Page 71 of Midnight Legacy

“These pages should reveal what he was hiding if you apply heat to them. He showed me how to use something acidic like vinegar or lemon juice to write with that couldn’t be seen when it dried. The heat should turn it brown.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Jordan had appeared at the door with Ash beside him. “Secret messages in acid? That’s like something from a children’s mystery book.”

“It had us stumped last night,” Ash pointed out. “We spent hours trying to work out what that folder was about.”

“Come on!” Cassandra lifted a piece of paper and wandered back into the kitchen. She held it over the heat of the aga cover until brown writing appeared. The message left me even more confused.

“I have no idea what that means.”

Her grin was filled with mischief. “These are book locations for his library. It was one of the reasons I never touched his books, once you start moving them, then any message he left me would be lost.” She held the page up. “This book will have the information you’re looking for.”

It was a set of coordinates.

I heated another page, and more writing appeared.

“Our business address had visitors,” I informed Jordan while we gathered pages and revealed the cryptic messages held in them.

“I noticed,” he replied dryly. “I hope they wiped their feet on the way out.”

Ash laughed darkly. “I would have been more impressed if they had found one of our unregistered addresses.”

Cassandra continued working her way through folders and the other messages her uncle had left in the boxes. Every new piece of information added another layer of complexity to our situation. We were trying to play catch-up on an investigation from twenty years ago.

“This one has a date and location on it,” Ash said. “Oh…”

Jordan threw him an exasperated look and plucked it from his hands. His expression grew stony cold and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up in warning. “That’s the date and location of my parents’ death. Why is this in the folder without context?”

“Your parents had Council connections,” I pointed out.

“There’s something else on the page,” Jordan said, his voice laced with a foreign emotion. He held it back over the oven. “It’s one of the book references.”

Jordan studied the piece of paper, his brow furrowed. “Do you think my parents were assassinated because of this fucking mess?” It looked like we were going on a road trip because there was no way that Jordan was going to let that drop. Since I didn’t know, I didn’t answer. He was already hunting through the contents of the box again in search of information.

That folder revealed that our investigation was no longer about Cassandra and her family. Everything now focused on the Council and the men who ran it.

We were in more danger than we first realised. We’d been intent on protecting Cassandra, and with every piece of knowledge we gleaned from every scrap of paper we found, our own lives now hung in the balance.

When we returned to the room, Cassandra had put the pieces of paper and items that Dante had left in the centre of the table, each of them in a specific location, with items beside them.

“What’s this?” I asked, stepping behind her to view it from her position.

“Every page is a slightly different size. The markings on them tell me where they fit together. This nick matches the nick on this page, so it fits here, a bit like a jigsaw.” She pointed to another two marks which lined up.

“So we have a collection of blank pages. Do we need to heat these as well?” I asked, leaning over to lift one.

“I don’t think so,” Cassandra replied. “When Dad did this, he tended to use Mum’s baking soda to make a paste that he wrote with. I’ll need some juice.”

We watched her wander out of the room and return with cranberry juice. She dabbed it on and words began to appear. We’d all become so accustomed to high-tech messages that the basic stuff that kids used had foiled us.

A message slowly appeared over the pages:

Cassandra,

For the past 20 years, I believed Frank and his family to be alive and happy. Now I find that they have been dead for years. Everything I’ve done has been to protect my family. After my wife died, I vowed to destroy the Council and everyone in it. They are a cancer that has spread deep into society. I’ve spent years plotting moves on this macabre chessboard and soon I will be ready to bring my plan into play. If I had known what happened, I would have come home in an instant and ensured you were kept safe.

I will be in touch soon with a way to contact me. The location lies in the items I left behind. I know Frank taught you our methods of communication. All I hope is that you remember them after all this time.

Nothing is as it seems, and soon you will realise that friends are enemies and those accused of being villains are actually the heroes. Trust no one and remember everything your dad told you. I will do everything in my power to save what little remains of my family and now that I know where you are, I will always be watching.

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