Page 67 of The Pawn

If my face weren't already painted white, I'd be turning pale as a ghost right now.

The envelope has just one word scrawled across the front in messy handwriting: LEGACIES.

It's addressed to me.

Chapter 35

Curiosity killed the cat, and it certainly won't help the revenge-planning anonymous social media blogger. But I can't resist opening the envelope, even as I wonder who it could be from. The lack of postage seems to suggest it came from someone on campus, but I don't know how anybody could possibly suspect me. I've done all my work as Legacies on an incognito tab of my browser, routed through a simple VPN, or on a separate profile on my phone.

Somehow I must've tipped my hand, though. For all I know, this packet has some kind of nerve agent inside it. I tip the contents of it out onto my bed anyway, careless and endlessly hungry for a scandal to expose.

It's not poison, though. It's an entire dossier, one that makes my mouth water and my arms tingle with adrenaline and excitement.

It takes me a while to sort through the papers and photographs. Spreading them out on my comforter, I sit cross-legged in the middle and study them one by one. I feel like some kind of private detective, albeit a half-cocked one with little understanding of what I'm looking at.

The first piece I manage to figure out is an accident report. It's been scrawled on by a police officer's harried hand. There are two copies of it, though, I discover as I sift through the papers.

Both are dated July 12th of last year. Both report the same two license plates were involved in the crash. Both have photographs of the cars stapled to the report: a silver Mercedes and an old beaten-up Ford sedan.

Those are where the similarities end. One report claims the fault of the accident was a drunk driver; the other says that it was a deer in the road. One report says Lawrence Dawson was driving the car; the other says...

The other says Cole Masterson was driving the car when it crashed.

It takes me a while to figure out the details, but the more I see, the more I freak out. Apparently, Cole was involved in a car crash last year that killed the driver in the other car. There was a passenger in the car, a Michael Yates Jr., whose name is vaguely familiar.

I don't bother trying to place him, though, because there's another detail about the crash that's bothering me.

The original report says there were thirteen crime scene photographs taken by the responding officer. But the doctored report, the one that claims it was just a deer in the road that cause the crash, claims there were only twelve photographs. Both reports only have twelve photographs stapled to them, though, and they're each identical.

Laying the photos out on my comforter, I study them, letting my eyes unfocus. First I look for any differences between the two that I might've missed—but no, they really are identical. Then I take one group of them and lay them out, trying to figure out if there's a missing piece.

The office took photos of both bumpers of the cars, front and back. The sides of both cars—that's eight photos total. Then four wide shots of the cars from each direction, further away to get them in.

There aren't any detail shots, which is what the thirteenth photo would've had to have been. I can't figure out what it might be, though—a picture of the interior of the car, maybe, or of the victim. But according to the report, the driver was taken away in an ambulance and died in the hospital; they wouldn't have stopped to take pictures of her in the middle of saving her life. That scratches that idea.

My face itches from the makeup, so I get up and grab my makeup remover wipes, as well as the tweezers Mariana recommended to help me take the latex off. Holly is still out; she said she'd be crashing at Cole's until curfew tonight, which is just as well for me, because I don't want her to catch me with the envelope.

As I wipe the makeup off my face, I pace back and forth in front of my bed, restless. It feels like my mind is close to figuring this out. There's something there, something I'm missing.

Going through the photos one by one again, I stare at them and wait for my instincts to kick in and give me a clue.

When I hit the photo of the Mercedes, taken from the back, I pause. There's a little detail that's off: the trunk is halfway open, mangled from the car bouncing back and hitting a tree on the side of the road.

In the little sliver of the open trunk is something that sits queasily in my stomach. Something...sinister.

A tarp, and just beneath it, sticking out a little... the edge of a foot with bright pink nails.

No.It can't be. But... it is.

Mind whirling, I go back to the report and study the line that mentions fatalities.

In the original report, the scrawled handwriting says "one fatalities." I though it might be a typo, but it isn't. The word "one" is in different handwriting—the same messy handwriting on the front of the envelope. The ink isn't photocopied to death on the word "one" like it is on the rest; whatever other number was there was whited out and replaced by a clever hand that wanted me to know certain things—but not others.

There were two fatalities the night Cole Masterson drunkenly crashed his car into another.

The driver of the other car.

And the dead body in the trunk of his Mercedes.

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