Page 67 of Happily Never After

Claire followed her. It was safer than falling asleep again. Anyone who messed with her mom was going to pay the consequences. She would hunt them to the end of the earth…if she could find them.

She picked up her laptop and flopped onto the leather couch. She typed “Epsilon Sigma Alpha” into the search bar. Pages shehad perused a thousand times already populated. The top result was a news article about Venor’s fraternity getting shut down when all the members were arrested for attempted abduction.

There had to be answers somewhere in this sea of information. Claire opened the spreadsheet Nicole had put together with all the branches of ESA and scrolled down to California. Two colleges in LA listed ESA chapters. She typed them both into the search bar, but all the links were dead ends. ESA had been effectively scrubbed from the internet.

Losing the West Haven chapter must have spooked them enough to send them underground. Where could they go from here? There wasn’t any time to visit the abandoned fraternity houses, but maybe they didn’t have a choice.

Luke walked into the living room.

“There’s a cobweb in your hair,” Claire noted.

He brushed it away. “I was checking the attic. Just in case.”

“Any bad guys? Or girls. Feminism.” Mindy added as an afterthought.

Luke shook his head. “No. What are we doing?”

“Internet stalking ESA,” Claire said. “Or trying to. Everything is still pulled down, and the cached links are just news articles about bake sales and highway cleanups.”

Mindy looked up from her tablet. “The chapter in Miami went dark too.”

Luke sat on the couch next to Claire. He appeared to be deep in thought. “So they went underground when West Haven went under.”

“It seems that way. Do you think we could get alumni lists from the universities?” Mindy asked.

Claire shook her head. “I can’t imagine they would just give us those. Remember how long it took us to get a freakin’ yearbook from Barney’s high school? But I’ll mention it to Jack.They can’t say no to the FBI. I can’t believe they haven’t looked into it already.”

There was silence for a moment. There were ghosts of so many chapters of ESA online. Two dozen at least spread across fifteen states.

“Are we sure that all branches of this frat were really murderers in training?” Claire asked. It seemed insane. How did this many murderous individuals even find each other without raising suspicion?

“How could we know?” Mindy said. “Still, the fact that all these active branches are locking down is very suspicious. They wouldn’t do that for no reason.”

“You’re right.” Luke pulled one of his signature tiny notebooks off the end table. He flipped to a new page. “So what do we know about them?”

“They hate powerful women,” Claire began. “It seems like they think they’re a threat to men in the workplace. Barney said there’s only five acceptable careers for women, and they’re all stereotypical fields. Maybe I need to go talk to him again.”

“No,” Luke and Mindy said quickly.

“Let him rot,” Mindy followed up.

“Maybe if we could get the answer to his riddle, we could find the next body and then he’d open up about ESA.”

“I totally forgot about the stupid riddle,” Mindy said, turning back to the board. “What was it again?”

Claire recited it from memory. “She’s buried where William Hickory paid the ultimate price.”

“But what does that mean? Who’s William Hickory?”

“I have no idea. I’ve Googled it a hundred times,” Claire said, shaking her head. “There’s no record of a William Hickory living in West Haven or any of the surrounding areas. Hickory is a kind of tree, but there are probably a million hickory trees in Pennsylvania.” She leaned back on the couch. No matter whatangle they looked at, they hit a dead end. “Maybe we should go back to bed. We’re not getting anywhere with this, and we have to attempt another run-through tomorrow.”

“Not to mention you’re bamboozling Charlie into meeting Bri at lunch tomorrow, right?”

Claire nodded. It was probably going to be a disaster, but with a threat looming on the horizon, they stood a better chance if they stood together. Surely the threat to the family would squash Charlie’s temper at being introduced to her half sister.

Claire had barely edged into the hallway when Mindy gasped.

“What is it?” She ran back into the living room, Swiss Army Knife in hand.

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