Cry Wolf Cottage

I’m not a detective. No badge. No papers. No fedora. Just a man who looked too closely into a missing person’s case — and didn’t come back whole. Now I live in a house they call Cry Wolf Cottage. It’s not meant kindly. The neighbours use it to mock the paranoid recluse who finds patterns in the noise, and crimes in the patterns. But I know what I saw last week. A girl in a yellow raincoat. And the man who dragged her away. No one here believes me. Maybe someone out there will.