Mystery Loves Company

Chapter 53 - File #6.8: The Knight in Shining Armor

Avery

An important question: when Rhett Carver stood at your door, should you expect a good news or bad news?

"You could've at least said 'welcome'," he sneered.

"Because you're not welcomed," I folded my arms. I hope he realized that I was still kinda mad about him following my family. "What are you doing here?"

"Are you really not gonna invite me in?"

"Just talk," I chastised.

"Okay. I was just having a 'discussion' with the Chief and... Detective Evans," he opened.

My eyebrows raised hearing the name. "Was that about my father?"

"Kind of, but they haven't found out anything. Right now, they're reinvestigating the crime scene and the Chief probably requested some files to connect Norris and your father. The good thing is I drove the Chief to the right path. Sooner or later they will open a link to Detective Evans. I'm sure Chief knows what he's doing."

I nodded. "Do you think they will find out that I was... there that night?"

Rhett didn't immediately answer. "It's a long way to go and I can't guarantee that they won't, but if we work together, we can at least stall them from knowing it sooner."

"How?"

"There were four people on that list, including your father and Garner, with discontinued records, right? Well, Noel found one of them," he said, while taking out a paper from his messenger bag, "Adrian Knight."

I felt like I had seen the name before, but it slipped my mind quickly as Rhett added, "And we got his address."

"So?"

"So we find him!" He exclaimed excitedly. "Noel got the address to his old house. He's not married and the last address he used was in Havenbrook, which was five years ago, around the time his 'poker' records stopped."

It was the nth time something Rhett said got me speechless. Sometimes it was because his intellectuality was beyond my expectation, but mostly it was just because he said something dumb.

"You just proposed a searching party for a former Exclusives member," I summarized. "Are you insane?"

"At this point, none of these are sane. We want answers, we find Adrian Knight," he asserted. "He is a Bridgewald native, but was attending the same college as Norris, Havenbrook College. That's our first connection."

"You want to go to his 'old' house even though you're still not sure if he's there."

"The house is still owned by his family, that's a first step of investigating."

I rolled my eyes. "Why don't you just go with Noel? Or Kyle?"

"Kyle is currently spending time with his mommy, and Noel refused to go even before I asked him."

"He put you up to this but he didn't even want to come?"

"We are finally talking like real roommates now, but that doesn't mean he's less annoyed at me," he mumbled. "Listen, Avery... If you don't want to do it for yourself, do it for your mother and Alex. Do it for your father. Not that you owe him, but... it's a start. Remember how you said you wanted to talk to him again?"

I leaned my back to the door. "I'm not ready. Seeing how our first meeting after a whole eight years turned out... I guess I will never be ready," I sighed.

"You will," he convinced. "My life story might not be at the same level as yours, but... I was avoiding my siblings for most of my life for the reasons you've probably already read from my notebook. The time finally came, and I put aside my ego to let my sister explained herself, so... there goes one person I shouldn't condemn and start to care instead."