N I C H O L A S

"What are you talking about?" Isaac asked Shawn.

Shawn tore his eyes away from Wilson who had finally disappeared out of sight, and he turned to face his friend with a grin. "He wasn't with his girlfriend that night; the night of party."

"How can you be so sure?" said Luca.

"Because Patricia was with you, Nicholas, and Isaac at the ceremony," Shawn explained. "Don't you remember? Arthur and I had gone to connect the speakers to the radio to play the music at the party, and meanwhile, Patricia and her two friends were chatting with you three."

The memory came back to Nicholas in a sudden flash.

"When do you publish your newspaper? Every week?" Patricia asked Nicholas, looking genuinely interested. "I don't know where my boyfriend is right now, but I want to join the contest with him. Who knows? We might win."

"You're right..." Nicholas nodded absently, his mind feeling fuzzy. "I was talking to her the whole night. And I remember that she kept looking for her boyfriend while everyone else was dancing."

"Then what about Nancy's letters to John Carter?" Isaac said feverishly. "They made way more sense than whatever Wilson's case is. We know for a fact that Nancy was in a secret relationship with Carter. A, we know that she told him a big secret. B, he forced her into doing something unforgivable. C, near the end she couldn't keep the secret to herself anymore. And D, we know that she asked him to visit her on the night of the ceremony, around the time she died."

"But we don't know if Carter had showed up or not," said Shawn. "There's a chance that Carter didn't go to her dorm as she had asked him to, and instead it was Wilson who went to see her that night. You saw the look on Wilson's face when we mentioned Nancy. He was hiding something. I'm sure of it."

Nicholas couldn't make sense of what Wilson had to do with Nancy, but before they could say anything more, they saw someone walking toward them from afar. He was one of Wilson's friends who had been there a few minutes ago when they had asked Wilson about Nancy Green; the one with dark auburn hair and hazel eyes.

"That's Thomas. He's the team's captain," Shawn whispered to his friends. "Wonder what he wants..."

They all watched curiously as the tall boy approach them, sending an awkward wave when he finally reached them.

"What is it, Thomas?" Shawn asked bitterly, still angry over his encounter with Wilson.

Before he began to speak, Thomas threw a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was around. Nicholas could see that he looked nervous.

"I heard you asking Wilson about Nancy Green," Thomas said her name quietly, as though it was forbidden to speak it.

"What about it?" Shawn questioned, more calmly this time.

"I'm almost sure that Wilson denied knowing her. Didn't he?"

"Yes." Arthur nodded. "Do you know something?"

Another glance behind his shoulder. Thomas wetted his dry lips anxiously before continuing, "Wilson is my dormmate, so I might know him better than anyone else here. And I know that he... he used to date Nancy in the past. But I think they only went out a few times. And that was while Wilson already had a girlfriend; Patricia."

Nicholas frowned. "Really?"

"He'd never been faithful to his girlfriend. Nancy was one of the girls who fell for his lies. And I can't be sure, but..." Thomas scrubbed a hand over his jaw anxiously. "I think on one of their dates, she got a little drunk and Wilson took advantage of her."

Nicholas's eyes widened at those words, the horror striking at his skin. "How do you know that?"

"Because I know Wilson. Last year, a few weeks after Christmas break, Wilson told me that he was going out to a pub with a girl named Nancy, but he jokingly asked me not to mention it in front of his girlfriend," Thomas explained. "I don't know what happened between Nancy and him, but after that night, Wilson kept receiving letters from her. She would send him one almost every day, and I could see how nervous it made Wilson whenever he saw one of those red envelopes that she sent him. He would find them in his bag. He would open his locker and see one in there. Or he would wake up to see that Nancy had slipped the envelope into our room from under the door."

"Did you ever read what was written inside them?" Isaac asked.

"No. Wilson would just tear them up and throw them away."

"So how do you know the letters were from her?" Arthur asked.

"It was obvious." Thomas shrugged, before continuing, "It was only near spring break that the envelopes suddenly stopped arriving. There was no sign of them, and I could see that Wilson was glad about it; he always told me how crazy Nancy was. But then, only a few days before her death... Wilson found another one of the red envelopes in his locker after months."

Spring was when Nancy had started seeing John Carter, Nicholas thought to himself. That's probably why she had stopped writing to Wilson. But why did she send him another letter again after so long?

"I could see that the envelope scared Wilson," Thomas continued. "Like he always would, he tore up the letter and threw it away. But when he left the room, I went over the bin and managed to put a few pieces together."

"What did it say?" Luca asked.

"I only understood a short part of it," Thomas replied. "It said something like... 'we need to talk' and 'I can't keep this secret'"

The boys looked around at each other questioningly. Another secret. Another warning. Another threat.

"Do you know anything else about Nancy?" Arthur asked after a while. "Did you know her personally?"

There was a pause before Thomas finally gave a shake of his head. "No. But I know — well, I've heard that apparently, she didn't have a normal family. They carried a big secret that they could never speak of; it was about her father — Byron Green — before he mysteriously disappeared one day. And she was afraid of ending up like her father; one day here, the other disappearing forever."

"He disappeared?" Luca repeated with surprise. "What does that even mean? Why did he disappear?"

"That's all I know," Thomas said more firmly this time, flushed. He looked as though he already regretted saying this much.

***

That night, as they had gathered in the common room, huddled around their books and parchments, they couldn't bring themselves to study.

"What do you think Thomas meant? About Nancy's father and her family secret, I mean," Isaac whispered as he was sitting on the coach before the fireplace.

"I don't know... I can't make sense of any of this..." Nicholas muttered. The room was dim and warm, making him feel rather dizzy as his mind wandered off.

"I was so sure that it was the teacher," Arthur mumbled as he took his glasses off to rub his tired eyes. "But now with Wilson back in the picture again... I don't know what to think anymore."

"Maybe we should just stop." Isaac sighed in exhaustion, the itching fatigue in his body forcing him to give up. "There's nothing else we can do to get to the end of it. This is a dead end."

"It's not a dead end." It was Luca who had spoken, his hands laced together as he gazed into the fireplace. "There's someone else we can talk to. Someone who knew Nancy better than anyone else."

"Who?" Nicholas asked.

Luca finally glanced up at him. "Her mother. If there's anyone who can help us unravel these secrets, it's her."