“It looks like they took everything that belonged to him and put it in here,” Sam agrees.
“And everything my grandparents had of him,” I point out. “These look like pictures that would have been hanging on the wall and pages of albums. They took all of the reminders that Jonah existed and put them in here, then sealed it up and walked away like he never existed.”
“But why would they keep it?” Sam asks. “They thought he was dead. After everything he did, I can understand not wanting to think about him. I can even understand them not wanting you to know he ever existed. Not knowing what he did to your mother, and that he tried to come after you. Maybe even more than once. They would want to protect you by not letting you know. But if it was that important to them, if they really wanted to obliterate him from history, why keep a room full of reminders of him? It’s almost like a shrine.”
“It’s not a shrine,” I reply. “Everything was just put in here. It’s not on display. No one was ever able to access it.”
“I still don’t understand,” he says. “Why keep it at all?”
“Because he was their child,” I say. “Sam, this wasn’t my mother and father’s house. This was my grandparents’ house. They knew what he did and understood why he needed to be removed from their family’s lives, but that didn’t change that they had two sons. My grandmother carried two babies inside her. She gave birth to two boys. She raised them and loved them. She watched them become men. A mother doesn’t just stop loving her child even if she has to excise him from her daily life. He was still her son.”
“Are you seriously sympathizing with him?”
“No. I’m sympathizing with parents who had to live with knowing one son betrayed the other so badly. Who had to mourn his death in silence. They believed he was dead. They marked the end of his life by pretending it never happened. And don’t forget, he and my father are identical twins. So, every time they looked at my father’s face, they saw Jonah, too.”
On the other side of the room, I notice a plain white box that looks like boxes my dad used to store stuff. I take off the top, using my phone light to look inside. It’s filled with file folders. Sam comes up beside me as I take one out and open it.
“What are those?” he asks.
“I think they’re the reason somebody unsealed the sealed room,” I tell him. He glances over my shoulder, and I show him the file. “This is my father’s handwriting.” He takes the folder from me, and I grab out another few. “These all have my father’s handwriting in them. These are his records.”
“Why would he put them in here?” Sam asks.
“Look at the dates. These cover years. Most of them are from before the wreck. But then, look, he didn’t write the date on these.”
I pull a newspaper clipping out of the box. “It’s from six months before he disappeared.” I open another of the folders, and a vice tightens around my heart. “Sam…”
He looks up from the file he’s holding, and I show him the picture in my hand.
“That’s Natalia,” he says.
I nod. “This whole file is about her death.”
“It seems your father was doing a lot of looking into your future,” he tells me.
“What do you mean?” I ask. He shows me the folder in his hands so I can read it. Across the top of the page, in my father’s handwriting, is a phrase: “What is he doing?” I read out loud. “He knew about Leviathan.”
“At least he had his suspicions,” Sam nods. “There’s nothing in here that’s specific. It doesn’t directly talk about Leviathan or refer to Jonah as Lotan. But there are notes about accidents and disasters he believes were actually crimes. It seems he figured out Jonah wasn’t dead.”
“But why would he take all this and put it in here? Why would he go to the effort of opening up a sealed room to hide files in it?” I ask.
“He didn’t want anyone else to find them?” Sam suggests. “He knew there could be danger and didn’t want anyone else to get their hands on this information, but also couldn’t just destroy it.”
“Derrick mentioned my father came here just a little while before he disappeared. He said he was clearing some stuff out of the house and putting it in the storage so the house could be rented. We’ve gone to the storage unit, so we know he actually did that. But what if he wasn’t just putting stuff into the storage unit. What if he was hiding these, too?”
“Because he knew he wouldn’t be looking at them any time soon,” Sam says. “Either he knew he would be back for them, or that one day you would find them. By this point, he knew Jonah was alive. This room wasn’t about pretending his brother never existed anymore. One day it was all going to come out. He just had to keep it safe until then.”
“This would explain what he was looking for when he broke into the house. He just didn’t have time to find it,” I say. I put the files back into the box and put the lid on before lifting it and heading out of the room. “I want to go through these more carefully. Maybe Dad was onto something that can help us.”
My phone starts ringing in my pocket when I’m halfway down the attic stairs. I let it ring as I lug the box into the living room. By the time I’ve set the box down on
