The Innocent: Chapter 4 (Patreon)

Index

Chapter 4

Camille

Kyla, Luna, and I were getting close to the morgue where we were meeting Abby. Luna didn’t know we were meeting Abby there, but when she’d heard where we were going, she insisted she wanted to tag along. She was in the backseat, but leaned over the center console of the Jeep to look at Kyla and me. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Dead dude from the other night might have been there when the brother of dorm dude died?”“Say ‘dorm dude died’ five times fast,” I challenged, but before Luna could attempt it with the breath she inhaled, Kyla shot me a stern look.I wasn’t taking this seriously enough… and judging by the zero tolerance, she might have still been a little upset about me asking her to dial it back the other night. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her trying to help, but it wasn’t just the Council that was involved in this. There was law enforcement, and school administration, and something powerful and obscure that had gotten away from me without even trying. I didn’t want her curiosity getting her into trouble.“Right,” Kyla answered in response to Luna’s question.“So it could’ve been a revenge thing?” Luna asked.“But Patrick died first,” Kyla explained.“Okay then,” she said, “somehow he came back to kill forest dude, and if this whole thing is about pissed off ghosts, then you’re on your own. I don’t do ghosts.”“It’s not ghosts,” I said.“Might be,” Kyla disagreed. “You didn’t get a scent in the woods. What’ve you ever heard of that don’t have a scent?”“Ghosts,” Luna whispered in horror.I rolled my eyes, and we pulled into the parking lot of the morgue, stopping next to a blue sedan. Abby got out of it as we got out of the Jeep, meeting us near the hood of our car.She and Kyla hugged in greeting, and then she looked at me like she was debating if it’d be awkward to hug me too. But I didn’t react fast enough to give an opening because it wasn’t something I was used to, and the moment was already gone, so she smiled instead and said, “Morning.”“Hi,” Luna said before I could reply, stopping at my side. “Who are you?”“I’m Abby,” she said, extending her hand.“Oh,” Luna drawled, “you’re the home wrecker.”Abby dropped her hand, looking like she had no idea what to say while my face burned hotter than the sun. “I never called you that,” I blurted, and muttered to my sister out the side of my lips, “I’m going to kill you.”“Come on, I’m kidding,” Luna said easily, and looked at Abby. “I was just kidding. Camille never called you that.” She finally stuck out her hand. “I’m Luna.”“You’re the twin,” Abby laughed, no offense taken whatsoever, and then I did want to hug her for being so easygoing as she shook with Luna. “Honestly, I was expecting another Camille, but you are like,” she gestured at Luna with a circular hand wave, “the complete opposite.”“You mean not uptight?” Luna suggested.Abby attempted to suppress a smile, and I tossed a thumb toward Luna, asking, “I’ve always wondered, does she really just say the first thing that pops into her head?”“Believe it or not,” Abby said, giving Luna another thoughtful review, “she holds back a little.”“See?” Luna said. “Told you I have a filter.”Abby looked at Kyla while she motioned between Luna and me, “Do they do the twin thing where they finish each other’s sentences?”“No,” Kyla said, “but they get separation anxiety if they’re apart for more than a day.”“You’re so full of it,” I accused, feeling my cheeks start to warm again.Luna, however, threw her arms around me, pinning mine to my sides while she grinned. “You need me!”I deadpanned at Abby because this was her fault, but she was laughing and didn’t seem to care one bit how much Luna was embarrassing me. Thankfully, she only made me suffer through it for her amusement for another couple of seconds, and then she nodded toward the entrance of the morgue. “Shall we?” We followed her into the building and to the front desk, where a young man was sitting. “Hey, Damien.” He was older than us – a college student maybe. There was a subtle scent of decay beneath his natural smell, but it could’ve just been because he worked at a morgue.“Hey,” he said, smiling at her as we reached him. “How’s it going?”“Good,” she answered, “you?” He gave a bored shrug, yawning and reaching for his coffee cup, the contents of which smelled so strong it might as well have been diesel fuel. “I need the roster and at least thirty minutes uninterrupted.”He glanced over the rim of his mug at the rest of us while he took a drink, asking as he set it down, “Who are they?”Abby glanced back at us, thinking about it for a moment before saying, “Field ops.”He leaned halfway across the desk toward Kyla, inhaling two short breaths through his nose. “They’re werewolves…” he said as he sat back down. “Does your dad know they’re here?”