Piers

Ria

She opened her eyes. She had fallen asleep on the bed in Paddy’s basement room sometime during the night. When Piers came back to the house and came in search of her at some time during the night he shook her awake. Together, they had tried to make sense of what Paddy had been up to but had only succeeded in drawing a blank.

The twins had been too weary to continue to make some of the scribblings of Paddy’s bizarre notes, jotted down in his spidery scrawl. Yawning widely, they had left for their respective rooms upstairs, though her brother had helped her as they tried to grapple with what they had found.

They had sat for a while, talking about the wealth of information they had unearthed from Paddy’s tablet. It had not been difficult to unlock that, his personal one, a device he left locked in his basement locker, safe and sound, except from his family. The password had been that of their first pet dog…

It had been Cole’s name that Paddy had written on his notepad, the one he kep