I slid the Polaroid photo across the granite countertop. It stopped right next to her hand.

“Who was she, Brenda?” I asked. My voice was surprisingly calm, but my stomach was in absolute knots.

Brenda looked at the photo. Her eyes darted from the photo to the cassette player, then to Dan, who was standing by the back door, blocking her exit. Her sweet, grandmotherly persona completely dissolved in a matter of seconds. Her jaw tightened, and her eyes turned incredibly cold.

“You shouldn’t have been digging around in that closet,” she said. Her voice wasn’t warm anymore. It was flat, sharp, and entirely unbothered.

“Who was she?” I repeated, my hands clenched into fists in my pockets.

“My father’s house,” Brenda said, sitting down at our kitchen table without being asked. She looked at the donuts, then up at us. “My father built this place. He was an eccentric man. He had… guest stays. That girl in the photo, she was just someone who owed him money. A lot of money.”

“You kept a woman locked in our bedroom wall for over two years,” Dan said, his voice shaking with anger.

“I didn’t do anything,” Brenda said calmly. “My father did. I just brought him his mail. I didn’t find out about the room until near the end. When he passed, I cleaned the place up. I didn’t know she left any tapes. I thought she was gone.”

“Gone where?” I asked.

Brenda just shrugged. “She went back to where she came from, I suppose. Look, we can make a deal. I can buy the house back from you. For $300,000. You make a quick profit, and you leave Vermont. Nobody needs to know about this.”

She sat there, so calm, so casual. She genuinely believed she could just buy her way out of this. She thought we were just some out-of-towners who wanted an easy payday.

What she didn’t know was that Dan had already called the local sheriff’s department while she was driving over. We had a deputy sitting in a patrol car down the road, waiting for our signal.

Dan pulled out his phone and tapped the screen. Two minutes later, the gravel driveway crunched.

When the front door opened and Sheriff Miller walked in, Brenda didn’t even flinch. She just stood up, smoothed her yellow scarf, and looked at him.

“Artie,” she said to the sheriff. “There seems to be a misunderstanding.”

But it wasn’t a misunderstanding. We handed the sheriff the second tape, the one wrapped in the plastic bag. We hadn’t even listened to it yet.