“Well,” Abby drawled, “he made me the case lead for these occult murders, so I picked my own team on this one.”“Abby,” Damien complained, “do you know how hard it is for a ghoul to find a job like this? Wait, wait, wait,” his eyes darted between us, “are they Pack?” Abby gave a grimacing smile. “No way. Your dad won’t just fire me if he finds out. He’ll send me back to the animal shelter, and I can’t live off dead cats and dogs anymore.” I held back a disgusted cringe, but Luna made a grossed out noise. “Exactly,” Damien agreed, gesturing at her like she’d proven his point.“Then don’t tell him,” Abby begged, folding her hands together. “Please. I’ll owe you one, anything you want.”He squinted at her, considering it for a long few seconds. “I want the special meat pie from Ghoulies.”“Done.”“In Eugene,” he clarified.Abby’s shoulders slumped as she let out a defeated sigh. I couldn’t blame her – Eugene was more than a two-hour drive from here. “Fine. Special meat pie from the Eugene Ghoulies.”Damien reached behind him for a clipboard mounted on the wall, grabbing it and then handing it across the desk to Abby. “Thirty minutes.”As we took the clipboard through the door to the back room, Luna whispered, “What’s the special meat pie? What’s a Ghoulies?”“Ghoulies are shops that front as restaurants,” Abby answered. “They sell corpse parts to ghouls. Special meat pie has the best organs in it or something, I don’t know exactly.”“Ew,” Kyla muttered.“Is that ethical?” I asked.“It’s more ethical than them killing people to eat.” Abby shrugged. “They exist. Not much else the Council can do but regulate. And most of them, like Damien, are pretty harmless if they get something to eat.”“Thanks for doing this,” Kyla said, giving Abby a grateful side hug. “I really do appreciate it.”“Yeah,” she said, “no problem.” She held up the clipboard. “So, Devon…”“Nealy,” Kyla supplied.“Number nineteen,” Abby read, tossing the roster onto a nearby table, walking to the refrigerator, and opening door number nineteen.She slid out the rack with the body on it, grabbing the chart located near his feet. I didn’t know what to look at or look for, and I wasn’t necessarily keen on seeing this anyway and the smell burned my nose, so I stood there while Kyla and Abby moved to one side of the metal bed. Luna was curious enough that she went over to stand across from them, and even though I didn’t want to get close, I felt weird and out of place hovering in the middle of a freezing room full of dead people by myself. I trudged to Luna’s side, but this was uncomfortable.I didn’t feel like we should be here. We had no connection or obligation toward the victims, the Council didn’t want us here and Eli wouldn’t have wanted us here either, and we were about to invade someone’s privacy. We were in a place that we didn’t have permission to be in, staring at the body of someone we didn’t even know and potentially interfering with real investigations.“He lost a lot of blood,” Abby said, her nose buried in the chart, “but the cause of death was that.” She pointed briefly at a wound in his chest. “Stabbed in the heart.” She motioned to the blood smeared across his forehead. "And apparently this isn't Devon's, but they don't know whose it is." She then gestured at the symbols carved into his arms and feet. “Stuff like this isn’t always legitimately supernatural, but it has to be if something without a scent managed to hit Camille. Cops would never be able to solve this case alone.” At that last part, Abby glanced across the rack to meet my gaze and offer a small smile, and I knew she was responding to my doubts and trying to put me at ease. It didn’t work, and it was awkward that she was listening to my internal conflict, but I appreciated the effort.“These are different from the one on Patrick,” Kyla said, pointing at the symbols. “Have you seen any of these before?”Abby looked at the one in Devon’s arm, eyebrows furrowing instantly. “Wait these are-” She adjusted to look at the one in the top of his foot, and then leaned over the rack to see the two on the other side. “These are familiar. They aren’t symbols; it’s a language. I’ve been studying it because my dad’s teaching me magic. It’s old, but it’s basically the mother-tongue of magic.”Luna bent closer to the body, getting her face mere inches away for a better look at the loopy figures. “Those are words? Can you read it?”“Well, no…” Abby admitted. “I’m really new to it, but I’ll snap some pictures and ask him to translate.” She pulled out her phone to photograph the words. “I think this one means ‘heart’ though,” she said, pointing to the one on Devon’s left foot.“He did get stabbed in the heart,” I pointed out.