Missing Person Notice at the Late-Night Convenience Store

Lin Mo clutched a faded missing-person notice as he stood behind the convenience store counter. The former detective’s instincts made him watch every shadow that came through the door late at night. This was the last place his younger sister had been seen, three months ago. Shen Yan, the new night-shift employee, always restocked the shelves at three in the morning. The old scar on his cuff seemed to match the mysterious figure in the surveillance footage from the night Lin Mo’s sister disappeared.

One night, when icicles mysteriously coated the freezer, Shen Yan handed him a bowl of oden with half a torn photograph tucked underneath. It fit perfectly with the missing-person notice in Lin Mo’s hands. A former employee’s diary was hidden in a compartment beneath the counter. Every page bore the words, “Don’t take orders from women in blue dresses,” yet no such customer appeared on the security footage.

When Shen Yan admitted that he was searching for his own missing older sister, dark red stains suddenly seeped across the convenience store’s employee handbook, behind their two missing-person notices. They were each other’s prime suspects, yet also each other’s only allies. Between the shelves in the dead of night, the truth was slowly emerging with every strange rattle from the refrigerator.