Some moments split a life clean through, dividing everything into before and after. The coroner's call was one of those moments—a simple voicemail that shattered everything I thought I knew about myself.
The message came on a Tuesday in December when the Colorado winter had stripped the world to basics—black tree limbs against a white sky, the sound of wind testing windows for weakness. Just another day, until it wasn't. I'd been sorting through old photos that morning, pictures of a childhood I barely remembered, faces that should have meant something but didn't quite connect. In every image, my father stood slightly apart, his shadow falling wrong, as if it belonged to someone else entirely.
His voice carried the weight of graves in it, the kind of tone that comes from speaking too often to the dead. He identified himself as the Las Calindas County Coroner, a title that should have meant nothing to me, should have been just another wrong number in a world full of misdials and mistakes. But there was something familiar in that voice, like an echo from those faded photographs, like something I'd been trying to forget.
My hands shook as I played the message again. He said my name—Jameson B. Reeves—like he was reading it off a headstone. The same way my father used to say it when he was disappointed, each syllable carved in ice. Sometimes, late at night, I still hear that voice in my dreams, calling me from rooms I can't quite reach.
My wife, Angelina, always the practical one, did what I couldn't. She looked up the official number while I sat there, letting fear crawl up my spine like ice water. The numbers didn't match. They should have matched. In a world that made sense, they would have matched.
—Look at this, she said, her voice tight with worry. There's definitely something wrong here.
Her laptop screen cast a blue glow across her face, making her look like something from another world. The article she'd found spoke of ongoing investigations of bodies stacked in single graves in Wolf Creek cemetery, just south of Trinidad. The coroner's name appeared in black and white, connected to a darkness creeping beneath the surface of that small Colorado town. Each word seemed to pulse with hidden meaning, like a code I should have been able to break.
I thought of other headlines I'd seen lately—the Return to Nature Funeral Home scandal, where they'd found nearly two hundred decomposing bodies. The way death had become a business in Colorado, with profits measured in human remains and grieving families left holding boxes of strangers' ashes. Each story had felt distant then, someone else's nightmare. Now they felt like breadcrumbs leading to a truth I'd been running from all my life.
—You need to call back, Angelina said, her hand finding mine. Whatever this is, we face it together.
My fingers hovered over the phone, trembling like aspen leaves in an autumn wind. The official number seemed to pulse on the screen, each digit a heartbeat of dread. Each number felt like another turn of a key in a lock I'd forgotten existed.
When I finally called, the universe played its cruelest trick. His voice—the same voice from the message—answered as if he'd been waiting. As if he'd known I would call, known exactly when my finger would press that last number.
—Jameson B. Reeves, I said, my name feeling foreign in my mouth, tasting of dust and old memories.
—I know who you are, he replied, those words carrying the weight of mountains. I've been expecting you.
Then came the part that split my world apart, the moment that would haunt my dreams for months to come. He told me about another Jameson Reeves—Jameson D. Reeves—a man in his sixties found dead under circumstances the coroner wouldn't specify. A man whose phone contained only one saved number.
Mine.
The silence that followed felt like a tomb being sealed.
—There's more, he said, his words cutting through the quiet like a bone saw through flesh. We need you to come to Trinidad. There are... questions that need answering. About your father. About what happened in '89.
I felt the blood drain from my face. 1989—the year the photographs stopped, the year my memories began to blur like water-damaged film. The year the nightmares started, though I never could remember what they were about when I woke.
Angelina watched me from across the room, her face a mask of concern. She knew, the way wives sometimes do, that something fundamental had shifted in our world. That whatever came next would change us in ways we couldn't predict or
prevent.
—When? I asked, though I already knew the answer.
—Now, he said. Before the snow comes.
I looked out our window at the gathering clouds, heavy with promises of winter. Denver's skyline stood sharp against the gray, like teeth in a skull's jaw. My reflection stared back at me, and for a moment, I saw my father's face superimposed over mine—the same hollow eyes, the same burden of secrets.
Whatever truth waited in Trinidad, it wouldn't wait long. The dead, after all, keep their own schedule.
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