“Think it’ll help narrow an archive search?” Kyla asked.“Maybe,” Abby answered. “It’s practically standard with the occult. Used for spells, rituals, summonings, casting. Unless it’s a spell we haven’t archived, then we’re out of luck.”“What about evidence?” Luna asked. “Did they find anything in the woods?”“Um…” Abby looked around the room, eyes setting on a computer on the opposite end. She paced to it, sitting down in the chair while the rest of us followed. She clicked to a website and entered some login information, which took her into the police databases.“You have access to this stuff?” I asked in shock.“Council privileges, I have a contact on the force,” she said over her shoulder. “Here.” She pulled up Devon’s name in the evidence list. “They didn’t find much. Just what little he had on him, his wallet, a shot-sized bottle of alcohol, and…” she scrolled down a little, “a bracelet.”“Hey,” Kyla set a hand on her shoulder, leaning over her to tap the screen. “I’ve seen that before.” It was a fancy metal bracelet with Devon’s initials engraved in it.“Where?” she asked.Kyla squinted at it. “I feel like… I know it.” She paused, thinking a bit longer before poking the screen in recognition. “Got it!” She took her hand off Abby’s shoulder to tap me excitedly on the arm. “A girl in one of my classes. That’s her bracelet. She’s got to be Devon’s girlfriend, she wasn’t in class Thursday or Friday.”“Good job,” I said, smiling.“That’s huge,” Abby praised. “Does she live on campus?” Kyla hummed her uncertainty. “Do you know her name?”“No…”“Okay,” Abby said, “if she’s back at school on Monday, you should talk to her to see if she knows anything. If not, I’ll try to look her up in the system and figure out how to find her.”Kyla nodded, and Luna asked, “What now?”Both Abby and I shrugged, but Kyla said, “We should go to the dorms. To Patrick’s room to look for clues.”“What?” I blurted, my stomach sinking. “We can’t go to his dorm.” We’d already done more than enough digging for one day and nothing about this case sat right with me. I didn’t want to get closer.“Why not?” Kyla asked.“Because it’s-” I stammered. “It’s morbid. And most likely off limits and I don’t want to go snooping around a dead guy’s room.”“We’re in a blind alley here,” Kyla said. “And since when have you ever cared about breaking rules? We need more to go on, and the only place we might find answers is his room.”“Just look on the computer for evidence,” I argued, gesturing to the database. “Or at his body, isn’t it here?”

“Yeah, but it was a suicide,” Abby said. “They wouldn’t have looked for much in his room beyond a motive, and his brother was dead. I think investigators called it a day…”

But Kyla’s eyebrows rose with interest as she asked, “The body’s here?”

Abby nodded, and seeing the desire on Kyla’s face to investigate, she picked up the chart she’d left on the table to figure out what number rack to pull out. We all followed her over while she did, and I dared to hope this would be enough to get us out of going to investigate his dorm.Kyla looked at the symbol in his palm, and the cuts in his wrists, daring to fold the white sheet down to his waist to look for other clues. There wasn’t much to see, and eventually she glanced at Abby. “They find anything else?”“This is it,” Abby answered, gesturing at Patrick. “Occult suicide. No foul play.”“We should go to his room,” Kyla said again, pushing the rack back into the refrigerator.“Kyla,” I whined. Abby shrugged, offering like she thought it would help, “We might find something the police missed.”“Luna?” I looked at my sister, practically pleading with my eyes for her to agree with me.“Sorry,” she said, “I think we should go.”“Come on,” I begged. “You guys aren’t serious.”“People are dying, Camille,” Kyla said, and maybe it was because she was still a little upset with me, but she seemed to have lost her patience. “Real people. We got the power to do something about it and you’re acting like you don’t care.”“Need I remind you,” I spat with offense, “that the last time the occult was involved, I almost got possessed by a soul eating phantom? Lacey sure as hell didn’t survive it!” Abby cringed while I swallowed past the lump the reminder had put in my own throat. “And I got hit in the face by something strong enough it probably could’ve killed me if it had three more seconds to work with. This thing is dangerous!”“Which is why we need to stop it before it hurts anyone else,” Kyla said angrily. “This is why we stayed, Camille. You know this is why we stayed. You don’t get to back out when people need you just ‘cause you’re scared. So buck up.” And she grabbed the shoulder of Abby’s jacket, dragging her out of the seat and toward the door, and Abby mouthed ‘sorry’ at me as they disappeared.I kind of just stood there and stared for a minute. Fear. That’s what that was, that icy discomfort at the pit of my stomach that made me willing to yell at Kyla if it would get me out of this. I hadn’t recognized it – I’d never felt it like this before, dull and nagging – but Kyla did. She felt it in the connection and she knew, and it wasn’t a good reason to her for me not to do this. But I was scared.