Chapter 13 #2
She pushes open the door, and I step in.
The smell hits first—old paper and ink, dry and metallic, with an undertone of dust that clings to the back of the throat.
The overhead lights buzz faintly, washing the cramped space in a sterile glow.
Boxes identical to the ones I’m carrying crowd the room, stacked in uneven towers.
Hundreds of old newspaper articles are spread across the tables, edges curled, headlines faded to a dull sepia.
It looks like someone tried to organize chaos and then gave up halfway through.
“Over here,” she says, dropping her box onto a long table with a thud. I set mine beside it, trying not to breathe too deeply; the scent reminds me of crypts, old air sealed in too long.
“Well then, I’ll leave you to…” I glance around again. It’s not quite a mess, but it’s definitely something. “... whatever this is.”
I’m reaching for the door when she calls out, “Wait. You were there.”
I stop. Turn. “I was where?”
“Here,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “In Forsyth during the spree.”
“Still not following.”
“The Carver,” she continues, leaning her hip against the shiny counter’s edge nonchalantly. “You must remember it.”
The Forsyth Carver. His reign of terror kept the city on edge for a long time, not dissimilar to the fear weaving through our town now. “I remember.”
The Barons had been busy then, answering the call for the many families who wanted their dead given rites and buried in the crypts, safely tucked away. Not all that different from how things are right now, with the kidnappings.
“Did you know him?” she presses.
“I did—vaguely. He was East End, but no one of importance,” I say, as if that’s enough. And it is. She nods in understanding. Frats don’t intermingle, and I was a Royal. A basic PNZ pledge at the time wouldn’t have been on my radar.
“Was it a surprise?” she asks, voice tighter now, less defensive and more… searching.
“Absolutely. No one had a clue who was behind the murders. They were vicious and brutal. Barbaric.”
He’d taken his time, slicing into the victims, causing intentional pain.
“You believe in legacy and bloodlines and shit,” she continues. This may be the longest conversation we’ve had. No, I’m sure of it. “Do you think that kind of trait passes down from parent to child?”
She’s asking about the Carver; it was known at the time that he had a child, but I can only think about Remy.
He inherited more than the color of her eyes and artistic abilities.
The troubles he’s had with his mental state started when he hit puberty, although if I’m being truthful, I saw signs long before that.
What I brushed off as sensitivities or eccentric behavior…
it all led to Remy slipping into a dark crisis.
The fixations and obsessive habits, the slips into dissociation.
Later, the self-medication. Watching him struggle the same way she did was intolerable.
And unacceptable.
To this day, I have to hope and pray that the true evil in her didn’t carry over.
For all of us.
“Why are you asking me this?” Digging up the past in Forsyth only leads to damage.
“The police mentioned a child,” she replies, her tone clipped, as if she’s trying to sound offhand, but can’t quite pull it off.
She turns toward the table and skims a hand across the scattered papers, fingers brushing headlines like she’s hoping one of them will speak back.
She plucks up a particular sheet, its edges softened by time.
The bold headline stares back: Forsyth Carver Dead in Murder-Suicide.
And beneath it, smaller, but somehow louder: Toddler Found on Scene.
“A child that would be in his early twenties now,” she says quietly.
“The kid’s identity was never disclosed. We don’t even know if it was a male or female,” I remind her. “Protocol would have been for them to go with family—maybe not even local.”
“It seems like quite the coincidence that twenty years later, Forsyth is under the same cycle of terror, that’s all.
” She sets the paper down with more care than she picked it up, as though aware she’s touching a live wire.
“I don’t know about you,” she adds, leveling a look at me over her shoulder, “but I don’t believe in coincidences. Not in this town.”
There’s a beat of silence–thick and expectant, the kind that makes the hum of the fluorescent lights feel suddenly too loud.
I watch her study the articles again, her jaw tight, her distrust of me and the world braided together so neatly I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. She isn’t wrong to question the pattern. She isn’t wrong to be afraid of it, either.
“Be careful with that line of thinking,” I tell her, softer than I intend.
“Some things loop back on themselves because people can’t let the past die.
Other times…” I trail off, because finishing the thought feels like stepping through a door I’m not sure either of us should open.
“Other times, there’s nothing there at all. ”
She doesn’t answer, but her expression says she doesn’t believe me.
And maybe she shouldn’t.
“One thing I can say with certainty, Lavinia, is that you should focus on your family. The people you care about. Those are the ones that tend to become the victims in this place.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Her sister. Remy’s friend Tate. Her mother. Her father. The Lucia line is one person away from being extinguished. We both know it.
I reach for the door again, and this time she lets me go. The scent of old paper clings to me as I step out, like the past trying to follow.