Chapter 12 - The Missing Mother
-12-
Sarah arrived at my house within ten minutes of my frantic phone call, bringing her battered laptop and a thermos of hot coffee. We sat at the kitchen island under the warm glow of the overhead pendant light, analyzing the network logs I had managed to salvage using an automated security script before the remote intrusion wiped my desktop.
“That wasn't just a standard hack,” Sarah said, her fingers flying across her keyboard as she parsed the residual hexadecimal code. “That was a localized packet relay. The sender wasn't in Washington or Europe. They were sitting within a half-mile radius of this house—probably parked in a vehicle right outside our street.”
“They’re watching us, Sarah,” I said, looking out the kitchen window toward the dark, quiet street outside. “And whoever sent that message knows about something else. Something buried in the past. ‘The mothers who came before you.’ Do you know what that could mean?”
Sarah paused her typing, frowning thoughtfully. “Well... back when Oakridge Academy first expanded its campus ten years ago, before Marcus and Victoria took over the administrative board, there was another prominent family involved in the founding endowment. The Reynolds family.”
“The Reynolds family?” I echoed.
“Yeah,” Sarah nodded. “Arthur Reynolds was a pioneer in pediatric neurology. But about eight years ago, right around the time Chloe was born, his wife—Clara Reynolds—suddenly disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The official police report claimed she suffered a mental breakdown and abandoned her family to move overseas. But rumor among the older custodial staff was that she had discovered irregularities in the school’s early clinical trials and threatened to blow the whistle.”
The pieces began clicking together in my mind with terrifying clarity. Clara Reynolds hadn't vanished overseas. She had been silenced by the exact same corporate machinery that Marcus and Victoria had inherited and expanded.
“We need to find out what happened to Clara,” I said with sudden, absolute conviction. “If her records are still buried somewhere in the county archives or old school storage units, it could prove that Marcus’s syndicate has been operating these illegal trials for over a decade.”
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“County records for closed cases from eight years ago are heavily redacted,” Sarah warned, adjusting her glasses. “And the old Oakridge administrative archives were supposed to be incinerated during the federal asset seizure.”
“Supposed to be,” I replied, standing up from the stool and grabbing my jacket from the back of the chair. “Cabinet files don't always burn the way people think they do. Grab your gear, Sarah. We’re going back to the school.”
