7

THERE’S ALWAYS A TRAIL

Adelaide found herself back in the hidden wing. Though it was midday, darkness clung to the room like cobwebs. Embers still glowed orange in the grate, but it had been hours since a roaring fire permeated the room with warmth. Charlie lit a few candles, their gentle flickers of light fighting to reach the shadows collected like dust in the corners. Adelaide watched the dancing flames as each sprang to life under Charlie’s fingertips. Fire would always be to her one of those things with equal power to awe and horrify. The spark of a single flame on a cold night was enough to save a life or end it.

Xander’s painting was still in progress. A wooden artist’s palette caked in oil paint lay beside it on the stool. The peaks and valleys in the dried and blended colors were a work of art all their own. A few layers of blue in the waves added a depth to the sea that hadn’t been there hours earlier.

The door creaked open, and Xander entered, a slight flush to his cheeks. He ran a hand through his hair and took a shaky breath. His free hand worked loose the top button of his starched white button-up. Shadows darkened his eyes to deep brown, leaving no hint of the gold Adelaide knew was there.

“Xander, what’s wrong?” Adelaide thought it, but Charlie voiced it out loud as she crossed the room to lay a hand on Xander’s arm. They had always been close, and Charlie clearly meant it as a means of comfort, but an intimacy in the touch made Adelaide wonder if it wasn’t something more.

Xander laughed once, a dry and brittle chuckle escaping his lips. “Well, I just left my father and grandmother arguing, if that answers your question at all.”

“About what?” Her voice drew his eyes to Adelaide, as if he had only just realized she was in the room.

“Doesn’t matter.” It did, and they all knew it, but they also knew enough to know they couldn’t push him. He would tell them what was going on when he found the way to turn his art to words. “What did you find, Charlie?”

Charlie didn’t look satisfied with his answer, but she didn’t push him on it either. Seeing the only furniture in the room was the stool, she took a seat on the floor in front of the fireplace and motioned for them to do the same. They obliged, dropping beside her as she opened the laptop they had grabbed from her room on the way over.

“I’m not entirely sure yet,” Charlie said as she focused on the screen. “Xander told me about your conversation, that something about the fire wasn’t sitting right with you. So, I started doing some digging.” She turned the laptop toward them.

Adelaide ran her eyes along the screen. On it was what looked like a redacted police report. Thick, black lines of ink overed most of the text. The only words visible, other than the date and location at the top of the document, were the ones Adelaide had repeated to herself over and over since that day: her parents’ names, fire, and accident.

Adelaide’s stomach dropped. “I could have shown you this, Charlie. Sheriff Dawson gave me a copy. It’s somewhere in my notebook.” She had hoped Charlie might have actually found something useful, but she knew the police report front to back. The only way she would be able to learn more from it was if she could scrub the black ink off and reveal the words beneath the censored pieces, but that wasn’t an option. She had tried.

“I know, but this one, the one you have, isn’t copied from the original report.” She pulled up another window, placing a second document beside the first.

At first glance, they looked the same, but when Adelaide looked closer, she could see the first report was shorter than the second. “I don’t understand. Why are there two of them?”

“I wanted to see if I could find a scan of the original report, unredacted, so I broke the firewall to the Atkin County records. This second report, the one Sheriff Dawson gave to you, is the one they have on file for the night of the fire, but after some more digging, I found this other one with an earlier scan date. Someone tried to delete it, but nothing is ever as gone as we think it is. There’s always a trail if you know where to look.”

“And you found it. But why delete the original and swap the files?” Adelaide’s heart raced, suspecting she already knew the answer.

Charlie worried a curl between her fingers. “I wasn’t able to fully redact the original document, but I did find a reference to a foreign piece of DNA at the crime scene. Whoever removed that information and scanned in the fake report clearly didn’t want anyone to know about it. Now, it could mean nothing, but if we were able to connect the DNA to a person and actually place them at the crime scene, we could have a witness.”

Adelaide brushed her curls back and let out the breath she was holding. It wasn’t the whole truth, but at least it proved she wasn’t crazy. Someone out there held the answers she was looking for, but who?