When they regroup, it is past noon. Barry and Lydia make frozen pizza after frozen pizza in what passes as an oven in their basement. It took forty minutes to preheat, and another hour to cook all four pizzas, one after the other. It's three in the afternoon, but it feels like a midnight snack. The sun is already in the west, so lights don't stream in through the closed blinds covering a window so small they couldn't crawl out in the event of a fire.

In quiet, they mostly sit and eat. Their journey back to life has left them with a jet lag, and with tired eyes and blinks that last too long, they eat on their separate cots, mostly at separate from separate pizzas. The cheese burns, sticking to the roof of their mouth. The oven has raised the temperature of the room by at least five degrees Celsius, akin to having a personal space heater. If they closed their eyes and ignored the old smell of the blankets, it might feel like a place they'd rather be. At the very least, the basement of the church is starting to feel less transient. There isn't another place they can go.

Once everyone is done eating, Audrey passes out sheets. With Kaia and Este's help, they compiled information on everyone and they pass them around.

"You don't have to share if you don't want to," Audrey's voice is sharp and clipped. "I mean, I know, so I can do the investigating if you aren't interested."

"I mean, we don't have to read them either," Eva shakes her head. "We don't have to do anything."

Kaia wants to agree, but she can't. She loves horror movies. Kaia can remember going to an older theatre in Vancouver with Rory, curling up next to her and watching classics, trying to commit every thought that occurred to her at the moment to share with Rory later. The buttery taste of popcorn and comfort and excitement was on her tongue. Kaia doesn't know much, but she knows a few film theories. Their deaths aren't MacGuffins. At least, Kaia's death isn't. It's everything.

No, the pages are Chekov's gun. It will go off. Possibly immediately. The people who killed them seemed trigger-happy. Maybe it's Chelster.

Barry doesn't care for his. He essentially tosses it aside. He knows what he did. His world stopped stilling the second she died. He is certain that his love for her didn't bring her back to life. It would have done so sooner than his death. If anything, his love for her rose him from the grave. He had to join her on whatever plane of existence, whatever spot in Heaven or Hell or whatever in between they were then and are now.

Lydia does peek at the information from her death. She had a stroke. A fan site reports her brain was without oxygen for twelve minutes, and her parents unplugged her body, and run on machines but without any activity in its brain, twelve days later as well. She's always appreciated symmetry.

When Clare gets their file, they pour through it immediately. There are articles in the local newspaper and a few stories reported at the national level. A boy whose name she doesn't know, a face they can't picture. They hear the sound of a gun firing. A boy who hated the police, who pled not guilty. The smell of hot tar in the air, warmth through their stomach. Laboured breaths. Squeezing someone's hand. Then, the thought is gone. The file says Clare Canosa is a local town hero. The Canosa family is still in town, and she had a Catholic burial that thousands of people attended. The boy's prison is hundreds of miles further south. That's what happens to cop killers.

A face Clare cannot picture. They wonder what he would say now, two years into his sentence with at least twenty more to go. He's seventeen now. Maybe if they did know each other before, Clare wouldn't recognize the young man the boy is becoming.

True crime podcasts sometimes start with stranger premises.

Leo only skims his paper, since the details are already aligned. He died in a fire in a factory. He didn't take his medication that morning. Surely, he was unconscious before he died. At least he doesn't think he suffered. His body was recovered but the funeral did not have an open casket. He doesn't want to think about his mother standing over his grave, or people saluting him as if death has any value, or as if Leo's life had any either.

There's a child out there who is dead because Leo didn't stop the man. Perhaps, there are many more. At the very least, there is one child, who died in the nineties, and Leo has yet to save enough people to resurrect that child. Why him? Why him now?

Eva wants to do something with the paper. As expected, she died of an overdose. It doesn't really matter. She uses the back to sketch out the layout of her childhood home, in a marker that bleeds through the page. She draws the downstairs and the upstairs, and she indicates where the windows are, and where her files are in the basement that have every report card and every tardy slip and every immunization record. All the things from her childhood she couldn't take but her mother kept. The places where her stuffed animals would be in her closet if her mother hadn't tossed them in the garbage when she snuck out and into a dingy apartment on her own.

