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I cross the room toward him. “Stop.”
He faces me, and I nudge him back just a little as I squat down and lift up a floorboard. A newspaper sits inside, and I remove it, opening it up.
Pictures spill out, and Hunter dips down to grab them. I stand up, inspecting them with him.
Two brown-haired boys, one crying and one gazing at the camera with big blue eyes. Same age, same face. “Twins,” Hunter whispers.
The other picture is of a woman at a picnic table outside. She wears a simple dress, and the table is covered with food. Deacon and Conor look about thirteen years old as they sit on the bench seat.
“Twins,” I say, pointing to the boys and guessing Deacon is the one who looks pissed about something in this photo too. “Deacon. Conor.” Then I point to an older boy propped on the edge of the table who looks about sixteen. Black hair, brown eyes. “Manas.”
Manas wears theNo FearT-shirt on my body now.
“Oh my God,” I breathe out. “There were two brothers here with her, but not the twins. Conor did die.”
He did commit suicide.
I meet Hunter’s eyes. “It wasn’t Conor and Deacon texting on those phones. It was Deacon and Manas.”
I don’t know if Hawke or Kade filled Hunter in, but he doesn’t ask me to explain.
The brothers who went after her were the twin who survived and the older brother.
I look at Manas in the picture. He’s the one in the notes who comes down from the attic.
Something about the way he’s perched on the edge of the table in the picture just like….
“Your parents were around?” I asked Bastien.
“No.” He shook his head. “I still couldn’t come and go as I liked, though. Siblings.”
Younger siblings.
I study the newspaper, seeing the headline for the flood the night she probably disappeared.
A picture of water spilling onto the river banks and covering the streets in the mill district stares back up at me as images flood my head.
Resting on the edge of the table, just like…
Just like he leans on his desk at school.
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
He lightened his hair to dark brown, and he’s more than twenty-five years older than he was in this photo, but that’s him.
“Can we stop at the school?” I ask Hunter.
He nods. “Yeah.”
I snap a quick picture of the newspaper and the photos for Hawke and put everything back where I found it. The phones, the notes…someone is feeding us.
But they didn’t give us these things. I’ll leave them here.
We hurry to the school, Hunter getting me inside through the auto shop. The bay door is easy to maneuver open, and we slip inside, running immediately upstairs.
Hunter grabs my hand, taking the lead, and we stop at Bastien’s classroom, the door wide open.
Before I even enter, though, I can see that nothing is right. We walk in, slowly absorbing the bare walls, the empty desk, and the clean whiteboard. No lamp. No container of markers or pens. No posters of student work on the walls.
