by Blair Young
I sighed. There was a lump in my throat, and I suddenly realized this was going to be a lot harder than I thought. I wanted to find clues as to who might have been the one to murder my parents, but looking through the work that my dad did made me realize just how dangerous his job really was.
There had been times when I was upset with him for not being around as much as I thought he could have been, but now I could see that he was doing a lot of work for the public. I wondered how many people he had helped during his time on the job, and how many people he landed in jail because of his investigations.
Then, there was a part of me that knew that could be the reason he was killed, too. If he got the wrong person thrown in jail – wrong, as in dangerous – then the other members who backed the person might come for him. Which also meant that they would have reason to include my mother in the murder as well.
But, that still didn’t answer why they didn’t kill me. I was at the house often enough, they could have waited for me to get home before they committed the crime, or they might have waited until I got back from school or wherever I was when the crime was committed.
They didn’t, however, and they never came back. In fact, no one seemed to think that I had been in any danger at all from the situation. I was given to the foster care system for a few days, then I was given to Susan, but no one seemed to think that I was going to be hunted down by these people, or I had any reason to believe they also wanted me dead.
That is, until the note.
Finally, my eyes fell on a file cabinet in the corner of the room.
“This might be something,” I said. I walked over and pulled it open. It was locked, but the key was right on top of the cabinet and easy to find. I couldn’t imagine that my father would have been the one to leave it there. Then again, he did do some strange things at times, and that might have just been the most obvious place to hide it.
I flipped through the files as Damon continued to look around the room. He still seemed to be rather uneasy, and I wondered if there were more secrets than he was willing to tell me for legal reasons. But, now wasn’t the time to try to drag those out of him.
There was something in my bones that told me I was close to finding out something. I didn’t know if it would be a name of a person to use as a suspect, or if it would be answers directly, but I knew I was getting close to finding something that would make this entire trip worthwhile.
“Why don’t you see if you can find anything around the place that’s not in here?” I suggested when Damon walked by a third time.
“I already checked. The whole place has been cleared out besides the file cabinet, which seems weird to me if you ask me,” he said with a shrug.
“Most of the files in here say they are closed or inactive,” I said. “Maybe if someone did look through it they couldn’t find what they were looking for.”
“Or they found out they weren’t on the list any longer and decided to go about their days with peace of mind,” Damon said. “Do you happen to see anything about me?”
“I hope you’re joking,” I said as I looked up at him. He shrugged. “This isn’t the time for jokes. I’m looking for something important.”
“Sorry, it’s just that I don’t like this place, and I’m eager to get out of here,” he said.
“You are more than welcome to wait outside if you’re scared,” I told him sarcastically.
“Who said anything about being scared? I just don’t like it in here and I want to get this wrapped up so we can get back home,” he said defensively.
I was about to give up in my search through the cabinet anyway. I couldn’t find anything that mentioned me, and there didn’t seem to be anything that mentioned an adoption, either. At the same time, the files that I opened all said that they were closed, and that wasn’t going to do me any good, either.
I didn’t see my parents being hunted down or killed by someone who had already been a case closed situation, and this whole thing was starting to feel like a real waste of time. I didn’t want to admit it, but there was a part of me that was starting to think maybe Damon was right.
But, right before I closed the file cabinet, something caught my eye. It was the very corner of a file that was tucked in the far back, almost bent beneath the rest. It seemed as though it had been shoved back there in haste, almost as though whoever had put it back there had been trying to hide it from someone.
And, if I wasn’t trying to be so thorough, then I might have missed it myself.
“Wait a second,” I said to Damon as he was about to head for the door. “I think I found something.”
“What is it?” he asked, suddenly curious.
“It says that this file is active. My father was the only one who worked in this office, so anything that was active was a person or people he was investigating for one reason or another,” I explained. “He told me once when I was a little girl how it all worked, back when I thought I wanted to be an investigator when I grew up.”
“Well, you’d be doing your father proud now,” Damon said with a smile. I knew he was trying to help, but I still didn’t feel like I was doing as good of a job as he was.
“Let’s see who he was after when he died,” I said. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and for a moment, the two of us hesitated. We both wanted to know, but there was a part of us that was scared to find out. Then, with a sudden impulse, I threw open the file and flipped through the four pieces of paper that were tucked inside.
Shock swept over me, and I could see by the look on Damon’s face that he, too, wasn’t sure how to react. There were four people in the file, and we lived with one of them.
Susan, Dean, Richard, and Pam. The names glared off the pages and Damon sucked in his breath.
“What the heck?” he breathed.
“Who are Richard and Pam?” I asked. “And why on Earth would he want to be investigating Susan and Dean?”
My mind was still spinning. Why would my father be investigating the woman I went to live with when he died? Why would I still go live with her after the fact? There had to be a reason he was trying to learn more about them, and how the heck was Dean related to any of this?
Clearly he and Susan knew each other, and they knew each other well. They were exes. But why did they break up? And how did my father know them?
“Who on earth are Richard and Pam?” I asked again, looking back up at Damon. His face was white as a sheet, and he looked like he might pass out. He put his hand to his forehead as he shook his head, his eyes wide and wild.
“Richard and Pam,” he said. “Are my real parents.”
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