“Should we close that?” Luna asked awkwardly, pointing at the open refrigerator we’d pulled Devon out of.I didn’t answer, but she pushed the rack with his body back inside and shut it, and then we left the building. Kyla and Abby were sitting in the blue sedan waiting for us, so Luna and I climbed into the Jeep to follow them to the school.“You going to say something?” Luna asked after a silent minute on the road.“Am I acting like I don’t care?” I asked. “I don’t want people to die…”“I know,” she said, kicking her feet up on the dashboard. “You want my opinion?” I nodded. “I don’t think Kyla lost her temper because you’re not motivated.”“What do you mean? She wants me to help people and she thinks I’m not trying hard enough.”“She wants you to help her,” Luna said. “She’s the one who wanted to stay in Oregon, right?” I hummed affirmatively. “Why do you think she’d stay here instead of going home to her family if this wasn’t important to her?”That hit me like a slap to the face, and I blinked away my surprise at the revelation of just what Kyla was missing to be here. I hadn’t thought of it exactly like that, but she wouldn’t have. “This is really important to her…”“Duh,” Luna said. “I don’t even think it matters if you care what’s going on, but she doesn’t feel like you care that she cares.”“Holy shit,” I breathed. Luna was right. It wasn’t about me. It was about Kyla. She was mad because she was trying to do something she believed in, and whether I was scared or not, I wasn’t backing her up.“You’re welcome,” Luna said, and she let me absorb all of that for a minute before changing the subject. “So…” she murmured, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye, “you didn’t tell me Abby was really cute.”“What about it?” I asked.“You noticed?”“I guess?”“You guess, or you noticed?”“I noticed,” I said, “why?”“She and Kyla,” Luna suggested.“What about it?”“They’re kind of… you know?”I took my eyes off the road long enough to glare at her. “What are you even talking about right now?”“They’re touchy,” Luna said.“They’re not touchy.”“Kyla touched her more times at that morgue than she touched you.” Luna turned in her seat to face me. “That doesn’t make you just a tad jealous?”“I’m not keeping a tally on how much Kyla touches people,” I said. “That’s creepy, and she’s affectionate.”“With exes?” Luna asked.“Let it go,” I told her. “I trust her and it doesn’t make me jealous. Besides, they’re not exes, they were never official.”Luna made a face. “Did they hook up?” I shrugged. “Make out?” I shrugged again, exaggerated and impatient. “How do you not know?”“I never asked!” I said, throwing my hands up in exasperation. “I’m trying not to come off to her as hostile about it and she doesn’t have to tell me if she doesn’t want to. Will you please let it go?”“Okay, geez,” Luna said, gesturing her palms at me in surrender. “I’m just saying, I’m straight and I noticed Abby’s really cute. And her boobs are like,” she held her hands out in front of her chest, “massive.”“Luna,” I groaned, “let it go.”“Alright, alright,” she agreed, but a moment later she held her hands in front of her chest again and asked, “but did you notice?” I ignored her, which prompted her to ask with a hint of laughter in her voice, “Camille, did you notice?”“I’m not answering that question.”She snorted her amusement. “You totally noticed.”“You’re so annoying.”She laughed pretty heartily at that, but stopped bugging me for the rest of the ride to campus. We met Kyla and Abby at the entrance to the dorm building Patrick lived in, and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible while we took the elevator up to his floor. Abby had his room number in the Council files on her phone, so she led us down the hall at a casual pace.“This is it,” she whispered, stopping outside his door and glancing around to make sure no one was watching.Just as she did, the door of the room right next to Patrick’s opened up. It was a student who shared a history class with Abby and me, the girl who sat in the desk beside mine, and the moment she saw us standing there, outside Patrick’s room, she went back in and slammed her door shut. I immediately looked at Abby.“We know her,” I said.“I know.”“She’s in one of my classes too,” Luna added.“Great,” I said, “so she knows us, and she saw us snooping.”“What was she thinking?” Kyla asked Abby.