Page 40 of Electric Kiss

“Yes. The pieces of the puzzle are coming together,” Luke replied.

“Can we have a recap and assume I wasn’t here for six months of this puzzle expedition?” Daisy asked.

“Okay,” Luke said, coming around to Daisy’s side of the table and hopping onto his bench next to the ledgers. “Mrs Philbott said that she had secretly digitised all his records and wondered if we wanted to put these ledgers into the museum so people could look up their ancestors and see where they are buried. There is a separate one for the Turners, and she thought it would be best if we hung onto that one.”

“Why?” Daisy asked, her curiosity piqued.

“Apparently, there’s some sensitive information in there about the Turner family that Mrs Philbott didn’t want to make public. She didn’t give me any more details, but whatever it is, it must be pretty serious.”

Daisy nodded, understanding the need for privacy. She had spent most of her life trying to keep her own family secrets hidden from the world.

“Have you looked?” Daisy asked.

Luke shook his head. “That’s why I called this meeting. The handover was an hour ago. I think we should find out together who is in the unmarked graves.”

Daisy wanted to text Nate and get him to the kitchens, but her brothers didn’t know about him, and Luke would be less than impressed she was seeing her school bully. When Daisy thought too hard about it, she scared herself that she needed to have a bully around her at all times. Her history of growing up in Turner Hall with a bully. How the bullies treated her at school, and then college when she graduated ahead of time and then on the rigs where most of the men thought she was a liability just because she had a vagina.

It wasn’t lost on her she was insanely attracted to the person who gave her hell when she was a teenager.

She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. Daisy was drawn to Nate’s rough edges and his confidence despite her attempts to clear her thoughts of him. Remembering the men she had encountered on the rigs, the ones who thought she was weak because she was a woman. But Daisy was far from weak, and she knew it.

With a deep breath, she opened her mouth to speak, but Archer beat her to it.

“Open it,” he said.

Luke picked up what she assumed was the Turner ledger and thumbed through the pages. It was half the size of the other ledgers and thin. For a family that had a lot of deaths, there didn’t seem to be many pages. When Luke found what he was looking for, he scanned the page with his forefinger and then stabbed the page.

“Well, fucking hell,” he said, giving a humourless laugh.

“Luke,” Daisy snapped.

The others giggled at her impatience.

“All right, calm yourself. I thought Jason was the uptight one,” Luke said.

Jason gave him the finger and then looped his arm around Freya’s shoulder, bringing her in close. Jason’s kiss on her temple reminded Daisy of Nate kissing her temple when she was scared out of her mind.

“We found the tin in the warehouse, and inside were the birth certificates of four children plus some other stuff that makes little sense right now.”

“Like what?” Daisy asked.

“A list of plants and pesticides. I don’t know why she would keep those with her children’s birth certificates,” Luke said.

Daisy went cold all over and gripped the edge of the workbench, stilling her legs.

“You okay?” Jason asked, resting his hand over hers.

“Yep,” she said, repeatedly nodding.

With her other hand, she lifted her phone, held it to her face and then typed out a quick message. She tapped the side button and placed it back on the bench on her right side, where no one was sitting. No matter what they did as siblings, they sat in age order. No one was ever to her right side.

“What’s the link?” Daisy stammered out, desperately trying to hold on to reality before she spaced out.

She could feel it coming.

“Cynthia buried her partner and son under those unmarked gravestones. They died six months before Archer came back to Copper Island. It looks like she buried them here.”

“How did they die?” Erica asked.

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