Interlude
A detective is a seeker of justice. A journalist is a seeker of truth.
After three students vanished, journalists swarmed the campus of Warren University to do what the detectives could not.
Willem Pendel was one such journalist, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter whose investigative pieces had appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, and the New Yorker.
He had noticed a pattern of unexplained disappearances, and it was his intention to write a nonfiction book about whatever he found out.
According to Pendel, the administration was remarkably helpful.
He was allowed to examine dormitories and classrooms. He was allowed to research in libraries and retrace steps across the quad.
He was allowed to study student records and interview living family members.
It was the evidence that gave him trouble.
It was nonexistent, as if Letitia Rose, Manuel Sharp, and Angel Mclaughlin had never walked these unhallowed halls.
Pendel had written takedowns of well-protected government figures that had left more of a paper trail than three students from two different decades.
Instead, he wrote about the peculiarities of Warren.
The rooks and hummingbirds and owls that gathered on campus in eerie packs, living peacefully together while watching the students with eyes that held an almost-human wisdom.
Their unorthodox start and the rumors of paranormal activity that they had never quite shaken.
The Old Masters, a secret society that no one could truly prove existed, and the Godwin Scholars, a not-so-secret society that contributed reams of esoteric research to the world.
That book would never reach publication.
Willem Pendel was found dead of a heart attack in his office at the age of thirty-three, face down on his own notes.
His final page of writings included sketches of birds, each one more detailed than the last, staring up at the ceiling with a peculiar sort of malice that gave his widow chills.