Superheroes Suck

Chapter 39: Wildflowers

We alerted my mother as we drove to the The Hideout, filling her in on everything we had learned. Murphy had someone send over the car because he didn't trust anyone to take us to the Hideout, and the traffic in the area had settled down significantly.

My mother promised us that she and Hunter would make their way there as soon as they cleaned up at the station. They had already made a lot of progress narrowing down list and everything we learned today would only help to further minimize the list of people.

Murphy pulled off the main road and drove down one of the smaller, unpaved side roads leading up to the mountain. A few minutes later we came upon a high fence, cutting off our route. Instead of slowing down, Murphy simply pressed a button the fence slide up, allowing us the cross to the other side before slowly returning back to its original position.

I shot Murphy a questioning glance but he shrugged and said, "My family owns this area so I had the fence put up and modified to keep people out. I have a button in my car but there's also one in the Hideout itself so we can open it up to let people in."

"Neat."

We pulled up to the side of the mountain and, just as the fence had slid up, the ground slid down to make a ramp down to the base of the mountain. We drove down a little runway and parked in one of four parking spots in the little basement. Murphy led me over to the elevator and entered a long sequence of numbers into the elevator's keypad.

In less than a minute, the silver doors slid open to reveal the part of the Hideout I was most familiar with. My mother and Hunter sat suspiciously close at the dining table as they pored over all the case files scattered across the table.

Murphy cleared his throat and they turned around. My mother beamed up at me, "Nova! Come over here, we have it narrowed down pretty far at this point."

"Really?" I took the seat to her right while Spitfire slid in across from me.

"Yeah, we managed to glean a few nuggets of information from the message Shckr related. Hunter went to see if we could get information on who Stromer is but someone wiped Stromer's files from every database. Now, we have to hope he's in one of these files," She explained as she gestured to a large pile of manila folders. " It's someone from my days as Breeze so it knocks out any entries related to my work as a doctor or as a Rain Maker."

"We also narrowed it down to those that happened in the summer," Hunter added, "So we included everything from May to September, just in case they were pushing it when they mentioned a 'Summer Breeze.' Of course even that left quite a few possibilities because crime is the most prevalent in the summer months and your mother was Breeze for over a decade."

"Knowing that whoever this person seems to believe I 'wronged,'" My mother rolled her eyes, "Is male really narrows down and we were able to cross reference that with those who have at least one son so this pile," She gestured to a small stack of folders, it couldn't be more than ten, "There are only only eight people left now. I'm really that little poem wasn't a red herring because otherwise we're screwed."

"Can we see the files?"

My mother opened the file on top and one-by-one, we went over all of the possibilities. There were four that were still alive but in jail, though only one of the three was still in for the crime my mother had put him away for. The other three had minor crimes but reoffended and landed themselves back in jail. A couple of them had sons who followed into a life of crime but none of them had passed the Xavier Test.

There were two who had died in prison. One was towards the end of my mother's time as Breeze, though his son hadn't passed the Xavier Test, he had been present during a fire at the factory he worked at. It's a longshot, especially because he was tested afterwards for powers, but they could have manifested later. The other was relatively early in my mother's career as Breeze, he had two sons who were in their twenties and thirties. They left Belhurst soon after their father's death so we didn't have a lot on them. The only thing we knew was basic things, the older one studied theatre at one of the local community colleges and the younger brother was an athlete, he played baseball or something like that. It wasn't exactly helpful but it was something, so we decided both were still possibilities.