BURDEN OF AN ANCIENT OATH by Joshua Brown (early reader books TXT) 📕

I could. I found a birth certificate for a Marylin Crossley, here in New York, dated around the time the victim might have been born. But that’s about all I could find. There’s no record of a Marylin Crossley living in New York, and anyone who shares the name is so far from the city, too old, or long dead.”

“That doesn’t inspire much hope,” clearing my throat, I dropped into my leather chair.

“No, it really doesn’t. But we’re still early on in this investigation—”

“Sure, but there should have been something. A person doesn’t just disappear out of thin air,” I cut him off. “But maybe we’re not looking in the right places. I’ll have to have a chat with her and see.”

“What are you thinking?” Aaron shrugged his shoulders. His wrinkled shirt billowed haphazardly with his humph.

“I don’t know. You’ve done everything in one night that I planned on doing through the day. I’m stumped,” a sigh left my lips. “How about you head home, get some rest, and I’ll take it from here? I’ll go pay Marylin a visit and see if I can find something.”

“I caught a couple hours of sleep here at the office,” Aaron said. “I’ll head home for a shower and be back before you know it.”

Giving him a nod, Aaron rose from his seat and left.

I spent the rest of the morning going through my notes and listening to the recorded conversation between myself and Marylin. There was nothing, not really. Lauren came in somewhere between eight and nine, bringing me a cup of coffee and a fresh box of Lucky Strikes. We spoke little, with her just as stumped as Aaron and me.

Not wanting to waste much time on this case, I waited until 9:30 to arrange a meeting with Marylin Crossley. This strange name game was becoming problematic, and if we didn’t get to the bottom of it first, we’d never manage to get to the bottom of the case.

Chapter 3

Jack

She lived outside the city, nestled between a dense overgrowth of trees and other white picket fence homes. There were no high walls out here—no safety measures barring neighborly protection and kindnesses. Her home was a Victorian-inspired double-story house, decorated in pastel blues and a darker shade for awnings.

It was beautiful.

Had I been much one to take a standalone, this might have been preferred over my simple, single-bedroom apartment. She waited for me on the front steps, beside a simple hedge path for the cars to drive along. In her hands were two cups of coffee.

“Morning,” she said, descending the short staircase.

“Apologies for bothering you this early,” I said, getting out of my car.

“No need for apologies. I’d much rather you come knocking early in the morning than be found dead,” she snickered. But there was fear behind her words.

“Of course,” I accepted the cup of coffee she held out. Dressed in a long, woolen bathrobe, Marylin Crossley stood. Her hair wet and wrapped in a towel, she showed no signs of care for her appearance. I liked that about her.

“My husband’s inside doing his morning routine; I hope you don’t mind that we have our chat outside?”

I sipped the coffee.

“Not at all. Living in the city doesn’t give me much time to see the greenery of the world.” I looked around. The Crossley family garden was spectacular. Roses grew along the beds with an enormous Weeping Willow on either side of their home.

“So, Detective Mercer…” she paused, “Jack, what is it that brings you here? Have you uncovered anything on the case?”

“It depends on how you look at it,” I said, leaning against the door of my black Dodge Charger. “A member of my team spent the night looking into your name. It seems, apart from your date of birth, there’s little to nothing he could dig up. A man’s gotta wonder, Miss Crossley, how have you stayed hidden beneath the shrowd of social media for this long?”

I looked her up and down. She gave no signs of discomfort or fear, simply a nod of her head.

“That’s because my name isn’t Marylin Crossley,” she sighed. “I was born Jane Dench. At least, that’s what I believed up until recently. I use the term born loosely here, of course.”

“What do you mean?” I cocked a brow, watching Jane shuffle for the box of thin cigarettes inside her gown pocket.

“Well, after the letters began pouring in, I spoke with my parents. They’ve always been good people but wanted to spare the details of how I entered this world. I was adopted from a foster home a little while after my parents shunned me. They hid the secret because I was as much a daughter to them as their actual children.”

“Why didn’t you bring this up earlier?” To think that she knew these details but didn’t mention them was an annoyance at the very least.

“Because whoever’s sending these letters knows more about me than even I do. Or at least that part of my life from decades ago. I thought there was a chance you’d manage to find something on that name, something that I can use to know who my parents were, but more-so, find the reason I’m being targeted,” she replied, lighting her cigarette.

I joined her.

“We could’ve done that anyway,” I returned.

“Yes, you could have. I know you could have. But I had a vision for how this would turn out, and I suppose it doesn’t always work out the way one would want,” she puffed on the cigarette, not inhaling the smoke. “But it took you a night to figure it out, so there’s no harm, no foul, right?”

“Right,” I swallowed the rest of the coffee in two giant gulps. “But this does give us more to go on.”

“How so?”

“It means that we know they’re not