Duskwood Mysteries

Part 35

I quickly ran inside the house and was about to rush to the room when Richy grabbed my hand, "Jade what are you doing?" "I'll tell you. I just..." I started. "No. Tell me now." Richy said. I stopped, "You heard what Johnson said before we left?" I said. "Yes and I know what you are going to do next. You are going to find your dad's notes but I need to talk to you before that." Richy said. "What?" I asked. "Why didn't you tell Johnson everything? He offered to help. Or did you miss that part?" Richy asked. "Are you kidding me? Tell Johnson and screw everything we've have worked on so far. Need I remind you the trouble all of us have gone through. You injured yourself, Jessy got hit over the head, the markings, the threatening calls, the stalking, ..." "I know everything. And we have a way to end it. You said Johnson is resourceful. It is best to hand him the reigns Jade." Richy said. "No way. Telling him everything is risky." I said. Richy gave me a look, "Risky for Jake you mean." "That's not what.." I started. "Save it Jade. After all this you are still worried about him? What about Hannah?" Richy asked. "I am doing this for Hannah." I responded. "No Jade you think you are but you are doing this for him. Jade he threatened us. Now I get that he is desperate but how much time till he does something drastic? We have a way out of this. Tell Jake that we are going to let Johnson into the case. We give Jake time to disappear and tell Johnson, and Johnson finds Hannah. You told it yourself this is way over our head." Richy said. "How can you say that? Finding Hannah is important to me." I said quietly.

"I know but so is Jake and you can't let that cloud your judgement." Richy said. I knew he made sense. But then my mind wasn't ready to give up, "No I am not telling Johnson..." "Oh God. Jake is so unpredictable right now. Are you waiting for him to shoot someone to tell you that he is so unhinged?" Richy asked. "No. Jake will not do that, and I am not saying this because I'm blinded by emotions. Richy please you have to trust me on this. Give it one last shot. I feel that we are really really close to finding Hannah. Plus this is the way your secret remains a secret too. Don't you get it? We tell Jake what happened with Johnson. He needs to know. We follow this lead and if you start having doubts about this along the way you can tell Johnson. I will not stop you but please let us follow through this Richy please." I pleaded. Richy looked at me with a pained expression that literally hurt me more than anything. "Alright. This last time Jade. If anything goes wrong I will tell Johnson. Ok so where were you going to go to get your dad's notes?" Richy asked. "I am thinking he might have kept it in his study. Its down the hall." I said walking towards it. Richy followed.

Dad's study was one room that was left untouched. I wanted to preserve it the way it was. I would sometimes come into the room if I missed him a lot or just try to imagine what advise he would give me when I would get into any tough situations. I opened the door to the room. One wall was covered with bookshelves with rows of books ranging from law books to encyclopedias to medical books to even some science and technology journals. Right in front of it was a wooden desk with an office chair. The adjacent wall was lined with French windows that let the evening light in. On one corner there was a couch, one armchair and a coffee table. On the furthest corner were cardboard boxes filled with what I assumed was dad's documents from work. Also presuming that the notes would be in those boxes as well. "Woah, this looks like the dean's office" Richy exclaimed. "Which dean?" I asked. "Any dean. Could be university, school, ..." He stopped talking when he saw me roll my eyes. "So where are his notes?" he asked. "I think there?" I said pointing to the boxes in the corner. He looked at where I was pointing and did a double take. "Sweetheart please tell me you don't mean all the boxes." Richy said. I nodded. "Are you kidding me? There must be atleast 50 boxes there." Richy said. "79 actually. Some are in the closet." I said. He looked at me, "No way I am reading papers." "Come on its not that bad. They have the years on them" I said but I was mentally sure that this would be a tedious task. "I think before all that don't you think we need to tell Grumpy about what we found?" Richy said. I nodded. We sat down at the couch and Richy called Jake. One ring later Jake picked up. "Hello," Jake said. "So, we met Johnson today. Turns out Jade's dad was Ted Madruga's lawyer." Richy said. "Oh, is that why Hannah called the firm?" Jake asked. "We don't know the exact reason but yes she did want to speak to Jade's dad. The assistant kinda gave her Jade's number thinking that she probably wanted to get in touch with the family since he passed away. She said that Hannah was really desperate and hysterical when she called." Richy said. There was a pause. "I see," Jake said after a while. Richy looked at me and shrugged, "I think you owe someone an apology Jake." "Did you get the full case files on Madruga?" Jake asked ignoring the statement. "No Johnson couldn't give us access to it, but he did mention that Jade's dad kept notes, so we are planning to look into that." Richy said. "Great get the notes here and we can sort it out." Jake said. "Sure, can you send a moving truck?" Richy asked sarcastically. "What?" "There are lot of boxes. Its going to take us serious time to get through it. Fortunately, the boxes have years written on them so that narrows something, but we still have a lot to go through." Richy said. "Ok then try getting the ones from the year of Madruga's case. Try wrapping that up soon." Jake said. "Hey, don't order me around. We aren't your dogs." Richy snapped. "Need I remind you why we are doing this?" Jake retorted. "Fine. There is no point arguing with you. We'll get to it." Richy said. No response. "Hello?" Richy asked. "I'm here," Jake said. "Yeah, but why? Don't you have anything better to do?" Richy asked. "Yes I do. Bye." Jake said and hung up.

Richy looked at me, "I think he wanted to talk to you." "He didn't say so. I think he just wanted to know if I hadn't run away or something," I said dryly. Richy shrugged, "Thinking about all this makes my brain hurt. I think we better get to reading now." "Yeah," I said. We pull boxes from the stack and check for the ones that are from 10 years ago. We find 4 boxes that have that year and start rummaging through the papers. However, going through them I don't see anything that look like notes. They look like some financial documents, bank statements, tax statements, etc. "Ok I am starting to think that these are not the case documents your dad worked on. More like his personal financial documents. I see a few property papers maybe insurance nothing about work though. Are you sure his notes would be here?" Richy asked. "I don't know. I thought it would be." I said feeling puzzled. "Maybe Johnson knows where it is?" Richy said. "Maybe. God, I don't want to talk to Johnson again." I said. "Yeah, that guy is scary." Richy said. He looked around at the room. "Seems like your dad liked to keep up to date with the world." "Yeah, he had to, given his job." I said. "You know I was wrong. This may not look completely like the dean's office. This wall especially makes it look like a studio." He said pointing to the panels on the fourth wall. "I remember those. Dad got it installed because I used to get disturbed when he used to yell on top of his voice here. Either on call or ...." I trailed realizing something. "Or what?" Richy asked. "Or while dictating on his voice recorder. Of course. Dad hated to write that's why he used to use a voice recorder to dictate notes which his assistant or interns used to type out." I said excitedly. "So where are the typed notes? On his computer?" He asked. "It would have been on his computer but I am pretty sure he had all of them also stored in a backup drive." I said. "Where's the backup drive?" Richy asked. I thought for a moment. "Dad had a safe here in this room for important documents. Maybe there?" I said walking towards the bookcases. I remembered he had a safe behind some law books on the 4th row from the bottom. I removed the books and removed a false panel revealing the safe. I entered the code and the safe opened. Many documents and files were in the safe along with a hard drive. Bingo. I removed it and showed it to Richy. "Awesome. This is much better." Richy said.

I connected the drive to my laptop. The screen said, Please enter password. Richy looked at me, "Do you know the password?" "No but we do have our own hacker who can open this for us," I said. "So, we head back?" Richy asked. "Guess we do." I replied.