Page 68 of Body Tox

The stupid storm was acting up again outside, and the electricity was fuzzing out. I hoped we weren’t going to be freezing our asses off here like the abandoned gas station.

“Don’t worry. We’re warmer naked…” Asher sang, guessing my thoughts.

“Yeah, sure, drunkey. C’mon.”

There were some doors along the bottom floor, but they were locked. I continued walking to the other door. It looked like someone may have left it open from exiting in a hurry. I whispered loudly to Asher, who was spinning in a circle at the end of the stairs and staring at his hand like it was the best thing in the world.

I noted to myself that drunk Asher was a hell of a lot less annoying than sober Asher.

He seemed happy and living life with his little dancey dance, so I pushed the door open, making my way inside the dark, slightly colder room. The light from the lightning storm outside lit up the space periodically, and the strobe effect made me nauseous.

Big industrial filing cabinets were sitting in the room’s back corner. They stood out from the abandoned candle holders and a desk with dust on it.

The filing cabinets didn’t have a speck of dust on them, and if I had to guess, I’d say they were strategically put in this room so others wouldn’t think to go shuffling around.

What creepy secrets would I find in this holiest of hellholes?

I kicked the metal with my foot. No huge booby trap swallowed me up like in old Western movies. I kicked it again, mostly just enjoying the ting of the metal sound. I tried to peek out the door for Asher, but he was off dancing somewhere I couldn’t see from the ‘little corner of secrets.’

The filing cabinet was locked, and it would not budge.

I sighed, waiting for the makeshift strobe light to shed some light on a weapon I could use to pulverize this cabinet. The old candle holders were metal. They should work well enough.

I smacked the gold metal on my palm, testing the weight and durability.

“Meet your maker cabinet,” I yelled, a bit tipsy from sipping Asher’s adult happy juice.

The metals clashed together in an awful sound. It was timed perfectly with a particularly loud thunder boom.

I broke the lock clean off, and the drawer slid forward, untethered by the previous lock.

Some papers were damaged in my snoop mission, but I ignored them, yanking out a big red folder labeled: ‘Participants.’

Furrowing my brow, I squinted, waiting for the lightning to bring the words into view. There were pictures of girls, maybe college-age, some younger than that. All races, faces, hair colors, and backgrounds.

At the bottom of each, there was one word of scrawled handwriting. It either said, ‘Success’ or ‘Failure.’

I kept swiping through the folders, and the dates for these girls were dating back over a decade. One image caught my eye. A blonde girl with bouncing beautiful curls and sad, gray eyes was so familiar to me that they made me bring the paper closer.

The lightning struck, and the room lit up. The girl’s image was clear now, her name written in red pen at the top.

“Evangeline Ballard.”

Evangeline…Ballard?

The girl who committed suicide was Asher’s relative?

Wait, that didn’t make any sense? He was an orphan, and she was too. Were they abandoned there together?

Asher said that the Headmaster was her adopted father.

Was that the truth? Was Asher the headmaster’s son?

Evangeline Ballard would be his sister then. The question remained…did he know?

I was about a year and a half through these files, and now the images were changing. The scrawled handwriting wasn’t the ominous success or failure but instead read, “Sired, yes. Father John.”

There were dollar signs with an attached page—a receipt of some sort.

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