POV: CASSIE
At 12:41 p.m., she returns to her studio. She is aware of this because she automatically checks the clock on the wall above her desk as soon as she enters. This habit is similar to how a sailor checks the horizon before entering a room with windows. The first coordinate is time. From it, everything else is plotted.
The studio is located on the back half of the ground floor of her brownstone. Three years ago, after the show outgrew the spare bedroom where it started, she had the wall between the original sitting room and the back room removed. The wall was replaced by a room that is completely hers in the sense that very few rooms are completely anyone's; it is precisely shaped by what she needs and devoid of everything she doesn't. She knows how to operate the equipment on the recording desk along the left wall, and she doesn't upgrade it arbitrarily. Above it is a reference wall with an episode timeline, source contact cards, and a printed map of the Mid-Atlantic region with pins that she can move to follow the plot. Two grey filing cabinets with her handwritten labels. She sporadically has a leather chair facing the desk in the room for visitors. She learned early on that good lighting is not a vanity in a room where you need to read people's faces, so the one compromise she made to comfort rather than functionality was warm, adjustable lighting.
Not a window. When a neighbor's construction schedule started to conflict with her recording sessions in year two, she had it bricked over.
Compared to other places she has lived, she has spent more time in this room. I spend more time here than I do sleeping.
Her bag is placed on the desk. She places her recorder next to it. She doesn't take a seat.
She launches her laptop and visits the Final Words listener portal right away.
Listeners can send messages, advice, enquiries, and what the intake form tactfully refers to as personal testimonies through the portal, which functions as a submission inbox on the show's website. After the amount of listener mail exceeded her personal email, she started it in season two. It enters a shared inbox, flagged by category and arranged by submission date, which she and her researcher Demi jointly oversee.
TIPS, QUESTIONS, FEEDBACK, FAN MAIL, PERSONAL, and ANONYMOUS are the categories.
Submissions in which the sender has chosen to omit contact information fall under the ANONYMOUS category. This option is not available in the majority of podcast inboxes. Cassie does this on purpose because she has always thought that the person with the most important thing to say is frequently the one who needs to say something but is unable to say it.
In three different interviews, she has written this in public.
Since leaving the bedroom on that street in Washington, D.C., she has given this a lot of private thought.
"You built a door and left it open, and someone used it," she thought.
The ANONYMOUS folder is opened by her.
There are currently 841 messages in the folder, spanning three years and two months. This is not uncommon. She receives twenty to thirty anonymous submissions a month on average, with occasional spikes when a story receives more widespread attention and spikes around the release of new episodes. Once a week, she and Demi carefully go through them, marking anything that seems reliable or important and archiving the remainder.
She has looked over this folder numerous times. She believed she understood what it contained.
She starts her search by date, going from oldest to newest, and starts scrolling.
From memory, the messages are exactly what she would have expected. Small guilt is confessed by listeners. Large ones are confessed by listeners. A man needs to tell someone that he has been stealing from his employer for four years. A woman who reported her brother for a crime has not spoken to him since and is unsure if she was correct. The lonely, the burdened, those who addressed their worst selves to her voice because they heard something that sounded like absolution.
She doesn't write these people off. She reads rapidly but not dismissively, giving each message the full three seconds it deserves before continuing. These are actual individuals with actual weights. They simply aren't what she's searching for.
She is searching for a particular item. She must examine everything since she is still unsure of its exact appearance.
She continues to scroll.
Forty minutes in, she discovers the first one.
It was submitted two years and nine months ago, filed under ANONYMOUS, and timestamped on a Thursday at 2:14 a.m. The first flag is the time. The majority of listener messages arrive in the evening, after dinner and the commute, when people sit with their devices and think, which results in words that they send to strangers. It's a different hour at 2:14 a.m. At 2:14 a.m., people have either made a decision or taken action that has prevented them from falling asleep.
She peruses the message.
It's brief. Four phrases.
Gerald Fitch is a man who resides in Annapolis at [address redacted in Cassie's original archive flag, marked as UNVERIFIED]. He has committed acts for which he will not be held legally responsible. This will be fixed. Since you are concerned about accountability, I felt that you ought to be aware.
That's all.
Not a preamble. Not a signature. No request.
I felt that you ought to be aware.
Cassie reads it twice.
She launches a new tab in her browser.
She looks for Gerald Fitch in Annapolis.
A local news story from two years and seven months ago, submitted about ten weeks after the anonymous submission, is the third result. 54-year-old Gerald Fitch was discovered dead in his Annapolis residence. At first, death was considered accidental. The case is presently being reviewed.
presently being examined.
She examines the anonymous submission's date.
She examines the news article's date.
On the yellow legal pad she keeps next to her laptop, she writes both dates, draws a line between them and ends each line with the following word:
earlier.
The death was preceded by the submission.
She returns to the folder.
Nineteen minutes later, she locates the second one.