“Um,” Abby glanced at the girl’s door, a crease forming between her eyebrows. “I don’t know… it happened too fast and your ‘oh shit’s were kind of loud.” We must’ve all made some mental complaint, because she said, “Hey, I’m not foolproof.”“Wait,” I sniffed the air. There was the unmistakable odor of bleach coming from Patrick’s room, as surely they’d started cleaning it already. But when the girl had opened her door, underneath the overwhelming smell of her perfume, I’d caught the faintest whiff of something else. “She smelled like blood.”Before anyone could say anything, Kyla turned and knocked on her door. It swung open a few seconds later, and the girl stood in the doorway. “Hi,” Kyla said, sticking out her hand, “I’m Kyla. That’s Luna, Camille, and Abby.”The girl glanced briefly at Luna, but though she also knew Abby and me from class, she didn’t so much as look at us. “Constance,” she said, reaching out to shake with Kyla. There was a gauze wrap around her left forearm, stained with at least a two-inch patch of blood and undoubtedly the source of the smell.“Whoa,” Kyla said, motioning to it, “you alright?”“Yes,” Constance answered, and it took her an uncomfortable amount of moments to realize Kyla was waiting for more of an answer, and then another few to actually give it. “I groom dogs, sometimes they get irritable.”Constance’s eyes had been fixed on Kyla that whole time, and didn’t so much as move when Abby gestured at me and said, “We’re in your history class.”Instead, she asked Kyla, “Did you need something?”“I, uh,” Kyla glanced over at Abby and me, a little taken aback and unsure of what else we needed.So I asked, “Do you know anything about what happened?” and pointed to Patrick’s room. Nothing. Not so much as a shift my direction. She stepped back into her room and closed the door on us.“Okay…” Luna murmured.“What was she thinking that time?” Kyla asked Abby.“She didn’t want to talk.” Abby was staring at Constance’s door, and she shook her head. “Wow, that was weird.”“What?” I asked.“Thoughts are usually unorganized and scattered, or they’re more like rambling. People can even be pretty blank sometimes, but hers were…” She paused to search for the right word. “Precise. Like script-precise.”“Fake?” Luna asked.“I mean they were real,” Abby said, “I could hear them. That’s never happened before, though, I don’t know what to make of it.”“Is she like that in class?” I asked.Abby’s eyebrows furrowed, and her mouth fell open as she took in a thoughtful breath. “I’ve never noticed her in class… Everyone else is thinking and I never tried to pick out her voice.”Luna side-eyed Constance’s door. “She’s not a ghost, right?”She shook her head. “A ghost’s thoughts don’t project.” And Luna sighed with relief. “Anyway, let’s get this done.” She reached for the handle of Patrick’s room, but one twist let us know it was locked. “Crap.” She twisted it again just to make sure. “I might be able to use magic.” We all nodded, watching as she grabbed the handle and closed her eyes tight to focus. “Atyn,” she whispered. She twisted. Still locked. She said that word again, but nothing happened, and she dropped her hand with a sigh. “I guess I should’ve prefaced that with ‘I’m kind of bad at magic…’”There seemed only one thing left to do. I reached out, grabbed the handle, and twisted so hard that the metal insides crunched. The lock broke, and I pushed the door open. All three of them were staring at me in shock, but I met Kyla’s gaze in particular. “What? We have people to protect.”She grinned, and after Abby and Luna climbed between strips of crime scene tape to the inside of the room, she grabbed my arm to pull me aside from the door. “Hey, so… Abby pointed out I was a bit insensitive,” her gaze fell, “about you being scared and all. But you got good reasons for being scared and I shouldn’t have made you feel bad about it.”“It’s okay,” I told her. Though, admittedly, I was a little surprised she was apologizing. “You were kind of right. This is important to you, and I guess I wasn’t being as…” I trailed off, searching for the right word. “Supportive? As I should’ve. I’ll try harder.” Her lips curled with the smallest of grateful smiles. “You’re doing a good thing here, trying to help people. I want you to know that I have your back, one hundred percent.”