"I did it with Caleb when we were trying to find information about Chase." Pogue said, standing in front of the locked door of the school's records room.
"I still dunno about this."
"Chill out, baby boy. This is easy." Reid took a step forward and unlocked the door with a flick of his hand and a black twitch in his eyes. "Speaking of Caleb, where is he?"
"Sarah said he's feeling sick." Pogue said, stepping through the doorway. "Maybe its some post-ascending sickness. Like the thing we had after we turned thirteen."
"Makes sense." Tyler said, closing the door behind the three boys. "Has anyone briefed him?"
"Not yet." Reid said. "Once we find this damn girl we'll go."
The three boys unlocked the door to the records room and spent little over five minutes searching for Maddie's file.
"Got it." Pogue said triumphantly. He opened the folder and flipped through a few useless papers before starting to read.
"Madeline Juliet Stoughton-Sparrow." He began. "Born November 1rst 1989, in London, England. Her parents were Mrs Heather Stoughton-Sparrow and Mr. Henry Sparrow." He flipped to another page.
"She was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder at the age of eight, following the brutal murder of her mother by a jealous ex-boyfriend. The treatment went on until she was eleven and moved with her father to Ipswitch, Massachusetts. She attended Cavvil's school for gifted children until the age of fourteen, where she started attending Spencer Academy."
"Nothing special so far." Reid mumbled. "Except that she's a nutcase."
"She witnessed her mother's murder." Tyler snapped. "Trauma isn't a big deal."
"Wait, there's more," Pogue continued. "She was expelled from six different elementary schools, one for attacking a teacher, the other five for telling teachers off and disturbing the peace of the classroom."
"Ooh. Rebel."
"Quiet, Reid. When her mother died she apparently went hysterical, then started drawing scenes of her rape and murder, then the angry ex that killed her. Then she escalated into drawing all her classmates dead and giving them the drawings for Christmas."
"Snap."
"Then the guidance counselor, a certain Joshua Penn, came to try and talk to her but she freaked out. When he tried touching her she would bite, scratch, and hit him, all while screaming that he was a murderer. Then she started getting therapy and was home-schooled. Then she moved."
A sound echoed from far at the end of the hallway they came into. They quickly replaced the file and headed out through the other door into the pouring rain that had started while they were inside.
"So lets recap. Other than being a seriously messed child, we didn't get learn anything remotely useful from those files..."
Tyler was bouncing a ball off his bedroom wall. It would hit the floor, the wall, the floor again, then he would catch it, and restart. He had been frowning since they had returned from the record's room all the way until now, when Pogue and Reid were loudly debating over some issue or another.
"She's bluffing!" this was Pogue.
"Hell no, you weren't there, you should have seen the look in her eyes… I'm telling you she knows!" now Reid.
"There is no way she would know!"
"Fae knew, didn't she?"
"That's different!"
"It is not!"
"Is so!"
"Is not!"
"This is stupid." Tyler finally said, putting stop to the bickering. "We aren't getting anywhere just sitting here and bitching."
"You're right. But what else is there we can do?" Pogue said, sitting himself down on a chair.
"We can go look at the files again." Reid said hesitantly.
Pogue shook his head.
"We already read through them all."
"Well something in those files is the key do discovering what is up with Madeline Sparrow. We just didn't see it." Reid said.
"Well we need to find it."
"We know, Tyler."
"But that doesn't help!" Tyler was getting irritated now. He was standing, pacing around the room, squeezing the ball in his hand until it split. "We need to find something!"
Silence ensued while the three boys thought hard for a few minutes. After a long hesitant sigh, Reid started talking.
"The guidance counsellor's name rings a bell. Joshua Penn. Where did I hear that name before…"
"I know." Pogue said. "There was an article about him in the newspaper last week." He leaned back on his chair and rummaged through a pile of newspaper on the floor. He pulled out a yellowing sheet and scanned their contents briefly.
"Here it is." He began. "Joshua Penn, age 48, has been convicted of multiple counts of rape, murder and pedophilia. Over the course of the last ten years it is suspected that he abused, raped and murdered over 38 young girls, aged between 7 and 12, all of which attended the schools he worked in. He would apparently keep them after school for 'help', rape them, call their parents to let them know their daughter was on her way, then rape the little girl some more and kill her. He never admitted to the location of the bodies."
"… Didn't Maddie accuse him of being a murderer?"
"Yeah…"
"We need to get to those files."
The trip was much shorter this time around.
The three merely snuck in and photocopied the entire file, then headed back to Reid and Tyler's dorm.
"Snap. Look at these drawings. They're pretty intense."
Pogue looked over Reid's shoulder at one of the sketches the psychiatrist she was seeing kept. It was gruesomely detailed, for the work of an eight year old, and depicted a small blond girl curled up in the corner of a room, crying and soaked in blood, while a large dark shadow loomed over her with the shine of a knife in his hand. At the bottom of the paper was written in blockish child-like letters Merry Chrismas Laura D.
"Well, she does have a certain talent for drawing, although these are a bit too creepy for any art expo I know that shows the works of children. Wanna see, Tyler?"
"No thanks." He replied to Pogue.
"What are you looking for anyways?"
"Evidence, Reid."
Tyler was at the computer, searching for information about Joshua Penn on the internet. After a few minutes he stopped clicking and typing madly and read the webpage.
"Pogue, read me the names that the drawings have on them."
"Alrighty. Jessica, Lorraine, Kimmy, Laura D, Laura F, Jenny, Beverly and Jas."
"Well then. Listen to this: Jessica Digiovani, Lorraine King, Kimberly Monta, Laura Donnelly, Laura Finlan, Jennifer Jackson, Beverly Silver and Jasmine Prince. Not in that specific order."
"Who are they?" Reid rolled over to the computer on his wheeled chair. He peered at the screen.
"Eight of the thirty-eight victims." Tyler said with a satisfied smirk.