The day was grey, it’s been raining since morning. It was almost lunchtime and Colby Jones hadn’t had any sleep when he arrived on the marbled porch with four gigantic pillars holding up the extravagant canopy. He’d been interviewing everyone he could find at The Dungeon to gather information on the latest missing person case. Now he’s at the door of The Cromwell Estate to visit his long time friend who always gets the first update on anything important going on in Mofocity.
He wiped his wet shoes on the fancy welcome mat by the door and dried himself with a small white Supima cotton towel the butler had given him. The oversized painting of Sabina Cromwell greeted him at the foyer, something he always enjoyed examining while waiting for the butler to come back and let him in. A well-known painter had painted Madam Cromwell at the height of her beauty at the young age of 24. Her dark brown hair tied on one side and gracefully laid on her left shoulder, her eyes sparkled, a faint elegant smile on the corner of her lips displaying the confidence of youth, hiding away any trace of the agony of being married to a shrewd and ruthless businessman.
She was married to Matthew when she was only 22, Matthew was 27. The painting was done just a year before the separation and it stood unhinged when the earth shook and their old house was badly damaged. Matthew built the Cromwell Estate after the incident, the massive building took almost 4 years to build with minimum heavy equipment that was available to reconstruct the majority of the town. With only Matthew and his oldest son, Jacob, and his wife Iris occupying the estate, the 30 bedroom mansion was a huge waste of space. It was the largest home in Mofocity, a marble monument to remind the citizens of who owned the town.
There was something different around the estate, there were armed men surrounding the area that wasn’t there the last time he came by. The news of the missing people seemed to have struck a nerve for the tycoon, he had a lot to protect in his massive home and the access to guns straight from the government. He never consulted Colby about the matter, this was the first time he had seen it.
Colby Jones stepped into the gallery following the butler’s footsteps even though he’d been to that place thousands of times before. He contemplates why he considered Matthew as his best friend when he always had to wait at the foyer before he could enter his home. But then again, he didn’t have any other best friend to compare his friendship with Matt.
The long gallery displayed an old carved mahogany table with crystal ornaments, antique porcelain, chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, Persian carpet lined the wooden floor and a row of prominent rare paintings on the walls that ended at the double door going to the dining room. There he sat at the end of a 12 seat dining table having his steak by himself.
“CJ! Good buddy ol’ pal! Come in! Come in!” bellowed Matthew from across the room.
Colby sat on the chair closest to Matt, took a glimpse of his steak, and swallowed his disgust. In a world where meat was scarce, only Matthew Cromwell Jr. managed to eat steak for lunch almost every day.
“Are you hungry? You want something to eat?” Matt made a gesture to the butler to serve his guest with something to eat.
“No … no thanks … I’m here for work, not a social call,” he declined.
“Oh! Come on CJ! We can discuss work over a good proper lunch … what can we get you?” Matt insisted.
“Well … okay … just some bread, soup, and salad for me … I need to lose some weight,” he said lightly.
“Okay, you heard what the man said, serve him what he asked for!” Matt ordered his butler while chewed on his meat. “With the cases you’re handling now, you’ll lose weight in no time my friend … heh … heh …” he chuckled.
“So … what’s the update?” the sound of his chewing annoyed Colby.
“A nightcrawler was reported missin’, one of your son’s employees … I was there last night interrogating everyone who worked there … it seems like he disappeared right after they closed the club after the concert.”
“The Addams boy?”
“He’s clean … your kid vouched for him … a solid alibi.”
“Jordy?”
“No … Jade, she was with him the whole night that night.”
Matthew paused and leaned on the tall wooden dining chair. Colby burst in a sudden rage and slammed the table.
“Forty fuckin’ people in the last year alone! Shit! This is the fifth in four months! The numbers are getting way too high Matt! This is fuckin’ ridiculous!”
“Hey! Hey! Hey! … settle down buddy! Relax! Don’t get your blood pressure up! You’re tired and hungry, that’s all … you can solve this … you always do.”
Colby grunts deeply, “I doubt it … this is way over my head, Matt … sumthin’s going down, and all I have is a team of dimwits of investigators tryin’a nail down ghosts to solve the case.”
The butler came with his soup and salad, and a good couple of slices of bread. He laid them in front of Colby and he started to calm down.
“We’re fine buddy … we’re fine … just take it easy.” Matt lowered his tone and held Colby’s hand.
Colby took a bite of his bread and tasted the soup, it was damn good, he has almost forgotten the last time he ate something that tasty.
“Are we fine, Matt? Really?”
“What do you mean buddy?”
“I mean … what’s with all those guys I saw down in the garage? With guns ‘n’ all?”
“Oh … that … well, we need to be careful … it’s for precautious … anyways, Iris had been doing some business lately and she needed protection to go around town at a time like this,” he answered calmly and took a sip of his red wine.
Colby wasn’t convinced, “What about the government? Do they let you in on anything they’re doing in that facility?” Matt didn’t reply.
“I mean … I don’t know anything about what they’re doing in there, sumthin’ could suddenly blow up in their lab and we wouldn’t know what to do about it,” he continued sarcastically.
“I’m sure they’re being careful this time, I don’t think they’re doing anything remotely the same as before …” Matt wasn’t sure.
He put one hand on CJ’s shoulder, “I think you need to make an arrest for at least one of the missing person’s case, ease the mind of the people so everyone can go by their day in peace … I’ll make sure the government has nothing to do with this,” he spoke in confidence because Matt Cromwell really did have that kind of power.
CJ looked Matt straight in the eyes, “I need to stop people from being missing … and I need to find out where they are.”
Matt nodded in agreement, “I know buddy … there is something else that I wanted to talk to you about …”
*****
Colby Jones left the estate more confused than when he came. His intuition told him that the government was behind the missing people’s cases, he was sure that Matthew probably knew about it but tried to cover it up because that was how the mutual relationship worked. The government provided him with guns and he would cover their tracks in return. “What kind of experiment are they up to now?” Colby thought. More importantly, how is he going to protect his people from ending up in a lab? But then again, Matt told him something else, something that he never thought would happen in his beloved city, and that was a game-changer for everyone.