Where The Mind Breaks

Chapter 5: What The Ledger Shows

The bolt slid back with a sound like a bone breaking. Nel opened the door just a crack, the chain lock still engaged. The woman, Silvera, didn't flinch. She simply held up one of the paper cups. The rich, bitter scent of coffee cut through the room's smell of damp and fear.

"Truce?" she said. Her eyes, a startling shade of grey-green, were direct. They held no false warmth, only a frank assessment.

"What did Golda tell you?" Nel's voice was rough, sandpapered by panic.

"That a man named Nel would come. That he was the only one who could understand. That he'd be scared, and probably not trust me." A faint, wry smile touched her lips. "She said to tell you it's about the garden. The poison garden."

The phrase meant nothing to him. It could be a code, a test. He stared at her, his mind racing, weighing the risk. The ledger under the bed felt like it was emitting a radioactive glow. This woman knew Golda. She knew he was here. If she was a threat, she was already inside his defenses.

He closed the door, slid the chain off, and opened it fully.

She stepped in, her gaze sweeping the room with a botanist's detached curiosity before landing back on him. She handed him the coffee. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I think I have," he muttered, taking the cup. The heat was a shock to his cold hands.

She nodded towards the mud smeared on his jeans and the puddle on the floor. "The cemetery is slippery this time of year."

He froze, the coffee halfway to his lips. "How did you..."

"I saw you leave. I was collecting samples from the lake's edge. The view from there is quite good." She took a sip of her own coffee. "I also saw someone else. In a dark coat, watching from the trees. They followed you for a bit, then turned back."

His blood ran cold. She had seen it all. "Who was it?"

"I couldn't tell. The rain, the hood." She studied him. "But they were very interested in you. Did you find what you were looking for?"

The directness of the question threw him. He defaulted to the lie he’d prepared. "I was just paying my respects."

"To Elias?" she asked mildly. "A man who died thirty years ago? At two in the morning?"

He had no answer. The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable.

"Look," she said, setting her cup down on the desk. "Golda trusted me. She knew what I was studying. The lake's ecosystem is... unique. There are fungal and plant species here that don't exist anywhere else. Highly toxic, some of them. She thought it was connected."

"To what?"

"To the Weeping." Silvera's voice was low and serious. "She believed the disappearances weren't just murders. She thought it was something else. Something that used the land itself."

It sounded like the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist. But after the ledger, after the entry about his father, Nel's definition of "possible" had been violently expanded. "What kind of something?"

"I don't know. But Golda was scared. Really scared. She said the Demmys family weren't just corrupt. She said they were custodians of something old and rotten in this soil." She glanced towards the window, towards the lake. "She called it the poison garden. Not a place you plant flowers."

Nel thought of the ledger entry. Payment to Dr. Sam: $10,000. For revised autopsy report. What had the original autopsy shown? Something a small-town doctor wouldn't be able to explain?

"Why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"Because Golda is dead," Silvera said flatly. "And the police called it a suicide. And you and I are probably the only two people in this town who know that's a lie. That makes us allies, whether you like it or not."

Jason isn't your friend. Trust no one.

But Silvera wasn't offering friendship. She was offering an alliance. A practical, dangerous partnership. He was drowning in secrets, and she was throwing him a line, even if he didn't know what was on the other end.

He made a decision. A reckless, probably stupid one.

He walked to the bed, got down on his knees, and pulled the ledger out. He placed it on the desk beside her coffee cup.

Silvera’s eyes widened slightly, the first real crack in her calm demeanor. "What is that?"

"Golda's life insurance policy," Nel said, his voice hollow. He opened it to the page. "It's how Hedge Demmys bought this town."

He watched her as she leaned over, her eyes scanning the entries. She didn't gasp or exclaim. Her lips tightened into a thin, hard line. She saw the payments to the police chief, the mayor, the doctor. She saw the record of systemic corruption laid bare.

Then she saw the entry for the Weeping. "Five disposals." Her finger traced the words. "My God."

"Keep reading," Nel whispered.

She turned the page. Her eyes found the entry he knew was there. Payment to L. Tait: $10,000. For "ongoing silence."

She looked up at him, her expression unreadable. "L. Tait..."

"My father," Nel said, the words ash in his mouth.

The silence in the room was absolute. The confession hung between them, a monstrous, shared truth. He had given her a weapon that could destroy him. He was either securing an ally or signing his own death warrant.

Silvera closed the ledger slowly. She didn't offer pity. She didn't flinch away. She simply looked at him with those clear, assessing eyes.

"That," she said finally, "changes everything."

"It changes nothing," he shot back, the anger and shame suddenly boiling over. "It just means the rot was in my own house. It means my father... my father might have..." He couldn't finish. The image of the man in the woods was back, the features shifting, threatening to resolve into a face he knew.

"It means the story you've been telling yourself for twenty years is a lie," Silvera corrected him, her voice gentle but firm. "And lies are a weak foundation. The truth, no matter how ugly, is solid ground. We can build on this."

"Build what?" he asked, exhausted.

"A case. An understanding. We have the ledger. We have my research. We have your knowledge of this town and its people." She leaned forward. "Golda didn't just die to protect this book, Nel. She died for what it points to. The 'poison garden.' We have to find it."

He looked at her, this strange, calm woman who studied poisons and talked about building on the rubble of a life. He had come to Everfell for answers about Vivi and Golda. He had found a conspiracy that implicated his own blood. And now he was being asked to go even deeper, into some dark heart he couldn't even imagine.

The ledger was no longer just a record of crimes. It was a map. And the territory it charted was more terrifying than he had ever dreamed.

He looked at the closed book, then back at Silvera's resolute face.

"Okay," he said, the word feeling like a surrender, and a beginning. "Where do we start?"