Chapter Twenty-Nine

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Reid opened the cluttered drawer of his office desk at home. He told himself that he would clean it out for his New Years resolution, but like most resolutions he never kept it. He took out the seemingly endless pieces of paper from his drawer and plopped them on his workspace. There was nothing better to do on a Sunday morning than read through papers and papers of a mystery waiting to be solved. That was a New Years resolution that he wanted to achieve as soon as possible. He closed the drawer just to open the one underneath it that was filled with even more paper that had all his messy handwriting on it trying to piece together everything.

He carefully organized the sheets of paper out on his desk in two piles; the pile on his left was for already read letters and the pile on his right were the letters he still had to read, which wasn't many. He hated how much he procrastinated this urgent project, but he didn't have any time during the last few months of the year to even penetrate on it. Carmen had already given up on reading any more letters since she would just get utterly frustrated by the first few sentences, so she gave all the letters Rossi had given her to Reid. He put those letters in a separate pile, so that he could decipher that after he was done with the current letters.

After he was finished sorting, which took no time at all, he revised the notes that he had been keeping while he read through each letter very closely. He made note that Jeremy never mentioned what gender "they" was, so he assumed that "they" was anonymous or a group. He also never mentioned Olivia or Carmen by name. Reid had to admit that he had quite a poetic way of writing to cover up any evidence that he had a family.

'The song that swells within my Olive tree is about to bloom a wonderful garden,'

'Even when a sad song comes on, it's still beautiful and worth everything,'

'I don't want my Olive tree to wither and die because of me and I neither want my garden to die.'

Reid noted that Olivia was obviously the Olive tree he endlessly talked about and that Carmen was the song and garden he mentions throughout various letters. He thought it was quite creative the way he used name meanings as his cover up. But from what?

He picked up a letter from his right and began to read it very carefully. Maybe it held the key to this strange riddle.

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Carmen walked up the sketchy stairs of a pretty rundown apartment building in downtown Washington. There were only three levels to the whole building meaning no elevators. The fake stair tiles were pealing off, revealing rotting wood underneath. It reeked of cigarette smoke and she even passed by a few small butts left inside the front entrance right underneath the sign that warned 'No Smoking.' She let that irony sit in the back of her mind as she made it to the second floor and went up to the one of two doors in the small hallway. She gave three hard knocks and waited. She soon heard the clicks of unlocking several locks and then the knob turned and the door opened.

Carmen smiled graciously. "Hi, Claudia."

Claudia smiled back as she moved aside to let her in. She closed the door, making sure to lock every lock and even double checking them to make sure they weren't loose. After that she turned to face Carmen with wide open arms and they embraced each other in a long hug.

"Hey, girl, how are you?" Claudia said, still holding onto Carmen.

Carmen rubbed her back. "I've been good, how about you?"

That's when Claudia let go of her and stared blankly into her eyes as if she lost all life with one simple question. Carmen knitted her eyebrows together followed by a concerned look appearing across her face, getting more serious the longer Claudia didn't answer.

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