The Omniscrolls

  I couldn’t believe what I was reading: all the times that he was supposed to be working, he was actually in a hotel room with her! I found all the receipts tucked away in the journal cover—they were from the Williamson Hotel. Even the two-day business trip was a romantic rendezvous with her. How had I missed it? We were supposed to start a family. I realised why he kept putting it off: he was planning on running away with another woman. I felt my chest tighten; I couldn’t breathe. I tried to call out to my new boyfriend, Craig, but the words wouldn’t come out. I woke up in a hospital bed and had no idea how I got there. Craig related to me what had happened: “I found you lying on the basement floor and called emergency services.” The doctor told me that I had a minor heart attack, and that it may have been brought on by stress. He asked me to take it easy. Little did I know that getting that heart attack would help me get to the bottom of my husband’s disappearance. I was in the ...

I had the perfect life: a great career at a prestigious law firm, a perfect husband, a mother-in-law who treated me like her own, and plans to start a family. However, that all changed with just one phone call. I had spent the entire morning in court and decided to meet my husband, Lyle, for lunch. I called him to confirm our lunch date only to have someone else answer his phone. The man on the other end said, “Sorry, but Mr. Raymond cannot come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?” “Who are you and why do you have my husband’s phone?” “I’m the man who decides your husband’s fate.” “Who are you?” I asked as my heart pounded in fear. “It doesn’t matter who I am. What matters is what you are willing to do to save your husband.” “Okay, what do I have to do?” “First, listen without interrupting me. Second, if you inform the cops, I will kill him. And third, get me ten million dollars within a week.” “I don’t have that much money!” “What about your bank account?” “I don’t have that...

  “Wake up, Alex,” I said as I opened my son’s bedroom door, but he wasn’t inside. I looked in the bathroom; he wasn’t there either. I rushed into the living room when my husband, Elliot, stopped me. “Julie, what’s wrong?” “I can’t find Alex.” “Let me check,” he replied, leaving the room. Elliot came back three minutes later to tell me what I feared: Alex was missing. I called Alex’s phone, but it didn’t ring. I called his friends, but none of them had seen him. Elliot called the cops right away. They arrived an hour later and swept through the house, but found nothing useful: there were no signs of a break-in, nor any notes left behind saying he was running away. Days passed, and there were still no clues as to where my son was. It was not long before I started seeing nightmares—it was a recurring one of Alex calling out to me, begging me to break him out of a cage. I could’ve sworn that every time I woke up from it, I heard his voice from his room. I got out of bed without waking...

  I started digging into my mother’s case whenever I could. As I was a detective, I thought all the information I required would be easy to find, but what I found was a lot of red tape. My partner, Dave, was twenty years senior to me, so I turned to him for help. He was curious about what case I wanted to look into, so I opened up about it without letting him know about my most recent discovery. “I remember that case. As a matter of fact, I worked on it until the then captain asked us to drop it.” “I’m guessing politics played its part there.” “Yes, our prime suspect, the husband, had connections to a lot of powerful people; one of them was even a senator.” “And do you have an idea about what happened to the child?” “I’m not certain. At the time, my partner and I assumed that her mother had asked a friend of hers to skip town with her daughter, but since we were asked to stop looking into it, we never got to confirm it.” I could see the pain in my partner’s eyes as he spoke those w...