Snakes and Ladders - Falice

Stone

You've been waiting for a miracle all your life.

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Alice remained at Pop's far later than she'd hoped to that night. She kept staring at the words that she'd written as the case of the Black Hood came to a close. Betty had given her all the facts, Alice had unknowingly been right in the middle of the case all along. Everything was laid out for all to see – the cipher, the letters, the threats, and the psychological torment. She knew that Betty and some of her friends had been working feverishly to solve this case, but – now that the Black Hood had supposedly been shot dead – Alice could see that some of the evidence just didn't seem to add up.

For one, his letter to Betty mentioned that he was inspired by her speech at the mayor's jubilee, but Alice couldn't even remember Joseph Svenson being present at town hall that evening? That was minor, of course, she could have just missed him in the crowd. Now, she could understand why he may have been privy to some of the secrets that the kids shared within the halls of the school, but how could he have possibly known about some things?

How did he know about Fred and Hermione's affair? How did he know that Moose and Midge would be at Lover's Lane taking jingle jangle on the night that Betty saved Pop's? How did he know about Geraldine Grundy's affair with young Archie Andrews, and the fact that she had moved to Greendale? How could he possibly have known about Betty's childhood obsession with the Nancy Drew Handbook? That being said, why the fixation on Betty at all? She couldn't have been that special to the school janitor that he decided to force her to cut her friends out of her life and betray those that she loved? What did he care in the first places?

Moreover, there was still the unanswered question of why exactly the handwriting from the letter that Alice herself had received from the masked madman did not match the handwriting from the letter that Betty had received from supposedly the same man. Betty had told her that she'd been receiving torturous phone calls and emails from the Black Hood, instructing her through his killing sprees and threatening the people that she loved in order to keep her listening. How did he get her phone number and her email and why did he care at all?

Something that still haunted Alice was the fact that he'd managed to get his hands on the old Riverdale Register article that featured her teenage mugshot on the front page. She wasn't exaggerating when she said that she'd rid the entire town of the article as if it had never been published at all. There were very few people who would have access to it besides her and Hal as co-owners of the Register. What also confuses her, is the fact that Betty told her that the Black Hood said that Alice was supposedly a thorn in both of their sides. She really didn't know what that meant, but she wished that she hadn't been a part of it at all.

She'd never spoken a single word to Mr. Svenson, and it was the Serpents and the Southside that she attacked in her paper, not high school janitors. She couldn't imagine why exactly he had such a bone to pick with her? Betty also mentioned that the Black Hood knew of Polly's exact location at the farm and that he knew she was pregnant with her cousin's children. That chilled Alice to the very bone. Polly had left town to find safety from the Black Hood, and it had proven to all be in vain. The fact that Mr. Svenson had known her exact whereabouts just didn't make any sense.

And of course, no one could overlook the fact that Archie Andrews – who had looked into the very eyes of the Black Hood himself in the same diner that Alice Cooper now sat – did not recognize the eyes of the killer. Mr. Svenson's reasoning behind his crimes could never really be questioned now that he was dead, but according to Veronica and Archie, who had questioned him, he didn't exactly seem like someone obsessed with cleansing Riverdale of sin. Besides, if the school was his only source of information, certainly there would be many other sins that Mr. Svenson would have heard of.