly, Laurel's handle and password were both autosaved.

A hidden folder gave her access to a social app, Shiftr, that she wasn't familiar with at all. As she opened up Laurel's profile, she expected to see racy teen photos, but they were actually pretty tame. The only thing the girl lied about was her name. Even her age was made public.

Perusing quickly, Mara gathered that the app was aimed toward users who were into some type of animal cosplay. Not one to judge any lifestyles or fetishes, she paid no mind to the animal lingo and went straight to Laurel's inbox.

Empty.

All the messages had likely been purged by the perpetrator or possibly even the cops if they were covering for someone.

Swiping back to her profile, Mara started to scroll through the comments, but there were thousands from hundreds of friends. Nothing immediately jumped out at her and screening them one by one would be a tedious last resort.

But Laurel hadn't been the only girl to have gone missing from the area.

Pulling out the fliers of the other girls from her jacket, she laid them on the table. All three girls were about the same age, dark hair, brown eyes. All went missing in the last three weeks. It was definitely a pattern the police were choosing to ignore.