Secrets Are

Book 1: Secrets Are Deadly | Chapter 45

Mom had told us that she was still wondering why Dad hadn't been more persistent in finding out who had set his office on fire and now she knew why. He didn't want anyone finding out who set his office on fire because he was partly the reason why. I'm sure he hadn't pressured any of his friends who were policemen to spend time on the case like he would have if someone else had set his office on fire because they wanted to ruin his business.

He wouldn't have let his friends stop working on the case until the culprit was found. I wasn't sure if the police were still looking into who caused the fire and Mom didn't either. She said Dad hadn't talked about the fire since the month it had happened.

***

A few days later Ben and I were in my dad's office looking through the safe. I had come up with a couple of codes that could possibly be the password for the safe and tried them until I got the right one. It was Ryan's birthday, which really wasn't that surprising. At least it wasn't his own birthday. I was kind of almost expecting that to be his password for his safe. In the safe there was of course the usual things you find in a safe, like birth certificates, which included Nick's, but there were also journals.

There were a lot of other things in the safe, but none of them were important to why we were looking through the safe. I had flipped through a couple of the journals before dumping them into a box that Ben and I had brought after seeing Nick and Andrea's name in them. This was what I was hoping that would give us answers on what was going on and why Dad was trying so hard to keep a secret. Maybe there would even be something on Dad's friend, Ron Hampton. I would surely like to know more about this man who has been helping my dad.

"Alright, you've got everything?" Ben asked me as he looked back up at me. He was holding the box that we had brought with us to put whatever we were taking with us in.

"Yeah, I think so. None of this other stuff is of any use to us," I replied looking back into the safe one last time. I looked over everything that was in the safe and then decided that we were done here. After closing the safe door and making sure it was locked, we left my dad's office and I locked that up as well. Then we left my house and got into Ben's car.

He had picked me up earlier this morning to go to breakfast before we went to my house to search through my dad's safe. Ben had left the same time as his dad had left to go golfing with my dad and then have lunch. We still had a bunch of time left before lunch was to come around, but it had taken a couple of hours to go through the safe, so we had been in there longer than I thought we had been. I'm sure that my dad and Ben's dad were still playing golf, so we didn't have to worry about being caught at all.

But it was nice to get out of my house as soon as possibly just in case my dad came back earlier than we expected him to. After Ben and I had gotten into his car, we drove to Hayden and Natalie's house where we were supposed to meet everyone later to discuss what Ben and I had found in Dad's safe.

Besides getting everything related to Nick and Andrea that was in that safe, I had also taken the birth certificates that belonged to me, Ryan, Mom and Nick. Hayden's wasn't in there, but I figured that was because he had his birth certificate in his own house. Mom had talked about going to get our birth certificates just in case we needed, which is the reason why I had grabbed those. I didn't want Mom to have to go back to our house and get them herself when I had the chance to grab them.

And even if she did go get them, she wouldn't have known where to find them since she didn't know about the safe until Mr. Morgan had told her about it. So, she wouldn't have known where to find them there. But that didn't matter, I had them now. And Mom wouldn't have to worry about going to get them.