Small Acts
The Letters in the Wall

Missing Pages

August 25, 2026 · Part 8 of 10 · 2 min

Nobody on a four-person crew disappears a photo from a locked tablet by accident, and Dash spent the rest of that morning doing math he hated. Odette had the passcode. Gus had watched her set it. Dash himself had held the tablet exactly once.

"Say it," Gus said, when the silence went on too long in the trailer. "You're doing the thing where you think it and don't say it. Just ask me."

"Did you take the letters, Gus?"

Gus didn't flinch, which somehow made it worse and then, a half second later, better.

"No," he said. "But I know who did, and it's on me, so sit down."

He told it slow, like a man setting down something heavy he'd carried a long way. His late brother-in-law, Otto — no relation to Attwater, different Otto, Dash's head spun trying to keep them straight — had worked as a caretaker at the community center for eleven months in 1977 and '78, before quitting without notice and refusing for the rest of his life to say why.

"All he'd ever tell me, drunk, once, at Thanksgiving twenty years back — 'I covered for Arthur Pemberton and I've hated myself every day since.' Never said covered what. Died before I could ask again." Gus's jaw worked. "When I saw that plaque, that name, I about walked off the job right there. Didn't say anything because I wasn't sure. Then we found the letters and I was sure."

"So you took the S letter," Dash said.

"I took a photo of the original — off Odette's tablet, while she was in the bathroom, three days ago, I'm not proud of it — and I drove it to a retired detective I know two counties over. Man worked cold cases his whole career. I wanted somebody who knew what they were doing to have it before we did something stupid and lost the only piece of real evidence to a lawyer's shredder."

"You should have told me," Dash said, and heard how tired it came out.

"I should have. I was scared you'd want to go straight to the news with it, half-cocked, and get it thrown out on some technicality before it ever helped Sylvie." Gus met his eyes. "I deleted my own copy off Odette's tablet after. Should've told you that too. I'm sorry."

Dash's phone rang before he could answer. Unknown number, area code two counties over.

He answered. Listened. Sat down hard on the trailer step.

"What?" Odette said. "Dash, what is it?"

"That detective Gus talked to," Dash said slowly. "He ran Simeon's name against an open cold case file from 1979. Skeletal remains, found near the Milbrook Falls creek bed that spring. Never identified." He looked up at both of them. "They're reopening it. And they want to know if Sylvie Lindqvist is willing to give a DNA sample."

Continue the story Part 9: What the Ground Kept →

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