Page 51 of Scarred By Sin

Gwenyth raised her head slowly. Her eyes were red-rimmed, though no tears had fallen. She was holding herself together with the kind of rigid control that Sylvie recognized from years of interviewing people on the edge of breaking but who refused to do so in front of a stranger.

“Yes.” The word was thin. “Has there been any progress?”

“We’re still interviewing everyone connected to the estate and to your father.”

“Not Porter.”

The correction was quiet and immediate. The absence of a man who had been part of Gwenyth’s daily life for as long as she could remember was at the forefront.

“No,” Sylvie agreed softly. “Not Porter. I’m very sorry for your loss, Gwenyth.”

She nodded, and the effort it took to keep her composure was visible in the tightening of her jaw and the way her fingers gripped the fabric of her cardigan. She was trying not to cry, and the restraint made her appear both older and younger than her forty-eight years.

“Porter was special,” Gwenyth said. Her voice steadied as she spoke about him, as though the act of honoring his memory gave her something solid to hold onto. “He took care of me when my father couldn’t. He never asked for anything in return, and he never made me feel like I was a burden. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.”

Sylvie didn’t fill the silence that followed. She let Gwenyth hold the space for as long as she needed it. The corridor was quiet around them, the only sound the faint creak of the house settling somewhere below their feet.

“Will there be a funeral?”

“I’m not sure,” Sylvie replied truthfully. “Porter has a sister in Arizona. I’d guess the arrangements would be up to her.”

Gwenyth’s brow creased slightly, as though the idea of someone else deciding what happened to Porter didn’t sit well with her.

“I’ll speak with Uncle Cal. Maybe he can reach out to Porter’s sister.” Gwenyth paused, and when she spoke again, her voice carried something closer to a wish than a statement. “It would be nice if Porter were buried somewhere close by. I could visit him.”

Before Sylvie could respond, Gwenyth stepped back into her room. She moved with the slow, deliberate gait that Sylvie had come to associate with her retreats, not confusion but conservation, as though she rationed her energy the way some people rationed their words.

The door closed with a soft click, and the hallway was quiet again.

Sylvie stood there a while longer, her leather-bound notebook pressed against her chest, processing the encounter. Gwenyth’s grief for Porter was the most coherent and sustained emotion she’d displayed in Sylvie’s presence.

No confusion, no drifting, no retreat into blankness.

Just a woman mourning someone she loved, articulating that emotion with a lucidity that contradicted the picture Dale had painted of her in every conversation. Sylvie had interviewed hundreds of people over the course of her career, and she’d developed an instinct for the difference between performed emotion and the real thing.

Gwenyth’s grief was real.

Whatever else was going on with her condition, her love for Porter Voss was not part of the confusion.

Sylvie made her way downstairs, the old floorboards announcing each step with their familiar protests. She found Bit in the dining room. He was hunched over his laptop with a half-empty bag of pretzels beside his keyboard, and his knitted cap was pulled low enough that it nearly touched his eyebrows. The portable monitor at the end of the table was active, the grid of burial sites glowing in the dim room. The curtains had been drawn against the midday sun, and the light of the screens gave the space the same cave-like quality it had taken on every day since they’d arrived.

Bit had been running searches for the better part of the morning, cross-referencing missing persons records against cancer diagnoses, hospital admissions, and hospice facility reports from the mid-nineties. The work was painstaking and repetitive, the kind of digital excavation that most people would have abandoned after the first hour, but Bit had a patience for data that bordered on obsessive.

“Where are Brook and Theo?”

“They went to search Porter’s cottage for the hidden lab,” Bit said without looking up. His fingers continued to move across the keyboard. “No word yet on whether they found anything.”

“I need to reach out to Ruth Okafor’s family today.” Sylvie set her notebook on the table and pulled out the chair in front of her workstation. “Dr. Kessler has already notified the next of kin. They’re expecting a call from us.”

“You’ll want to add another call to your list.”

Bit reached for the remote and pointed it at the portable monitor. The grid shifted, and a new section appeared alongside the existing profiles. A photograph, pulled from a missing persons database, showed a woman with kind eyes and close-cropped, graying hair. The image was decades old, the colors slightly washed, but the woman’s expression carried a warmth that had survived the degradation of the file.

“Dr. Kessler just sent a notification that a fourth victim has been identified.”

Sylvie turned to the monitor and studied the new entry. The woman’s name, her age at the time of disappearance, and the circumstances of her case were laid out in a clean, clinical format that Kessler’s team had been using throughout the excavation. Sylvie lowered her gaze to the details beneath the photograph, and the information confirmed what they’d all already begun to suspect before she’d finished reading the first line.

The woman had gone missing thirty-one years ago…from hospice.