Work Text:
Don't come looking for me. —Katie Mae
It's her handwriting. No question about that; everyone in the family is familiar with the way Katie squiggles her gs. But something's wrong, and everyone knows it: Katie going from a long rambly email to the family listserv every week to a handwritten note left in the home she's housesitting? Does not compute. Hardly anything's gone from the house, either, not Katie's clothes, not her cash stash. She took her laptop, but she isn't answering emails.
The Mitchells tear the country apart looking for her. Sighting in Lincoln, Nebraska, barely a week after she vanished, but they hear about that too late. Sighting in Cicero, Indiana, but again, too late. Then she falls off the map for a month and resurfaces in Elizabethville, Ohio. Whatever the hell goes down in Monument, Colorado, Katie was there; her face is on the security footage that a Mitchell cousin in the FBI happens to see while investigating the deaths of some of their own. Where did she get that knife, and who taught her to use it?
Katie's body is dead center of the chaos in New Harmony, Indiana, a solid year after her disappearance. She died of a gunshot wound, the only victim who did; they have to call in antique-gun experts to identify the bullet as coming from an 1835 Colt.
I'm sorry about your daughter. The note is unsigned, and the fingerprints belong to a man who died in that explosion in Monument, Colorado.
Questions, questions, questions. Never answers.