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Just in case the night isn’t over yet. I smile to myself, my mind working overtime with the possibilities.
I close the front door, hearing a phone ring upstairs.
But I have my phone. I pull it out of my jeans. Why do I hear ringing…?
Then I remember the burner Hawke gave me. Right. I bolt up the stairs, into the bedroom, and yank open the bedside drawer, pulling the second phone off from the charger.
I swipe the screen. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Hawke replies. “I got your text. Sorry, I had a ton of classwork.”
“Why are you calling this phone?”
“Because your other one was going to voicemail. Is it dead?”
Is it? I press thePowerbutton, seeing it is, in fact, dead. I plug it into the charger.
“So, what’s up?” I ask, remembering I texted him a rundown of the story Bastien told me yesterday.
“I’ve looked into the names.” I hear a shuffle and a bunch of chatter in the background. He’s probably at his dorm. “Conor Doran declared dead twenty-two years ago. Supposedly buried at Esplanade Street Cemetery. Check it out, okay?”
“What do you want me to do?” I walk to my window, gazing over at Hunter’s dark bedroom. “Dig him up?”
“Just confirm the gravesite and take a picture for me.”
“Anybody could be buried in that grave,” I fire back.
“You watch too much TV.”
Oh, whatever. He knows Murphy’s Law as well as I do. Anything that can happen, will happen, and a gravestone for Conor Doran proves nothing.
“I’m checking Winslet,” he says, “seeing if she’s on any radars after that year.”
“And—”
“And I’m on Deacon,” he assures me. “Deacon Doran. So far, nothing. No social media, no credit history, no transfer paperwork for colleges… Just a birth certificate.”
“No death certificate, though?”
He pauses, but only for a moment. “No.”
So, he’s hiding. Probably because he killed a girl two decades ago and is trying not to get caught.
But it’s too easy. If it were that simple, why would there be any mystery at all? Why the varying versions? Why the confusion about what exactly happened?
We need to start piecing together what she did when she was here. She attended classes, met new people, probably endured a few pranks like I have…
And then I stop in my tracks, thinking.
Like I have…
“If Winslet’s experience mirrors my own at all, being a hostage here, then the Rebels weren’t the only ones targeting her,” I point out.
“Meaning?”
I pace the room. “Is there any proof it was the Rebels at all?”
“You mean other than the creepy text conversations we uncovered?”
