One cup of coffee and half a ham sandwich later, Boo is curled up in bed with a blanket wrapped loosely around her shoulders and the yellow yearbooks spread across her bed. The first one she picks up is from nineteen-sixty-five, Martha's sophomore year of high school. She flips slowly through the laminated pages, completely in awe at the glimpse into the past she's getting.

Martha's face catches her eye several times. Whether she's caught walking through the halls of the school, mid-cartwheel on the football field, or snapped in the midst of laughter, she's as beautiful as Boo remembers. In the background she can also see her late grandfather admiring Martha from afar.

And, of course, Nathaniel Waters is in the yearbook too. Nearly every photo of Randall has Nathaniel alongside him, tacked to his heels like a lingering shadow. Even through a photo twice her age, she can see still the cold emptiness in his gaze that she saw every time he looked at her.

Boo goes to turn the page again but stops when her vision snags on a face she hadn't expected to see: Damien Burkwell in a tattered practice jersey, casually grinning at the camera while clutching a football.

Of course. The newscaster's voice from the other night echoes in her head: "He graduated from Primark High School in nineteen-sixty-seven and was an avid sportsman."

Her heart nearly stops beating. Thrust into a state of urgency, Boo tosses the book from sixty-five back onto the bed and scrambles to find the one from sixty-seven, nearly ripping out some of the pages by accident as she frantically flips to the graduates section and traces her finger through the faces laid out on the page.

B . . . Julie Bearden, Gerard Box, Damien Burkwell.

She taps his smiling photo. It hadn't clicked until that moment that if Damien and Martha were at the same school, there was a chance they'd dwelt in the same circles. More than likely they were acquaintances; maybe even friends.

Her suspicion is soon confirmed; no sooner has she turned the page than do her eyes stumble upon a photo of a science fair from December 1967, with Martha and Damien candidly chatting while standing at the same display table. Martha's face holds an animated smile, but Boo is more interested in Damien's expression.

Even in a picture twice as old as she is, through grainy photography and poor development, she can make out the same wistful look in his eyes that she'd seen so often in her grandfather's. A woman as effervescent as Martha would certainly be hard to ignore.

Was it possible . . . no, it couldn't be.

Boo slowly turns the page to find a spread about homecoming of 1967, with a photo of Martha crowned queen in the middle of the page. Damien lingers in the background of another photo on the same page, his eyes on Martha again.

A lump forms in Boo's throat.

Her curiosity is ravenous like a wolf let loose to hunt. She abandons the yearbooks for her laptop, hastily hammering his name into Google in the hopes of finding out more. Having seen Damien with Martha ignites the same desire Boo had felt weeks before-to know more about her grandmother's life in order to quell her persistent grief. But she'd be lying to herself if she didn't admit it was more than mourning that drove her to dig deeper.

Within Boo there now lingered the morbid curiosity associated with the age-old question that all of Jack Creek had been asking for decades: what happened to Damien Burkwell?

Beyond the short news segment from the previous day and the occasional coverage throughout the decades, Boo is met with a disheartening shortage of information. Everything she already knows about his case is repeated via the same cycle of phrases: "Vanished on a fishing trip . . . whereabouts unknown . . . no progress made since that strange night." Her memories are no help either; Martha had failed to mention Damien. Ever.

It was well within her grandmother's personality to talk about anyone and everyone she knew, hence why Boo knew so many people in her social circle despite being such an outcast. But Martha had been friends with a man missing for over forty years and never breathed a word about it. She could barely go two hours without telling some outlandish tale she'd overheard; an unsolved disappearance is the motherload of all gossip. Why stay so quiet?

The dark pit in Boo's stomach continues to grow as she combs through Damien's past. A star on the high school football team, an avid outdoorsman, a member of the drama club-he eclipsed so many groups, and yet everyone seemed to turn a blind eye to his vanishing. Boo just can't grasp why.

Her fingers flex, inching towards her phone laying on the desk as if moving by their own accord. If she can't make sense of what she sees, perhaps Harry can.

"Hello, love," he chirps into her ear. "To what do I owe this pleasure?"

A momentary beacon of warmth shoots through the dark. Boo tries and fails to suppress a smile. "Back to bother you, as always. Are you busy?"

Background shuffling fills the space before his reply. "Not particularly. Any reason you ask?"

Boo sighs grievously, pressing her free palm to her forehead. "Just need to spitball for a moment."

"Go ahead."

Her brown eyes narrow at the screen while her mind gets to work weaving bridges between the fragments of information she holds. "Damien Burkwell," she begins hesitantly. "The guy who went missing literally decades ago. He's been in the back of my mind for a while now, but today he's really all I can think about. His case is driving me crazy."

"How so?" Harry sounds mildly surprised; granted, her interest may seem unorthodox but Damien is under her skin and it's unlikely he'll be leaving anytime soon.

Boo pulls up the most recent article published. "The news said he went missing on a fishing trip. Everyone thought he ran away right? But this article says he was supposed to be leaving for Virginia just a few days later and work at his family's store down there. If he wanted out, why didn't he just go to Virginia early? Why run away entirely?

