Page 32 of In the Dark of the Past

The folders weren’t right. I organized them by year and then alphabetically—decades of habit. But the 2016 folder was out of place, wedged behind 2018. And when I pulled it free, it felt too light.

I opened it.

Half the contents were gone. Removed. Cleanly. Purposefully.

My stomach dropped.

I checked three more files. Eleanor Jenkins. Kara Malloy. Even the Monroe trespassing case. Each one had something missing or out of place. The Jenkins file had been pulled from the back entirely and left loose on the desk—as if someone wanted me to know it had been touched.

I had seen no forced entry. No signs of a break-in. Whoever had done this had access or knew exactly what they were doing.

I swore under my breath and grabbed my phone. But before I could dial, a notification lit up the screen.

RIVER: Can you come over? Now.

I didn’t hesitate. The weirdness here could wait for a little bit.

Her porch light was on when I arrived, and the windows glowed like they always had when her parents were alive—a false sense of comfort. The moment she opened the door, I saw it in her eyes. It was the same unease twisting in my gut.

“What happened?” I asked.

She held up a leather-bound journal. Old. And oddly familiar.

“It was on the porch when I got home. No envelope. No note. Just this.”

It was then that I noticed her latex gloves. I motioned to her hand with an eyebrow raise.

“Hair color gloves. And when you’re as interested in true crime as I am, you know better than to touch evidence without protection.”

A strange surge of pride rose within me.

We sat at her kitchen table while she flipped it open. Most of the pages were covered in her father’s tight, slanted handwriting. Notes, formulas that many cops used, scribbled timelines. But then we reached the center.

The pages had been torn out, and in their place was a single folded, loose sheet of paper.

Some ghosts should stay buried.

The words were written in thick black ink, the script jagged and rushed but deliberate.

I leaned back and ran a hand over my mouth. “Jesus, River.”

“It gets worse,” she said, flipping to the inside back cover. A small note had been penciled there, likely by her father. A list of names.

Eleanor Jenkins. Marta Bloom. Josephine Graves. And one that hadn’t come up before.

Alexine Reed. And beside that one, a quickly drawn red eye.

“You recognize that last one?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No. But I’ll know more in a minute.”

After some online searches and one quick call to the county clerk, we called in the others. Within the hour, Autumn, Myra, Cade, Nivea, and Andra were crowded into River’s living room. Someone brought coffee. Someone else brought tequila. No one touched either.

The room buzzed with a tension just under the surface. Controlled, but ready to break.

Autumn held the journal like it might bite. “All of this stuff is connected.”

“It feels like a warning,” Myra said and ran a hand through her hair.