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TWENTY-THREE
Decima
“A shoe?”Garrison said, leaning into the counter with an expression that told me he was thinking just as hard about the situation as I was. He looked down at the printed-out photos I’d set between us, shaking his head. “That is pretty weird. And the papers and symbols are just as bad.”
I grimaced. “I just wish I understood what all of this means—if it means anything, you know?”
“Did you snap any pictures of the desk before you left?” Julius asked, scanning the photos of the bookshelves.
I shook my head. “I ran out of time. Maybe I can go back down there the next time I visit.”
Talon’s eyes shot up and captured mine. “You’re not going back.”
I frowned at him. “I have to.”
He gestured to the photos. “Not until we know what all of this means. It’s definitely disturbing, especially after what you found in the lock box. We’re not sending you into a potentially deadly situation for information. You’re not a spy.”
I narrowed my eyes in challenge. “No, but they are my family. It’s not like any of you could waltz in there and get access anywhere near as easily.”
“Talon’s right,” Julius said. “It would be reckless to go back without more information. We won’t tell you where you’re allowed to go, but please, give us a chance to see what we can make of this first.”
“I wasn’t planning on heading right back there today,” I said. “But even if I did, I can take care of myself.”
Garrison nudged me with his elbow, his tone wryly affectionate. “Sweetheart, nobody claimed that you couldn’t. But you do have a bit of a blind spot for your family, and we won’t let them exploit that—exploit you.”
I wanted to argue that I didn’t have a blind spot, but it would be a lie, and all of them knew it. No matter how much evidence arose against the Maliks, a part of me still wanted to believe it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t help searching for ways to deny the facts that had been laid out before me.
Blaze pulled the photo of one of the coded documents toward him, running his finger below each of the numbers that looked like years. “If these are dates, as the numbers suggest, it’s possible they’ll match up with some factor to do with the missing kids that I’ve found… Now that I have this, I might be able to break the rest of the code. I’ll see what I can do.”
He switched back and forth between the photos and his laptop, so immersed that he didn’t even glance at the rest of us. A weird tremor formed in my stomach, both anticipating the answers I’d worked so hard to get and dreading them at the same time.
“Was there anything else strange about the basement room outside of these pictures?” Julius asked.
“I took pictures of everything that seemed at all significant.” I lifted the photo that showed the image of the country home. “Any idea what this could be about when there’s no record of them owning another home? Why would they keep a picture hanging on the wall of some random house?”
“It could be one that used to belong to them and passed out of the family,” Talon suggested.
I hummed to myself. “I guess it could be that. Something they lost somehow and want to remember. No one’s ever mentioned an old house that they miss to me, but obviously there’s a lot they haven’t revealed so far.”
“They’re definitely keeping a lot of secrets,” Garrison muttered.
But what did it all mean? We didn’t know what the dates meant, just like we didn’t know anything about the house or the odd items on the bookshelves. There wasn’t nearly enough proof to draw any kind of conclusion. The only hope we had of finding evidence was Blaze, and he was currently frowning at his laptop with no sign of cracking the code yet.
“Where do we go from here?” I asked when nobody else offered any insight. “We have all of these clues, but we have nothing to connect them to. We don’t even have a working theory.”
Julius leaned into the countertop and swiped his hand across his face. He didn’t know either. Whatever the Maliks were hiding, they kept it hidden too well. What if Blaze couldn’t figure out what the parchments meant? We still wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
Garrison straightened up and took on a brisk tone. “It’s no good standing around here brooding while the tech head does his work. Staring at the pictures isn’t going to make them speak to us.” He tapped my arm. “Why don’t you and I go scope out the place where Malik’s wife works? You said she takes Fridays off, right? So she won’t be there to notice. I can chat up her colleagues and see what they’ll let slip about her, and you can pickpocket a few phones we can scan for texts and emails exchanged with her.”
My legs itched to move, to have something more to do, but I hesitated, biting my lip. “I don’t know. Iris hardly talks about her job. It doesn’t seem like she’s that invested.” All I knew about it was that she worked in insurance.
Garrison shrugged. “What’s more likely to turn up something—standing here doing nothing or trying out a little more scouting?”
I had to admit he had a point. And now that he’d proposed the idea, the thought of sitting around in the house made me want to explode.
I glanced at Julius, and he gave me a nod. “You’ll want to be careful about it, but you already know that. As does Garrison.” He shot the younger man a pointed look. “Be quick. We don’t want anyone realizing why you were nosing around.”
I bounced on my feet, restless energy coursing through me. “All right. Let’s see what we can find.”
