“Fuck,” I said with a sigh and ran a hand down my face. It was worse than he thought. He’d chalked her disappearance up to simply Cassandra being a runaway, but it was clearly more than that.
“Anything else I need to know? About the area or her case?”
On the table, Dag shuffled the flatware that had been wrapped in the napkin. Then his hands stopped, and he opened the folder in front of me. He started laying out photographs. Some of them looked like they were from college yearbooks. Some of them, with dangerous-looking shoulder pads, looked like they were 80s glamour shots. Some of them were in black and white, women with their hair marcelled and looking like they’d hang out with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. on the weekends.
“Eliza Powell,” Dag said, tapping what looked like the earliest photograph. “1927. Lessie Lynne, 1933. Theresa Cannette, 1936. Then it’s quiet for a while--or people are being made to be quiet. Cissy Taranto, 1988. Miranda Blanch, 1991. Janice Faulkner, no relation, 2000. Clair Cannette, 2008. That one is a relation, by the way. She’s a great niece or something of the one from ‘36. And, of course, Cassandra Mayfield. All of these girls were reported missing and were never found. All of them lived within a twenty-mile radius of Cyprus Manor. And are you ready for the freaky part?”
My eyes moved from picture to picture, following Dag’s finger with every movement. So many of them. So fucking many of them. Maybe Dag wasn’t the only one who needed a beer. I was about to tell him just that when a waitress wearing a t-shirt with Mills Diner printed on the left side of her chest, holding an order pad and a pen, came to a stop beside our booth. While I was ready to hear the rest, I was grateful for the interruption while my mind was trying to process everything.
“Are you two ready to order?” she asked. She seemed bored, and her tone indicated she hated her job.
“I’ll have a double-bacon cheeseburger with a side of fries and a soda,” I told her before glancing toward Dag.
“Same.”
Her pen flew over the pad as she wrote down our order and left without another word. Yeah, she wasn’t getting a big tip from me. Even if she hated her job, she could have faked it for five minutes. I took a deep breath, and turned my focus back to Dag who was looking through the file I’d given him on Mason, and wanted to wince at how haggard his face had grown over the span of the time we’d been there. The demons that’d taken up residence inside him in the disguise of guilt were eating him alive. I hoped he’d be able to find peace before it was too late.
“Okay,” I said after I cleared my throat to get his attention. “What’s the freaky part?”
“Twenty-three years old.” He tapped the first picture. “Twenty-three.” He tapped the next. “Twenty-three. Twenty-three. Twenty-three. All of them twenty-three years old.” A little grin twisted one side of his mouth. “I thought Theresa Cannette was an outlier because the report said her age was twenty-four. After all the shit with . . . with Mason, I couldn’t sleep. I found the 1930 census. I did the math. She was fucking twenty-three years old, Kade. They just got it wrong on the report.”
I let out a noise that was a combination of a gasp and a groan. Surely, there had to be more of a connection than that. “Why would someone want to kidnap and possibly kill twenty-three-year-old women?” I asked, more to myself than to Dag. If I figured that out, then I could hopefully find out what happened to Cassandra, and the others.
4
Jared
While Kade’s favorite part of an investigation was solving the thing, mine was something different—it was the research. I loved digging into the past, uncovering secrets, and finding the missing pieces to complete the complicated puzzles. It allowed me to work my brain and dive into my inner curiosity. I was forced to think, try different angles, and keep that wheel in my brain spinning. It felt good to be the reason the metaphorical smoking gun was found, and that it was my hard work that helped close a case. And the look of pride and small bit of praise Kade would shoot my way made all the hard work worth it.
When he returned from whatever meeting it was he’d had, the energy that radiated off him was so strong the ground practically vibrated under my feet.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he announced gruffly before tossing a file on my desk. While I flipped through the photos and paperwork, Kade explained the situation about the missing girls that’d spanned over the course of decades.
“Wow,” I breathed. “This is…”
“Not a coincidence. What do you see that ties them all together?”
It wasn’t an unusual question from Kade. It was a game he liked to play with me to test my ability. Sometimes I’d find it easily, other times I’d struggle and feed into the anxiety that festered. I wanted to get it right so I didn’t let Kade down. And if he saw me battling to find the answer, he didn’t let on or steer me in the right direction. He preferred I’d figure it out on my own, since he wouldn’t always be around to help with the research.
I flipped through the photos again, noticing that there weren’t any similarities in their looks. As I continued to study the file, I came to the conclusion that none of them were related. And none of them shared a birthday. So what was it?
Wait a minute…
I narrowed my eyes as I scanned over their birthdays, and gasped when it finally hit me with the force of a Mack truck slamming into a building.
“They were all twenty-three,” I said with a gasp.
“Bingo!”
“B-but why twenty-three? What does that specific age have to do with anything?” I was mainly asking myself those questions but voiced them out loud.
“Hell if I know. But once we figure it out, maybe we can find out what happened to the girls.”
I glanced up long enough to give Kade a nod before returning my focus back to the file. While it was thin, I knew this was going to be a hard case with loads of tiny, daunting tasks. “This is going to be a lot of work.”
“Yup. Let’s get started.”
I instantly got to work making copies of the papers and photos in the file folder so I could have my own set, and then Kade and I divided up the tasks. Adding in Cassandra Mayfield meant there were seven girls total, so Kade took four and I took three—Eliza Powell, Lessie Lynne, and, Theresa Cannette.
Since their disappearances happened in the twenties and thirties, I had my work cut out for me. But I didn’t mind. It was a challenge I more than willingly accepted, and it was fun digging around to find their family and circle of friends. I knew the drill—stories were told over time, and someone had to know something. Or at least, some variation of it. Stories would become legends as the years progressed, so it’d be interesting to see what the latest one was.
Growing up in DuPage Parish, ghost stories surrounding the bayou were common. People supposedly being eaten by gators or disappearing into the fog were a thing growing up—scary stories told over a bonfire while roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. But everyone knew there was always a touch of truth behind tales told, or how else would they get started?
After I accepted the job offer from Kade I had no desire to get my PI license, but once I got more involved in the job, the more I realized I had a knack for it. I spoke with Kade and aside from studying for my master’s degree, I was also looking into obtaining my PI license. Working on the cases was the perfect experience for my training.