I notice things. I write them down. That is the whole method.

Miles Reed found the first anomaly at Riverside before I did. That isn't something I say to be generous. It's a fact, and facts don't need my permission to be true.

We worked that case together. He asked good questions. He believed the pattern before he could see all of it, which I've since learned is called trust and is apparently rare.

Then Olivia Hartwell's file happened. Miles has a version of events where the decision that mattered was mine to make, and I made it wrong. I've gone through the timeline eleven times. I keep arriving at the same order of operations. It hasn't mattered.

We don't work together now. I won't call it a falling out — that implies motion, and there hasn't been any, from either of us, in some time.

Note to self: not every case closes clean. Some of them just stop being worked on, by everyone, at once.

Buildings are not supposed to remember things. People forget this, because most buildings don't. Riverside Academy is not most buildings.

I spent four months there and learned that the difference between a haunting and a pattern is mostly a matter of who's willing to write the pattern down. Nobody at that school wanted to write anything down. That was the first thing I noticed, and it turned out to be the only thing that mattered.

Note to self: when an institution's paperwork is more organized than its stated priorities, the paperwork is telling the truth.

Fourteen streetlamps between the corner and the river. Nine were lit. I counted without meaning to — I always count without meaning to — and then I noticed that Henry's ears were already up, which mattered more than the streetlamps did.

The tunnels under Old Town are two hundred years of people deciding not to look at something. I am told this is called "history." I think it's called "evidence with a better publicist."

We went down anyway. Henry first, technically, because he does not believe in doors he hasn't already smelled on the other side of.

Note to self: a hundred-year-old story that everyone agrees not to finish is not a story. It's an open case.

Investigate the Shanghai Tunnels yourself →

People decide very quickly whether to believe me, and it rarely has anything to do with whether I'm right. It has to do with whether I said it the way they expected. I have stopped adjusting for that. It costs too much and buys too little.

Here is what I know instead: the facts don't need me to perform them. They just need someone willing to list them in order and stop when the list is finished. I can do that. I am, apparently, unusually good at doing that.

Note to self: the people worth working with are the ones who ask "how do you know" instead of "why do you talk like that." There have been more of them than I expected.

Thirty is a specific number. People who use it usually think it's just a number. It isn't. I've started keeping a separate notebook for anything involving that word, because the regular one wasn't big enough and because some of what's in it, I'd rather Father Vicente read before anyone else does.

I'm not finished. I'm not going to pretend I am. But I've stopped believing this is a story about an object. It's a story about who's been counting the pieces, and why they keep coming up short.

Note to self: an artifact with a filing system is not an artifact. It's an employee.

Read the full case: The Iscariot Binding →

My name is Evelyn Cross. I investigate things other people have decided to stop looking at. I have a dog named Henry, an ally named Father Vicente who answers most of my questions and none of my favorite ones, and a family history I'm still filing under "ongoing." Miles Reed was my partner at Riverside Academy. He isn't anymore. I've filed that one separately, because it doesn't close the way the others do.

These entries sit alongside the full case files — The Haunting of Riverside Academy, Olivia Hartwell: Sterling Matters, The Iscariot Binding, and whatever comes after — written by the person who's been transcribing me the whole time, Justin Owens.