SELAH: I can’t wait!
TWIG: Well, listeners, this officially ends our second season. We’ll be back in November with season three, which promises to be our best yet.
SELAH: But first! I would be remiss if I didn’t wish my co-host and his robotics team good luck at the prestigious Carnegie Melon University for the Catalyst Cup in nine days. All five of you are brilliant brainiacs, so I’m calling it right now. You’re gonna bring home the gold, and if I’m wrong, I’ll go on record saying The Flash of 1757 was a giant hoax.
TWIG: You do realize we’re going to be surrounded by fellow brainiacs, right? The brightest minds from around the country will be there.
SELAH: But you’re the brightest of them all, and you can’t convince me otherwise, Twig. My bet’s on you.
TWIG: Well, that’s a wrap, listeners. Thanks for joining us on this journey into the unknown.
SELAH: As always, stay curious and never stop wondering!
21
ROTTEN BLOOD
Jude’s BMW idles in a fog that swirls and shifts like a dancing troupe of pale ghosts. October has arrived like a whole mood.
I open the passenger door and slide inside, unsure what to expect. Thankfully, the wounded young man from yesterday is gone. Jude looks at me over the top of his sunglasses with a heartbreaking grin. “I got you a belated birthday gift.”
He hands me a leather-bound journal with the initials I.V. stamped in the lower right corner. Isaiah Vandenberg, original author of the family tree, son of the scorch mark, survivor of the train crash. A man who was born into the Gilded Age and died just after the Roaring Twenties. The journal itself is nothing novel. We’ve looked through many just like it.
What’s new is Jude’s excitement.
“Check out March third,” he says.
I thumb through the pages. Each entry is short and to the point. The year is 1927, which means Isaiah only had three more left to live before he would die in the same bank robbery that would leave his son, Enoch, with one eye.
I stop on the entry in question and begin to read out loud. “My second-born son, Daniel, is lost to me. Led astray by his wretched cousin, lured into vice and ruin. Can blood be evil? Lucian sought to tempt me in my grief …”
My voice trails off.
Lucian.
One of the disconnected names on Raphael’s side of the Vandenberg Family Tree. Followed by Reuben, Frank, and Thomas, names given to the police by Jude’s grandfather in the Vandenberg cold case.
I look at Jude.
He nods for me to keep reading.
“Lucian sought to tempt me in my grief. Now his son,Reuben, has ensnared mine. My wife weeps. Enoch rages. I am powerless.”
I look at Jude again. “Reuben.”
Jude reaches across the console to turn a few pages. “Read this one, here.”
The entry is marked April 5, 1927.
“Daniel has returned. I am certain something dreadful befell him in his time away. He speaks little and refuses to say what transpired. But he has severed ties with Reuben, and for that, I amgrateful. I can only pray that in time, he will find his way back to himself.”
I turn back to the previous entry and blink at the page.
Can blood be evil?
The question makes my skin prickle.
“Remember those letters in Enoch’s trunk?” I say. “They were bound together with twine? I think they might have been from Daniel.”
