Chapter 8- A Network Of Possibilities

Ezra:

I awoke slowly- my eyes opening first to the sight of Davina, sitting impatiently by me. Then the rest of my body coordinated as I sat up. "Ezra, what did you figure out before you, well, passed out?", she asked me urgently. "What? No 'how are you feeling' or, at least, 'are you okay?", clearly I must've hit my head because joking with Davina during a serious situation is basically having a death wish, but she just shrugged it off and repeated her question. "What did you figure out?"

"Do you remember the school that day? The day they went to the lake", she nodded, "More specifically, do you remember what Vanessa was wearing". "Yeah, I remember she was wearing a navy sweater", she responded immediately followed by an "oh".

"Oh", she repeated again at a loss for words, so I spoke for her. "If Vanessa was wearing a navy sweater, why was her burgundy sweater at the lake? We went to the lake right after school so she couldn't have carried it with her, not that she would have a reason to".

"So why was it there?"

That was what we had to figure out. That was what we were going to figure out. Our first lead.

The first thing we did was inform Officer Garcia about it because that was the sensible thing to do. Next, we did something a bit more clichéd- we created a murder board, or in our case, a missing person board, no, a mystery board. Finally, we decided to go with the mystery board because the murder board was w

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ay too morbid and the missing person board just felt wrong somehow.

Our mystery board consisted of 4 post-its and my gaze shifted from one to another. One had the time period during which Nate and Vanessa had disappeared- 3:00-6:00. The second with the time that their parents had reported them to be missing- 6:30. The third with the sweater-breakthrough and the last with the question that had been hanging over our heads the entire time- was their disappearance their own doing or someone else's?

Davina and I were sure that it was someone else's doing, but at some point, that confidence had begun to falter by the slightest.

We needed to maintain the momentum and we were pretty much out of moves so we organized a search party- I know, what good is that going to do, right? But it was actually how we ended up finding our second and most important lead- a rock that had drops of blood smeared on them. Rachel, one of Vanessa's many friends, found it during the search party through the dense woods that occupied most of the west side of our town

On further analysis, the forensics department identified trace amounts of white phosphorus on it, allowing us to narrow down our search list to the one place where phosphorus is undeniably found in a high concentration- the sewer system. But that posed a new problem to us- Dawsbury was built under a network of sewers larger than any other; Nate and Vanessa could be in any one of the intersections in that network.