“Or perhaps, because of the project they worked on, the Crow girl’s thoughts immediately went to Joseph Wither,” I suggested. “It sounds like the police are looking into all the possibilities. The important thing to remember is that Cora is safe now. No one can hurt her here.”

Text Message Exchange Between Jordyn Petit And Violet Crow

Text Message Exchange
Between Jordyn Petit and Violet Crow

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Jordyn: Can u believe Cora did that to me?

Violet: Yeah, that was crazy!

Jordyn: She ruined the whole thing

Violet: It was pretty bad. Poor Kaley

Jordyn: Poor Kaley and poor me! Did you see Gabe’s face?

Violet: I don’t think Cora could believe it herself

Jordyn: I’ll get her back. I don’t know exactly how, but she’ll pay

Case #92-10945

Case #92-10945

Excerpt from the journal of Cora E. Landry

Dec. 4, 2017

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about JW44. In my head I know someone must be playing a joke on me, but mostly I want to believe it. To believe in him. I decided that if what JW44 said about the yearbook in the library was real, then I’d believe everything else.

Today Jordyn complained to Mr. Dover that we’d hit a dead end with finding any more information about Wither. Dover asked us what we tried and she listed all our sources. “Keep looking,” Mr. Dover said, putting his arm around her. “I have faith in you.”

At lunch I brought up the idea of going to the library to see what we could find out. “I hate the library. It’s so dumb,” Jordyn said, putting her hands around her neck as if studying there would bore her to death. “Besides, it’s so dinky it probably won’t have any new information, anyway.”

I told her that it wouldn’t hurt to try and that I was going to the library with or without them, that the project was due soon and we had to get it done. Violet said she would go and then after a minute Jordyn shrugged and said she’d go, too.

When we got to the library I really wanted to go to the yearbooks but Jordyn went straight to the librarian and told her what we were working on. The librarian said we should look at old newspaper articles and took us back to the microfiche machine and asked us what dates we needed.

She went into a back room and came back with a box of microfiche film from 1944 and ’45. The spinning microfiche pages made me dizzy but we did find an article that talked about the Wither house burning down. In the story the sheriff said that he thought that Joseph probably started the fire and then ran away.