“I know,” she said, but she didn’t feel completely better yet. She looked away from me again, shrugging as her eyes got distant. “It’s just… If I can keep someone from being a victim, then I want to.” There was a familiar emptiness creeping up on her, and I recognized that look in her eyes even though I never knew what it meant, or how to fix it. “I need to.”I nodded, but she was already too gone to notice, so I reached out to brush my thumb over where the dimple on her cheek should’ve been. “You’re disappearing on me.”She blinked that feeling away, and when she looked at me a few moments later, she smiled. It was real, and the dimple was there. “Thanks.” She pressed a kiss above the healing cut in my chin, and then another to my lips.I took her hand, leading her through the yellow tape and into Patrick’s room so we could help look for evidence. Abby caught my eye as we walked in, and though I still wasn’t too comfortable with her being in my head, at least she could tell I was grateful for her prompting Kyla to have that conversation. She gave me a responsive smile and then turned back to the bookshelf she was searching. I let go of Kyla’s hand to close the door behind us, and she wandered off to dig through Patrick’s desk.We searched around the room for a couple of minutes in silence. It wasn’t as out of the ordinary as I’d have expected given how strange this case already was. There was the desk, the bookshelf Abby was searching, the bed, a closet. Everything was standard except for the massive bleached spot on the carpet in the middle of the room. I skirted around that spot on my way to search the closet.“Hey,” Abby said, pulling a thick book off the shelf, “look at this – spell book. Never seen it before, either.” She flipped through a few of the pages, reading what was on them and muttering to herself, “Wow, this is old-school. He wasn’t registered as practicing though… Where did he get it?”“Think the ritual he tried is in there?” I asked.“Maybe,” she answered, tucking the book under her arm. “But it’s in Anlisc, the same language on Devon. I’ll have to skim through it later after getting it translated.”“What about this?” Luna asked, picking up a volleyball-sized bowl hidden under the bed. She carried it over to the desk and set it down while we all walked over. She stuck her finger into the charred items in it, crunching them down. “A bunch of burned stuff.”“I wouldn’t touch it,” Abby said, “you don’t want to know some of the nasty things people burn in rituals.” Luna cringed and yanked her hand out of the bowl, and I shoved her off when she tried to wipe her finger on my jacket. “What’s that?” Abby asked, reaching into the dish. Careful not to touch anything else, she slid a burned piece of paper up the wall of the bowl until it was out, and then held it in front of her face. It was so scorched that all that was left were two lines of unfinished words. “D-E and N-E-A.”“Yeah,” Kyla said, “Devon Nealy.”“So, what?” Luna mused. “He performs a ritual and kills himself just for a spell that’ll kill Devon? Why not do it the old-fashioned way and potentially get away with it?”“Maybe he couldn’t do it himself,” Kyla suggested.Abby nudged the bowl with her hand. “If only I could tell what he used in here.”“What he used?” I asked. “Like herbs?” Abby gave a noncommittal shrug. “I think I smelled some in the closet, hold on.” I hurried back over, following my nose to a covered shoebox on the overhead shelf in the closet. I pulled it down, carrying it to Abby and setting it on the desk in front of her.“What are those?” Luna asked, pointing to a glass bottle of elongated brown seeds.They were a common kitchen ingredient. I knew that because I liked to cook, and Abby must’ve heard me think it, because she gave me the subtlest nudge with her elbow and told Luna, “Dried maggots.”“Ugh!” Luna’s face twisted with complete and utter disgust as she grabbed my jacket, hysterically wiping her entire hand on it while Abby and I burst into laughter. “What the hell, guys!”“They’re just caraway seeds,” Abby snickered, and that made Kyla laugh too. She was still chuckling to herself while she began to dig through the box. She tossed ingredient after ingredient onto the desk, laughter fading as she appeared more and more unsatisfied with the box’s contents. “There’s too much in here.” She didn’t look the least bit amused anymore. “He was practicing. Full-on practicing and the Council had no idea.”“Does that happen often?” I asked.“No,” Abby answered. “And he’d be in a world of trouble if he was here to get it.”“So what now?” Luna asked.“Nothing left to do here,” she answered, and tapped the text tucked under her arm, “I’ll skim through this book, and use revenge as a cross-reference and rerun my search in the Council’s database.”“And I still think I should talk to Devon’s girlfriend on Monday,” Kyla said. “See if she knows exactly what happened between Devon and Travis.”The rest of us nodded our agreement, put everything but the book Abby was holding back where we’d found it, and left. Despite having gotten more answers today than I’d been expecting, I didn’t feel better about this. Knowing more only made it worse, and my gut was telling me to steer clear, but I was in this. I was going to see it through.

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