WHO: Sam Arquette WHEN: Friday, August 24. WHERE: Her residence in Preston. SUMMARY: After deciding to do some volunteering at the Fire Dept. Sam's uncovered something… interesting. WARNINGS: Nope.
"Jemma? Andrea?"
Neither of her sisters seemed to be home at the moment, which under the circumstances was preferred.
Sam moved quickly through the living space towards her own private room. It was hot in the apartment, and she would prefer to be somewhere else, but right now that was likely why neither of her sisters were there and why she had the place to herself.
She closed the bedroom door behind her and locked it, before she slid her messenger bag off of her shoulder, dropped it onto the bed, and opened it up. She pulled her hair back from her face, twisting it into a swirl that would hold it back for not more than a few minutes, but that was all she needed while she dug in the bag and recovered what she was looking for.
It would have been easier to do this at her parents house, all the things she might need were in her bedroom - she had the most random assortment of devices to watch and listen to things on, but in this case it was just a cassette tape - one that had clearly been recorded over multiple times, there were the remnants of sticky labels on the tape, but none currently on it.
Sam had tried to listen to it at the Fire Department in order to organize it for their archives, but she'd stopped about five minutes in.
Now she dug underneath her bed, pulled out an old tape player nearly half a century old, and stuck it in.
"Please help me."
It was definitely a child's voice, old enough to speak clearly, but young enough to still have a child's tone and lilt.
A question was asked by the operator, but that question was muffled and the child's response followed with a certainty:
"There's a fire and I can't find my friends."
"Are you safe, where are you at?"
The child coughed and there was another reply by the operator that was garbled.
The tape was damaged at that point. She wondered if it was possible to clean it up. Mr Wolfe might know. But probably continuing to play it wasn't going to help with that later. Sam stopped it rather than damage it further
Frozen she stared into the closet of her bedroom thinking about the section on the Fire Department in the book. A child had called the fire department around 2 in the morning, likely around the start of the fire.
Was this that call?
Sam tapped a finger on the play button, too lightly to push it down. The tape recorder was from the 70s after all, back when play required an actual push, not brushing against a phone accidentally in your pocket. If it was that call, then who had the child been? Was it Alice March on the phone? She wondered if someone who had known Alice would be able to recognize the voice. It wasn't entirely clear to Sam if it was a boy or a girl. If it was Alice March who had made the call - what friends had she been looking for? Had there been other children in the house with her? And why had any of them been in the house? They should have been at the Littles party?
Probably she should send it back to the station and tell them what she'd found. But part of her couldn't help but wonder if the Fire Department thought they might have been at fault somehow, if they wouldn't try to make the tape disappear. There was one person who would know how to clean it up. And there was one person she could think of who might still be able to recognize if it was Alice's voice.
She opened the tape player and slid the cassette out and returned it to the dusty plastic case.
There were ways to copy it at Wolfe Investigations. She would start there.