Chapter 146
HANNAH
"Have you figured out what she was trying to say?" Cade asked, his voice strained with the tension of the past half hour.
I shook my head. The muscles in my neck were sore and stiff from peering at Willa's phone, going in and out of every app she could have written her thoughts in. I had even been through almost every voice note she had sent or received in her recent chats.
The only thing we had found so far was that entry in her notes app. And we were still as confused as we were before we found it. We didn't know if it was related to what happened to her or just the usual gossip Willa had for me.
Why hadn't she written her thoughts in more detail? It was so frustrating to have had to be a tiny but important piece of the clue at our fingertips.
Straightening my neck, I glanced over at Chase. He was sitting half in and half out of the car with a laptop. His head was bent forward, his nose almost touching the screen. His fingers flew over the keys. He kept letting out little grunts of frustration whenever his Google searches came up with nothing.
"Chase? Anything yet?" Cade asked, stepping away from peering over my shoulder and turning his attention to his brother.
I could have told him Chase had found nothing yet, but I understood Cade. Talking, even when one knew it was pointless and not solving anything, was at least a way to ease off some tension.
"Don't talk to me now," Chase complained with a frown. He held up a finger. "Wait..." His eyes widened a bit as he leaned even closer to the computer.
We all held our breaths. Could this be the break we had been waiting for? A moment later, Chase relaxed. A false alarm obviously.
"It's nothing," he said bitterly. He thumped on a key with more force than necessary. "Just a bit of biography about a guy called Marcus Parker. And I typed Maxwell! Stupid search engine!"
"What if we're going about this the wrong way?"
We all turned to Jace, who hadn't spoken in a while. He had been pacing, stopping once in a while to check if I had found something else on Willa's phone.
"Yes," he continued. "Maybe this stuff we found in Willa's notes isn't even related to the poisoning. It probably is about something else entirely. We're wasting our time on this. We could be doing... something else to find the bastard that did this."
"Something else like what?" Chase said.
But Jace didn't have a clue.
"We're on the right track," I assured Jace.
"And how can you be so sure?" he said.
I struggled to put my feelings into words.
"I don't know," I finally said. "It's instinct. This Silvershade pack and Maxwell Parker guy are the clues we need. Someone didn't want Willa to tell me what she knew about this."
"You share most of Willa's classes. Can't you remember if she said or did anything out of the ordinary?" Chase asked.
"Yeah," Cade said. "She didn't keep any secrets from you."
I didn't have to think about it. I shook my head. Even with the shock of what had happened, I had been thinking a lot about the last few days with Willa, looking for the tiniest clue, but I had come up with nothing.
"How about you guys?" I asked.
Turned out they hadn't noticed anything either. Willa had been her perfectly normal self.
For the second time that afternoon, Chase leaned forward, staring at his computer screen with fixed intensity.
"I may have gotten something," he said.
We all crowded around him. On the screen was a headline in bold red caps.
TRAGEDY AT SILVERSHADE PACK, it read.
When Chase adjusted the screen, I saw the article was part of a newspaper publication, but was squashed between other stories with much bigger headlines.
"It's something to do with Silvershade Pack. Apparently, a tragic incident happened there some months ago. An entire family was murdered. A daughter went missing. There are rumours that she either died at another location, was kidnapped, or escaped..."
Chase trailed off as he read the rest of the article, his face clearly showing his disappointment. I stared off into space, wondering why the story in the article had stirred up something- a faint memory perhaps.
Or what is something someone had said to me recently? The more I tried to remember, the more it slipped further away like water through a crack.
I shelved the information for later when my brain wasn't all clogged up like it was now.
Chase shut his laptop. "I don't think this has to do anything with Willa or Hannah."
Cade and Chase agreed.
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