Mystery Hunt (Complete - Under Major Editing)

19. Suspicious

Dylan just looks at Noah with a dumbfounded expression.

"I don't believe you." Dylan refuses to look at the piece of paper.

"I said what I said. I saw him throwing it in the dustbin." Noah says as he pushes the paper to Dylan. "He must have thought it was a useless piece of paper hence he threw it. But he should have....." Noah is stopped mid-sentence by Dylan.

"I'll take that. Just don't tell about it to anyone." Dylan says, snatching the paper. He read the first line and yes, it was the other half of the 'Forbidden Love' poem.

"Why are you defending James?" Noah asks, "I saw him tossing this in the dustbin, an important piece of information and you are trying to save him?"

"You must be mistaken. I don't want to scrutinize him over anything. And he isn't the only one who is hiding things from me." Dylan says eyeing Noah. Noah says nothing but a meek 'breakfast is ready' comes out of his mouth.

Dylan closes the door as soon as Noah goes out. He takes the other half of the poem which he had and examines it again. It is! It is the missing part! But why would James hide it? Is he lying again? What could be his reason now?

Knock Knock!

"Hey! Everyone is waiting for you at the table." It was James.

"Coming! Dylan shouts on the top of his voice.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

"I think we should move past the servant's rooms now. We got enough poems last time." Logan groans as he sits down to have a breath. Everyone was down at the servant's room again, trying to find more clues.

"We haven't searched enough." David coughs as he takes out a bundle of journals. "Here." He dumps them onto Dylan's laps.

"I can't decode all of this! It's a suicide mission!" Dylan panics. Now when we say there were a lot of journals, the phrase 'lot of' doesn't even make up for it. David was busting his ass to find out more and dumping them onto each of the members.

"Why don't we give poems and couplets to Dylan? The others seem to be simple daily life entries." William looks at one of the journals.

"Seems fair. Why don't we segregate it right here and when we reach home, we just spend our day today reading through all of this?" Clive says already creating sections.

"Okay! So hear up boys! We take whatever we are given now and go back home. We will have a meeting exactly at 10:00 p.m. right after dinner to discuss. Can everyone cope up with the workload?" William asks.

"I might need someone's help." Dylan raises his hand. "James?" he looks at James.

James was a bit taken aback but smiled widely, "I would love to."

Clive whispers into Dylan's ear, "Ooooo... did you hear that? He would looveeeee to!" stretching on the love word. Dylan just hits his arm, blushing a little.

It was 5:00 p.m. and they had finally sorted out the journals. Thankfully there weren't many hard poems and Dylan had already decoded a few there.

"Hey! Good news." Dylan says as he carries his share of journals.

"What?" James just takes his journals in his hand, making Dylan skip a heartbeat.

"You don't have to do that...." Dylan tries to take it back but he just swivels away.

"It's okay, it's heavy for you. You were saying?" James says walking ahead.

"Ah right. The missing part? I found it." Dylan says in a low voice.