Chapter 15 Deleted and Discovered
The walk back to her dorm felt like wading through fog. Mia’s legs moved automatically while her brain replayed the lakeside confrontation on an endless, torturous loop. The cufflink. Silas’s explanation about the paired gift. His arrogant taunt—even if I confessed, nothing would happen.
She wanted to scream.
Her room was dark and quiet when she finally stumbled inside, locking the door behind her with shaking hands. She didn’t bother turning on the lights. Just collapsed into her desk chair and pulled out her phone, swiping to the photos she’d taken of the cufflink before Silas had… what? Taken it back? Claimed it? The images glowed in the darkness—close-ups of the ornate hawk design, the worn silver, those damning initials carved into the metal. S.V.
She zoomed in until the pixels turned into meaningless blocks of color. Was he telling the truth? The story was so weirdly specific. A birthday gift. A joke between roommates. Matching cufflinks with each other’s initials—his with Ethan’s E.S., Ethan’s with his S.V. It was the kind of sentimental thing she could imagine Ethan doing. He’d always been like that, finding meaning in small gestures.
But Silas? Cold, dismissive Silas doing something so… tender?
And if it really had belonged to Ethan, why was it buried in the mud by that lake? Had it fallen from his pocket the night he died? Or had it slipped from Silas’s hands when he returned to hide the evidence, just like that forum post suggested?
The questions tangled into knots she couldn’t untie.
Frustration burned hot in her chest. She needed to know more about that anonymous post—the one about Silas walking around the lake at 2 AM with a heavy bag. Maybe whoever wrote it had seen more than they’d shared. Maybe they had details that could crack this whole thing open.
She glanced at her clock. 1:47 AM. The campus internet would be quiet, most students asleep. Perfect.
Her laptop hummed to life, the screen’s glow making her squint. She navigated to the St. Augustine’s forum and logged in using the moderator credentials Elara had given her. The dashboard loaded, showing recent posts, flagged content, user reports. She typed “Silas Voss lake” into the search bar and hit enter.
Nothing.
She frowned, tried again with different keywords. “Sullivan lake night.” “Late night walking.” “2 AM witness.”
Still nothing.
Her pulse quickened. She clicked through to the archived threads, the ones that had been deleted or hidden. Scrolled through pages and pages of mundane drama—roommate complaints, stolen textbooks, dining hall food rants.
The post was gone. Completely gone.
Not just buried under newer content. Not just locked or hidden. Erased.
Her hands trembled as she accessed the backend moderation logs, looking for any record of who had deleted it, when, why. That kind of information was always tracked—it was basic forum protocol.
There was nothing. No deletion timestamp. No moderator tag. No digital fingerprint at all. The post had been scrubbed so thoroughly it was like it had never existed in the first place.
The room suddenly felt colder. Someone with serious access—someone who knew exactly what they were doing—had wiped it clean. Was it Silas? Did he have that kind of reach into the campus systems? Or was someone else protecting him, someone with the power to erase evidence as easily?
The clean disappearance felt like a response. Like someone had been watching her investigation and decided to close that door before she could walk through it.
But they’d made a mistake. Because the deletion was proof. Proof that she was onto something real, something dangerous enough that someone felt threatened by a simple anonymous forum post.
Her mind raced. If the digital trail was dead, she needed a physical one. The books Silas had checked out from the library—Advanced Cellular Biology, Principles of Forensic Toxicology, Chemical Interactions and Adverse Reactions—those weren’t just theoretical reading. If he’d actually been applying that knowledge, he would have needed materials. Equipment. A workspace.
The chemistry lab.
The next evening, heavy clouds turned the sky into a bruised purple mess by the time Mia reached Hargrove Science Building. She’d spent the day psyching herself up, going over the plan until it felt almost normal instead of completely insane. She had a borrowed student ID—swiped from a girl in the library who looked vaguely similar and had carelessly left it on a table. The photo wouldn’t pass close inspection, but after-hours security was usually half-asleep anyway.
The building loomed ahead, all concrete and glass, most windows dark. She swiped the stolen ID at the entrance, holding her breath.
The light blinked green. The lock clicked.
She was in.
The third floor was silent except for the hum of ventilation and the buzz of emergency lights. Lab 312…Advanced Organic Chemistry—sat at the end of the hall. The door had a keypad lock, numbers worn shiny from years of use. She tried the code she’d overheard a TA complaining about last week—the last four digits of the department phone number, apparently unchanged since the building opened.
The lock beeped. Green light. Open.
“Too easy,” she whispered, slipping inside.
The lab was dark and smelled weird—sharp chemicals underneath fake lemon cleaner. Rows of black tables held complex equipment she couldn’t name. Beakers, tubes, machines with digital displays. Her phone’s flashlight cut through the darkness as she moved between the benches, scanning for… what? She didn’t even know.
Then she remembered—hazardous waste disposal. Chemistry labs had to document everything they threw away. If Silas had used something unusual, something toxic, there would be a record.
She found the logbook hanging on a clipboard near a metal hood. Thick binder, forms going back two years. She flipped through pages, working backward through the months. September, August, July, June…
There. Early June. Five days before Ethan died.
Her breath caught.
It was a disposal entry for organic solvent waste. Normal stuff—acetone, ethanol, the usual suspects. But halfway down the list were two compounds that made her heart stop. 1,4-Dioxane and ethylene glycol derivatives. Both had a note in red pen: “Contamination - source unknown. Batch anomalous. Do not reuse containers.”
The student who’d logged it was someone named Cassius Wendt. But the supervisor signature, the “checked by” scrawl at the bottom of the form—she’d seen that handwriting before. Sharp, slanted letters that leaned aggressively to the right.
She pulled out her phone with shaking hands and scrolled to a photo she’d taken weeks ago of a script note from the theater. Held it next to the logbook signature.
They matched.
Silas’s handwriting.
He’d been in this lab. He’d signed off on the disposal of suspicious, potentially toxic chemicals just days before Ethan drowned in that lake.
Her hands shook so badly she almost dropped her phone as she snapped picture after picture of the logbook pages. The flash felt too bright, too loud in the silent lab. But she couldn’t stop. This was real. This was concrete. This connected Silas directly to…
CLANG.
The sound of a heavy door slamming shut echoed from the hallway. Footsteps. Slow and deliberate.
It was the security.
Panic hit her like ice water. She fumbled with the logbook, trying to hang it back on its clip, her phone nearly slipping from her sweaty palms. The footsteps were getting closer. A flashlight beam swept under the lab door.
The emergency exit at the back of the lab had an alarm. The windows didn’t open. There was nowhere to go.
She pressed herself against the wall behind a tall equipment cabinet, making herself as small as possible, praying the shadows would hide her. Her heart hammered so loud she was sure it would give her away.
The door handle rattled.
Then a hand clamped over her mouth from behind.