Page 61 of The Case of the Missing Love Stone

I reach for another stack of photographs from the archive file and flip through them beside Scarlet’s notes, and then I stop cold. “Wait.”

Wes looks up.

I pull a black-and-white photograph from the pile. In it, packs are gathered near the springs decades earlier during festival season, offerings spread along the dock. And tied beneath the far railing are white ribbons, same placement, same knot pattern as what we found this morning.

Scarlet moves beside me fast enough that her shoulder presses against mine. “Where did that come from?”

“Archive restoration file.”

Wes takes the photograph and turns it over. Handwritten notation runs across the back in faded ink: Emergency release gathering following bond deterioration concerns. Summer of 1978.

The room quiets as everyone makes the same calculation. It’s not separate cases but one system, older than the investigation and deeper than the theft.

Scarlet reads it twice. “Bond deterioration, long before GatorX existed.”

“Like what your grandmother documented,” Wes says.

She exhales slowly. “The release rites weren’t originally malicious. They were emergency rituals.”

“To manage unstable bonds safely,” I say.

“Or try to.”

Wes pins the old photograph beside the current springs images. The past and present face each other across fifty years, of the same problem recurring in the same place.

“If somebody’s recreating these rites now, they’re not improvising,” he says. “They’re following historical precedent. And GatorX may be the pharmaceutical version of something that started here.”

Scarlet presses her fingers beneath her ribs, and her scent dampens faintly with pain.

“You okay?”

She lowers her hand too quickly. “Fine.”

Wes doesn’t say a word. He looks at her, then at the clock, then toward the kitchen. He doesn’t comment. Instead, he opens her refrigerator.

Scarlet turns. “What are you doing?”

“Cooking.”

“You don’t know what I have.”

“I know you have eggs, leftover ham, half an onion, and three kinds of cheese.”

“You inventoried my refrigerator?”

“I opened it.”

“That is how inventories begin.”

Wes removes a skillet from the lower cabinet with the confidence of an alpha on an instructional mission.

She folds her arms. “You can’t solve every emotional problem with protein.”

“No,” he says. “But I can solve the fact that none of us ate dinner.”

“That is annoyingly reasonable.”

“It’s one of his worst traits,” I tell her.