The paper will do something. Eva smiles.

The pieces fall into place for Ajay. It answers nothing, but he has found nothing but unanswers. The earrings were an unanswer, a fact with no question proceeding it and no reasoning behind it. It only cast more doubt into many of Ajay's questions. How are their returns possible biologically? Why did any of this happen to him? A hit and run. He can hear tires squealing, the smell of burning rubber hitting his nostrils, and his body relaxing. The thought he learned in pilot training crosses his mind. When you are about to crash, as hard as it seems, as antithetical as it is to every thought, you need to relax. A tight body will be injured more. There is no reason the hit-and-run happened to him. No logic to any of it, and he's been wound so tightly. Ajay breathes in and out.

Fallon was murdered. The thought is relieving. A cool wave washes over her. Her fingers trace the stab wounds on her chest. Based on the newspaper article that Audrey pulled, she was stabbed twenty-seven times by two different men. She counts each mark. There are eight. She wonders why these eight remain. Yet, Fallon persists. She doesn't want to read about how Corrin was home late and discovered Fallon and the men and how she ran for help, but the fact is there. Fallon persists.

There are notes about the obituaries. The choice of information seems odd to her coming from Audrey. If Fallon had to guess, Kaia found it. Fallon looks over at her. Kaia is not reading her own notes, but she has a furrowed brow, staring down at her hands. Even still, Fallon smiles.

Fallon Evergreen. Survived by her younger sister Anna, her mother Kristy Stewarts, her father Damon Evergreen, her stepmother Bianca Evergreen. Fallon Evergreen. Survived by her fiancée, Corrin Duke.

Nico reads their letter and stands up. They run their fingers on their teeth, an unfamiliar taste on their tongue. Nico doesn't remember what happened, but they remember what happened three days before Christmas dinner.

Kye was always good at reining in Nico. Sometimes, their excitement got the best of both of them. Nico didn't use the bathroom at the airport, and in the car felt the sleep in their eyes from the flight. They asked Kye's brother to pull over at a gas station so Nico could use the bathroom. They wanted to freshen up. Nico wasn't allowed to bring their bag inside by the attendant. Someone had OD'd in it last week. It had all Nico's toiletries, and Nico didn't realize they left it behind until they got home.

"You forget everything," Kye laughed as he grabbed Nico a spare toothbrush.

Nico leaned forward and kissed Kye's cheekbone, the skin soft and clear of make-up, "I don't forget how much I love you. Or anything you tell me."

"You make me feel like a middle-aged woman with a husband who does her no good," Kye shook his head. "You do me no good."

Nico had smiled. They smile now, the memory not as fresh as the taste of a butter tart fresh in their mouth. Usually, they don't have any nuts in them. It did though. Nico had died an accidental death. Nico had died and Kye goes on living.

"What's the plan?" Nico asks. They need one.

Eva looks over at Este, "want to do something mysterious, no questions asked?"

Este's chin lifts. They place their hand under their chin, feeling the soft flesh on the back of their palm, "no questions?"

"Half the profits for you?" Eva asks.

Profits are something Este could stand to gain. Revenge could be free. Anything worthwhile takes costs. Este has learned that the hard way. They smile.

Nico shakes their head, "I mean, we should come up with something. I need to shower. Maybe see my family. We've got to do something."

"We shouldn't do anything without sleeping first," Ajay argues. "We should go to bed early and regroup once we've digested it all."

"The information is fresh," Audrey argues.

Ajay shrugs, "you all do it then. Somewhere else. I'm going to sleep."

Ajay looks over at the light switch. Ambrose gets up to get it since it's next to his cot. His fingers rest on the plastic. He glances around at the others, waiting for anyone to tell him to stop. Some eyes are on him, others averted. He waits.

"Tomorrow," Clare agrees. "We can figure it out tomorrow."

Ambrose flicks out the lights.

~~~~~

Okie. Shorter one, but the last one was meaty. Any thoughts on your character's next move, or their feelings after this revelation? Let me know in the comments!