Beyond the Pain

Chapter 21

THE PRIMARY TARGET OF MY  investigation was Eve. After all, she had led me to believe that she had something to hide. I started with her bedroom since it wasn't the weekend yet so it would have been impossible for me to spend any amount of time in her office without getting caught. I didn't think that I would find any clues in the bedrooms because the Evergreen people were almost always in their offices, but it couldn't hurt to look.

Much like her office, her room was always immaculate. Aside from a few old family photos sitting on the dresser, there were almost no decorations. Though I had seen them many times before, I had never really given them much attention. Seeing as they were the only personal touch in the room, I decided to start there.

Based on the outfits the people in the photographs were wearing and the sepia quality of the images, they had to be from the early to mid 1900s. In one of the pictures, a family of five young girls and their parents were posing in front of their house, smiling widely at the camera. In another picture, a handsome young man was proudly holding a chubby baby that couldn't have been more than two months old.

One picture caught my interest more than the others though. The same young man was wearing a chic suit. Next to him, his bride was wearing a silky white wedding dress. They were in each other's arms and looked happy from what I could gather from the poor quality of the picture. What struck me was the face of the bride. She looked a lot like Eve. They were almost identical. Based on the suspected time period the photos were taken in, she must have been Eve's great-grandmother, but the resemblance was uncanny. Above all else, there was something in her eyes that disturbed me. It left an uneasy feeling in my stomach that I couldn't explain or shake off.

More peculiar still was the fact that there were no more recent pictures. None of her parents or of herself growing up, only those of these people who must have been her great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents.

After having looked at the pictures, I moved on to the inside of the dresser. It was, surprisingly, stuffed with keepsakes. Eve didn't strike me as someone particularly sentimental, so the discovery jarred me at first. There was an old and sad looking stuffed bunny with parts of its fur scratched and burned, two folded flags, one from New Zealand and the other from Australia, a baby hat, and a beautiful pearl necklace in a velvet box, amongst other things. Only personal belongings and family heirlooms, nothing that could help me incriminate Evergreen.

Maybe I shouldn't have been going through someone's personal belongings. It felt wrong. When I had learned that Thomas had done the same to me, I had felt incredibly violated and it had made me impossibly angry, so I shouldn't have been doing it to someone else. But, unlike Thomas, I had a good reason to be doing this, so I had to keep going. For the other Cleaners' freedom and mine.

I directed my attention to the tables on either side of the bed. Tissues, a phone charger, Eve's Australian passport as well as her American one, chocolate. There was nothing unusual there aside from two boxes. The first one was a small velvet ring box that was tangly to the touch. Inside was a dainty wedding ring. It was simple, but elegant and beautiful. On the inside of the lid, a message had been embroidered. It read: Not even death could part us. - W.

The second box was made of wood. It had a lock on it and the sight of it automatically got my hopes up. I looked around for a key, which I found a few seconds later at the bottom of the drawer. My heart raced as I slowly opened the box and it stopped when music escaped from it. I frantically closed it, locked it and put it back in its place.

I grabbed my cleaning supplies in a hurry and pretended that I was doing my work. A few minutes passed, during which I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as I waited for someone to reprimand me—but no one came. It took a while before I could breathe normally again, during which time I cleaned the room as best as I could with my sweaty palms and half my regular amount of focus.

After that, I kept looking around as I was cleaning, but I spotted nothing out of the ordinary. There was nothing under the bed, as usual, the closet was only filled with clothes and shoes, and the bathroom was perfectly normal as well. If Eve kept proof of the criminal activities going on at Evergreen, she didn't hide it in her room.

I snooped around the other bedrooms as I cleaned them throughout the rest of the week, but my searches turned out as fruitless as the one in Eve's room.

Thomas had a keyboard and sheet music tucked under his bed, which surprised me because I had never seen them before and I had believed his only hobby was stalking people. Maybe there was a soft creative side to him hidden in the depths of his disturbing, small heart. Very deep inside. Or maybe he was one of those guys who learned a musical instrument simply to impress girls. That seemed more plausible.

He didn't have any family pictures displayed or any keepsakes that suggested he had any sort of life outside of Evergreen. No friends, no family, no past.

There was nothing to see in Daniel's room, no matter how hard I looked. Not a single picture, note, card or personal belonging of any kind, aside from clothes. For some reason, it didn't shock me as much coming from Daniel as it did with Thomas. Thomas had always acted like a human being. A sinister and intolerable human being, but a human being nonetheless. Daniel, on the other hand, was nothing more than a stoic statue, so I didn't expect signs of humanity to come from him. If there was something to find out about him, I would probably have better luck in his office, since he spent most of his time there. He was as much of a workaholic as Doctor Walsh, if not more.

Then, there was Claire's bedroom. It was nothing like Thomas and Daniel's rooms. Hers had always been my favorite room to clean. It was filled with art — mostly paintings — of all sizes, colors, and shapes. They were on the walls, on the furniture, on the floor—everywhere. The bedframe was painted a million different colors, the dresser had been turned into a colorful garden of flowers, even the doors had been transformed into windows to other worlds. It was beautiful, but I didn't learn much from them aside from the fact that they all had the same signature. I couldn't decipher it, but from the many bottles of paint and art supplies that were stashed in her dresser, I figured that Claire must have painted them all herself.

I didn't know much about art myself, but I could only imagine the hours she'd spent to become so talented. A whole lifetime wouldn't be enough for me to match her skill.

Aside from the art, Claire also had a few pictures of herself with Francine and Bastien on display, but she also had a whole picture book of them hidden in her bedside table. Some pictures showed Francine with a baby. As I turned the pages, the baby turned into a young child. Bastien was in some of them too. These pictures must have been recent because they both didn't look a day younger than they did today. But Francine didn't have a child at Evergreen, so I could only imagine that something tragic had happened.

I was no stranger to loss. The only two grand-parents I had ever known had passed away when I was very young, my aunt had lost her battle to cancer when I was a teenager, and I had just lost my parents. The only family I had left was my uncle, but I had seen him only three times in my life and when his brother —my father— and my mom died, he only sent a card that said to give him a call if I needed anything, but he hadn't bothered to include his phone number. Yet no matter how many people I had lost, I still couldn't imagine the pain that came with losing a child.

I was a bit disappointed when I reached the end of the week. I had searched every corner of the five bedrooms assigned to me and still hadn't found anything that could incriminate the Evergreen people, but I wasn't yet defeated. I didn't know the extent of their secrets, but at least I knew for a fact that they abducted people. There had to be some kind of proof of that somewhere in this huge mansion. Pictures, records, a paper trail of some kind, anything.

Thankfully, with the end of the week came the weekend, which meant that it was time to investigate the offices. And if there was something to find, I was ready to bet it would be in one of them.