The Queen and the Quisling

Chapter Thirteen: The Discovery

The village of Chesterfield looked about the same as I'd imagined it. It was a small village nestled within a rocky landscape.

 "Well... it certainly won't take us long to find the address of this house here" Finneas jokes as he scopes through the village.

 The village has only one row of small cottages on either side, and one big building located at the end near the entrance to the mines. The cottages look run down, and the streets are empty of any sign of life. Finneas and I dismount and lead the horses over to a corral that we put them in, tying their reins to the old wooden fence.

 As we begin walking down the street of the village, I notice that everything looks as if it's covered in a thin layer of soot and dust. All the windows of the cottages are boarded up and the wooden planks of the sidewalk creak beneath our feet as we walk along it. 

"Kinsey, here." I hear Finneas say from behind me.

 I've traveled a little ahead of him and he's stopped in front of a doorway of one of the cottages behind me. I walk over to him curiously. He holds up a paper from the file we found in his study and points at the address on it, then at the remnants of an address that remain on the front of the old cottage. We exchange a look of realization before Finneas decides to knock on the door. 

The sound of his knock echoes throughout the cottage, ricocheting back through the boarded windows. Finneas takes the echoing as an invitation to enter and he places his hand on the handle of the door, gently turning it to open the door with ease and enter the abandoned cottage. I glance over my shoulder nervously as I begin to follow him inside. The floor boards creak in protest to our entrance into the cottage. 

The entire cottage was probably about the size of my room back at the palace, and consisted of only one small room in the corner, then the rest of the space is divided up into what used to be a living space. There's papers scattered all throughout the room and dusty furniture still remains within it, giving me the impression that whoever lived here left in a hurry. 

The sound of crinkling paper distracts me from my thoughts and I look down, realizing I stepped on one of the piece's of loose paper fluttering about the cottage at their own free will. I pick up the paper I stepped on and flip it over to reveal a small portrait of a man, a woman, and their two daughters. The wide smiles across their faces cause me to smile myself. 

"Kinsey, look" I hear Finneas say as he holds something up. 

I tuck the photograph away in my corset and walk over to Finneas, grabbing the paper he's holding up to me. It's a newspaper headline dated from two years ago about one of Gateridge's most popular villages, Lunaris. The headline talks about all the different attractions in Lunaris and why it's such a popular tourist spot. Written in messy writing across part of the headline are the words: "Move in with Ken?". 

"Do you think that's-" 

"Kenneth" Finneas interrupts me. 

I ruffle my brow and pull out the photograph I found on the floor to look at it. 

"Where'd you get that?" Finneas asks after seeing me reveal the photo. 

"It was just on the floor" I explain. 

Finneas studies each of the figures faces as if searching for something, then he flips the photo over and begins to study the back. I can see his face light up as he does this. 

"There" He explains, pointing at something written in tiny letters in the upper right hand corner of the photo. 

"Lunaris, Gateridge. #4705. An address?" I ask as I read the lettering.