Chapter 6: A Bitter Taste

Chapter 6: A Bitter Taste

The blanket they gave her was coarse wool, smelling faintly of antiseptic and old coffee. Becca sat huddled in the sterile chill of the police interrogation room, the scratchy fabric a poor substitute for the warmth that had been leached from her bones. Across the metal table, Detective Miller, a man with a cheap suit and an expensive smirk, flipped through a file.

“Let’s go over this one more time, Ms. Collins,” he said, his tone dripping with a placid condescension that made her skin crawl. “You’re telling us that some kind of… entity… that you call ‘The Candy-Maker’ filled your friend’s apartment with sugar, and then turned her into… well, into what the Hazmat team is currently scraping off the floor?”

Becca flinched. The word ‘scraping’ was a physical blow. “I’m telling you what I saw,” she repeated, her voice a raw, broken whisper. “I’m telling you what Molly tried to tell me. The smell. The gifts. The… the bear.”

Miller sighed, leaning back in his chair. “Right. The life-sized teddy bear. We found it. It’s a crude piece of work. Looks homemade. Stuffed with old rags and what smells like potpourri. As for the ‘gifts’?” He slid a plastic evidence bag across the table. Inside was the mangled photograph of her and Molly. “We found this. Your face is… well, you can see. Looks like you two had a pretty serious falling out.”

The implication hung in the air, thick and suffocating. “No,” Becca choked out. “She showed me a note. He did that. To isolate her from me.”

“He?” Miller raised an eyebrow. “The bear?”

“The thing that made the bear! The thing in the apartment!” Her voice cracked, rising with a hysteria she couldn't control. She sounded exactly like the kind of unhinged person she had once believed Molly to be. The irony was a bitter acid in her throat.

“Ms. Collins,” Miller said, his voice hardening. “The preliminary report from the M.E. is in. Your friend had a cocktail of powerful, unregulated hallucinogens in her system. Synthetics. Stuff that makes you see, hear, and smell things that aren’t there. Stuff that makes you scratch the face off a photo of your best friend because you think she’s trying to hurt you. The official cause of death will likely be cardiac arrest due to overdose, complicated by severe malnutrition.”

Every word was a nail in Molly’s coffin, sealing away the impossible truth under a tidy, clinical lie. They were using Becca’s own logic against her, the same dismissive reasoning she had used on Molly. Grief can do strange things to the mind. Olfactory hallucinations. The memory of her own words was a fresh torment. She hadn't been a friend; she had been the first person to call Molly crazy. She had left her alone with it.

The door opened and an older detective, his face a roadmap of weary empathy, entered the room. He gave Miller a look that sent the younger man away with a put-upon sigh. The older detective sat down, placing a Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of her.

“I’m Detective Davies,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Drink that. You look like you’re about to fall over.”

Becca just stared at him, her eyes burning with unshed tears. “You don’t believe me either.”

Davies took a long, slow sip from his own cup. “I believe you saw something that traumatized you. I’ve been a cop for thirty years. I’ve seen what grief and drugs can turn a home into. It’s a private kind of hell.” He paused, looking down at the file. “This whole thing… the smell, the candy wrappers we found everywhere, the… crystallization of the organic matter… it rings a faint bell.”

A flicker of hope ignited in Becca’s chest. “You’ve seen this before?”

“Not me, personally,” he said, shaking his head. “It was before my time. An old case file I read once when I was a rookie. Back in the sixties. Some shut-in guy, lived alone. Neighbors complained about a smell, just like yours. Cops broke down the door and found the place looking like a melted gingerbread house. Found what was left of him inside. The papers called it the ‘Sugar House Suicide.’ Case was closed. They wrote him off as just another junkie who went out on a bizarre final trip.” He closed the file with a soft thud. “There was no evidence of foul play then, and there’s no evidence now. My advice? You were her emergency contact, not a suspect. Go home. Get some sleep. Let the official report be the end of it.”

It was a dismissal, but a kind one. A final, systemic closing of the door on Molly’s reality. The system had failed her, just as Becca had.

They let her go hours later. Her own apartment felt alien, the silence within its walls a mocking echo of the one that had consumed Molly’s. She walked through the rooms, touching the solid, normal furniture, the clean, unweeping walls. It was a world away from the candied tomb she had escaped, yet the sticky, sweet smell lingered in her nostrils, a phantom of the horror.

She collapsed onto her couch, numb and hollowed out. She had been the voice of reason, the anchor to reality. But that reality was a lie, and her reason had been a blindfold. Molly hadn't been lost in grief; she had been hunted. And Becca had done nothing but offer platitudes while the predator dragged her friend into its nest.

Seeking a distraction, any noise to fill the crushing silence, she fumbled for the remote and switched on the television. The local news was on. And then Molly’s face filled the screen—a smiling, vibrant photo from her college graduation, a lifetime ago.

“…the tragic story of a promising young artist,” the news anchor said in a somber tone. “Sources close to the investigation describe Molly Tate as a troubled woman, reeling from the loss of her partner a year ago, with a known history of severe depression and substance abuse.”

The words were a public vilification, a neat and tidy narrative for the six o’clock news. They were murdering Molly all over again, burying the truth of her terror under a mountain of palatable lies.

“Police also questioned a close friend,” the anchor continued, as a blurry, long-lens photo of Becca leaving the police station flashed on screen, “who discovered the scene after Ms. Tate had been out of contact for several weeks.”

The remote slipped from Becca’s numb fingers. They had made Molly a cliché and Becca a person of interest. She was alone. Utterly, completely alone. Just as Molly had been.

In a surge of rage and grief, she grabbed a pillow from the couch and screamed into it, a raw, ragged sound of despair. She threw it at the television, and the screen went black as the plug was jostled from the wall.

The sudden, absolute silence was a physical shock.

She sat there, panting in the darkness, the ghost of the news anchor’s voice still hanging in the air. The silence pressed in, heavy and watchful. It felt familiar.

Crinkle.

The sound was so faint, she thought she’d imagined it. A dry, whisper-thin rustle. Like a mouse in a bag of chips, or a single piece of cellophane being slowly, deliberately folded.

Becca froze, every muscle in her body locking into place. Her breath caught in her throat. Her heart, which she thought had been shattered, began to hammer against her ribs with a new and visceral terror.

It came again, a little louder this time.

Crinkle… pause… crinkle…

It was coming from the darkest corner of her living room. From the deep shadows beneath the heavy oak coffee table. From the place she could not see.

Her eyes, wide and unblinking, stared into the blackness. The world had dismissed her. The police had dismissed her. She had dismissed Molly. But he hadn't. He had listened. He had watched. And now, in her profound, newly forged isolation, he had found her.

The cycle was about to begin again.