"And besides, it's not as if these woods are hard to navigate. You'd have to try really hard to get lost. Downtown is less than half a mile away from the river he went to."

"I honestly don't know, Boo," Harry murmurs. "Downtown probably looked different back then."

"I mean, tell me this makes sense," she cries frustratedly. "Regardless of if he left or if he simply got lost, Damien was a football player, loved to hike, and knew his way around the outdoors-how does someone like that go missing on a fishing trip?"

"What are you saying?" he asks in confusion.

Boo rubs her hand across her forehead, as if the heat from the friction will somehow glue together the mess in her head. "I don't know. It just doesn't make sense."

"Maybe he didn't run away but he got hurt while he was out," he suggests. "Maybe he was alone and couldn't call for help and . . ."

Harry's morbid words die in the empty air. "I guess it's plausible. But everything I'm reading is suggesting the opposite. For God's sake, he was in the Nature Club in high school!"

A pause. Boo closes her eyes, struggling to fight off the familiar feeling beginning to settle onto her shoulders. "I just keep coming to the same terrible conclusion," she murmurs.

"And that is?"

Boo squirms uncomfortably in her chair as the black feeling grows stronger. The only other time she felt this horrid was after she found out Martha was dead-the same sick sensation had lingered for days before she dared voice it; the fear that maybe her grandmother hadn't died naturally.

Boo's hands begin to shake. "Maybe . . . maybe someone killed him."

She hears Harry's sharp intake of breath. "Don't you think that if he was killed, the police would've come out and said that already?"

She can't help but scoff derisively. "Of course not. Have you met the cops around here? An unsolved murder on their watch would be the last thing Nathaniel admits to."

"I suppose you have a point," Harry muses. "But even taking that as a plausible theory, what happens now? You think we could prove something the cops won't?"

As much as she hates to admit it, he's right. Her teeth sink into the soft flesh of her lower lip and her eyebrows draw together in deep frustration.

"Honestly, Boo, what concern of it is ours? You said so yourself, if someone wanted to look into what happened they'd have no idea where to even begin."

Boo sighs in defeat and slumps down in her chair. "I know you're right, I just can't get him off my mind. Besides, we still have Nana's situation to worry about-which, by the way, I'm now officially stumped as to what we do now. Any ideas?"

"Sorry, love, I've got nothing," Harry laughs awkwardly. "Between the tape and the photos, we have a whole lot of guesses but I've no idea what they add up to."

"Well that makes two of us," she grumbles. "It's too early to be thinking this much."

He exhales heavily into the phone. "What if we looked more into your suspects?"

Boo half-laughs, half-groans. "You mean the list of people that mostly just creep me out?"

Rich laughter hits her left ear. "Well if that's how you want to categorize them, that's fine. But yes, that list."

"I suppose that's a good idea," she concedes. "But you have to look into Calum. I refuse to go anywhere near that weirdo."

"And I suppose you'll look into both Nathaniel and Loughton?" Harry quips. "They seem like more of a threat than he does."

"Maybe so but I can handle them," Boo says, not sure how much she really believes that. "Just do what you can to find out anything about Calum. I'll make a trip to the station and see what I can sniff out."

"Are you positive?" he simpers. "I'm not sure my charms will be quite as effective on Calum as yours are. He seems rather enamored with you."

Boo gags into the phone and sends Harry into a fit of obnoxious laughter. "Say something like that to me again and I'll block you," she warns him darkly.

He giggles for a moment longer before the sound subsides and the air becomes quiet. After a moment, he says, "Please be careful, Boo." The abrupt seriousness of his words has her sitting up in her chair, her body drawn to attention. "If anything happened to you, I . . ."

He stops himself. The space between them grows tense and Boo finds herself chewing anxiously on her thumbnail.

"I know," she says in a small voice. She feels it too-the heavy weight of paranoia, mingled with fear for Harry's safety at any given moment; a feeling bred from her overwhelming adoration for him. The more they dig into the cloudy truth surrounding Martha's death, the stronger those feelings grow; her fear feeding off her love like some parasitic leech.

"I don't know what I'd do," he finally says somberly. "Just tread carefully, okay?"

"You too, Harry," she says softly. "I don't want to lose anyone else important."

"You won't, Lita, long as I have a say in it." Her heart bursts into a sprint, rushing into his throat at the velvet sound of her name on his lips. "I'm not going anywhere."

sorry the damn gif is so small, can't find a bigger size of it :c

and i apologize for the delay in updating! i've been working a lot at my real world job and haven't had as much time to work on this as i wanted. plus the edits took longer to make than i expected, but i took my time to make sure they were what i wanted and what you all deserve. quality over quantity i suppose. i'm not a photoshop expert but i did my best. the simplicity of the yearbook pages is closely representative of what it would've actually looked like in 1967.

what do you think boo is going to find during her investigation? what do you think harry will find?

did damien really disappear?

also hope you enjoyed that little nod to dandelion in the search result lmao