The writing style is different from the first; it is a little longer, more syntactically formal, and the sentences are organised with the meticulous precision of someone who is used to writing reports rather than letters. Underneath, however, is the same architecture. a name. a general place. Rather than expressing intent, it was a statement of inevitability. This will not be ignored. I was looking for a witness.
a witness.
She looks up the name.
The outcome takes longer to come to light: a death in a rural Virginia county was reported fourteen months after the anonymous submission. It was first determined to be a suicide, but it was reopened after a family member disputed the results. It is still open.
She puts it on the legal pad.
Two names. Two dates. Two lines to two results.
She returns to the folder.
She gives up on lunch. She becomes oblivious to the fact that she is skipping lunch. She doesn't pay attention to the time until she looks up at the clock and sees that it is 4:17 p.m. She has been at the desk for three and a half hours, only getting up to grab her coffee, which she can't remember running out of and is now a cup of cold beige regret.
Nine messages have been discovered by her.
Over the course of three years, nine anonymous submissions with names were made between midnight and four in the morning, timestamped prior to a death that was either reported as accidental, suspicious, or inconclusive, and all of them used variations of the same phrase: "I thought you should know, since you care about accountability." as authorship rather than identification. The phrase says, "This is mine." This is reliable. Every time, the same individual leaves the same impression.
She reclines in her seat.
She examines the legal pad.
Nine dates, nine names. Nine outcomes are represented by nine lines.
She grabs her writing instrument.
She draws a circle around the large number she writes at the top of the page.
9. She looks at it.
She returns to the folder after that.
At 4:52 p.m., she discovers the tenth, buried in a batch of submissions from fourteen months prior that had been bulk-filed as low priority during a week when Demi and she were working on other projects and the show was in the midst of a significant episode drop.
At 5:31 p.m., she discovers the eleventh.
The Eleventh is not like the others.
The first ten have one thing in common: they are reported rather than felt, and they are written from an observational rather than a personal point of view, as though the author is describing the behaviour of the weather rather than a human decision. This is the exact reason they are chilling. The cold is in charge.
This quality is absent from the eleventh message.
Five days have passed since the eleventh message was sent.
Eleven sentences, compared to an average of four, make it longer than the others. The writing has the same structure and syntax, but something is different beneath the surface. Between the first ten messages and this one, the author has undergone a change. Cassie, who has spent the last six years deciphering the emotional undertones of people's statements, perceives this change in the same way that you would a change in the weather. The sky remains unchanged. However, the pressure has shifted.
Nothing that has occurred is described in the eleventh message.
It talks about something that hasn't yet occurred.
a name. an address. I haven't decided on a timeframe, but it could be this week, tomorrow, or tonight. This message concludes with something different than the previous ones, which ended with "I thought you should know."
Before letting it land, she reads it three times slowly.
Sometimes I wonder if you hear me. I believe you do. You seem to hear everyone, I believe. You mentioned that in the first episode. that the final confession is the one that can't be concealed. That has been on my mind for the past three years. I believe I now have a better understanding of it than you do.
Cassie puts down her writing instrument.
She examines the legal pad. Her handwriting contained eleven names. Eleven lines are drawn between the dates of submission and the results. Eleven circles because she made a habit of circling each one as she verified it; the circle stood for "real." confirmed. It is not a coincidence. not fan mail.
She rips the page from the legal pad.
She places it next to the Mid-Atlantic map and the episode timeline on the reference wall above her desk.
She stares at it for a while.
She then launches a fresh spreadsheet.
The columns are labelled as follows: DATE SUBMITTED, NAME GIVEN, LOCATION, DATE OF DEATH, MANNER OF DEATH, STATUS.
She starts to fill it in.
It's a very quiet room. She hasn't recorded anything today, which is unusual, and she just realised that the recording equipment on the left wall is dark. She hasn't produced anything for the show despite spending hours in this room.
Instead, she has created an eleven-row spreadsheet.
She makes it to the eleventh row. Enter "five days ago" as the submission date. Enter the name. Enter the address. Since this is the first entry where the column applies, she types two words she has never typed in this spreadsheet before in the final column under STATUS.
She types, "Not yet."
She examines her writing.
"How long would it take you," she asks Demi when she answers, "to verify a death?" formally. paper trail, the manner of death, and the status of the case.
"Depends on the case," Demi responds. "One hour. Perhaps less.
"I need eleven of them."
Demi paused. A brief one. Demi doesn't take long pauses.
"Send me the list," she requests.
Cassie examines her spreadsheet. examines the wall of reference. Observe the eleven circles on the yellow legal pad. Each circle represents a name that once belonged to a person, and each one was sent to her email in the wee hours of the morning by someone who was looking for a witness and discovered one in her open door.
"I'll send it now," she declares.
She ends the call.
She examines the eleventh entry.
It says not yet.
She glances at her phone. on the clock. She entered the address in the eleventh row.
The individual mentioned in message eleven is alive somewhere in this city and is listed in a spreadsheet on Cassie's reference wall, but they are unsure of their name.
She checks the time.
She calls Demi back at 5:47 p.m. after picking up her phone.
"Start with the last one," she advises.