The alarm company called me about a system I’d never had installed. The account had been in my name since 2013, paid automatically from a bank account I closed in 2015. The strange part was that the system was still active. It reported to an address forty minutes from my house, and the emergency contact listed on the account was my son. He said he didn’t know anything about it, and I believed him, mostly, which was a terrible thing to have to write down. The representative offered to send me the event log, and it arrived that night, four hundred pages of doors opening and closing, and on the eleventh page…
There was an entry for my own house. It was dated three months before I had moved in. I checked the address twice because I thought there had to be a mistake, but the report listed my current bedroom as Zone 4. The next entries showed the front door opening at 2:13 a.m., followed by the garage at 2:17. Then, at 2:24, someone had disarmed the entire system using a code that the representative said had never been changed. I asked him who had access to the account, and after a long pause, he said there was one additional authorized user.
It wasn’t my son. It was my husband, who had been dead for six years. I called the company back and asked them to remove his name immediately, but the representative told me he couldn’t do that until the account owner completed an identity verification. I almost laughed because I was standing in my kitchen, holding the paperwork they had mailed to me. Then he asked if I wanted to know where the system was physically installed. I said yes, and he gave me an address I had never heard before. I wrote it down anyway, and something about the street name made me stop.
It was the same street where my husband had worked before we got married. I drove there the next morning and found an old two-story house at the end of a dead-end road. The alarm company confirmed that their equipment was still transmitting from inside. I knocked several times before an elderly woman finally opened the door. She looked at me for a long moment and then asked, “Are you his wife?” Before I could answer, she reached behind the door and handed me a small envelope with my name on it. Inside was a photograph of my husband standing in that house in 2013. On the back, in his handwriting, were four words: “If she calls, tell her everything.”
