Chapter 3: The Burnt Deed

Chapter 3: The Burnt Deed

Sleep did not come. How could it, when the memory of the whisper in my car was branded onto the inside of my eyelids? The question was no longer if it was real, but what it was. And why, after twelve years of dormancy, it was back with such terrifying intimacy. Luis’s violent rejection, his desperate denial, had only served as confirmation. He had felt it too. He was just better at running.

But I was done running. My entire adult life had been an exercise in building walls of logic and order to keep the chaos of my childhood at bay. Now, that chaos had breached the walls. It was in my car, in my head. It had followed me. Stalking me.

My fear, a cold and frantic thing, began to crystallize into something else: resolve. The obsessive, analytical mind that made me a good archivist was my only weapon. A ghost, a curse, a memory—whatever it was, it had a history. And history was my domain.

The next morning, fueled by bitter coffee and a sleepless night's adrenaline, I bypassed my own office and drove straight to the County Records Administration building. It was a place I knew well, a sterile mausoleum of beige filing cabinets and the hushed whisper of turning pages. The air, thick with the scent of aging paper and binding glue, was usually a comfort. Today, it felt like the air in a crypt.

My goal was simple: find the history of the property. Our house. Lot 417, Oak Ridge subdivision.

I started with the deed registry. The transaction was there, clean and unremarkable. Mark and Carol Vance purchased the property thirty years ago from a holding company. Before that, an elderly couple. I traced it back, deed by deed, owner by owner, until I hit the 1950s. The names were unfamiliar, the transactions mundane. A cold knot of disappointment tightened in my stomach. Was Luis right? Was it just an old, drafty house, and I was projecting my own trauma onto its history?

Desire met obstacle. I was looking for a monster, but all I found was bureaucracy.

I pushed away from the registry clerk’s desk. This was the surface level, the official story. Archivists know the real stories are often in the margins, in the records that are harder to access. I moved to the tax archives and the plat maps, my fingers flying across card catalogues and digital search fields. I cross-referenced the lot number with census records, with utility hookup dates, with anything that might show a discrepancy.

And then I found it.

It wasn’t a dramatic discovery, not a blood-stained document, but something far more insidious to a researcher: a gap. A neatly stitched wound in the fabric of the property’s timeline. In 1923, the property tax records changed abruptly. The assessed value of the primary dwelling dropped to nearly zero, with a note in faded cursive: Structure lost to fire. A year later, a new deed was issued. The original family name, which had held the property since the town’s founding, was replaced. The new owner was a young woman.

Lillian Vance.

The name hit me like a physical blow. Vance. Not a common name in this area. It had to be a relation. A great-aunt? A cousin of my grandfather? My parents were meticulous genealogists of the blandest sort, tracing our line back to hardworking, unremarkable farmers. They had binders filled with birth certificates and black-and-white photos of stern-faced ancestors. There was no Lillian. No mention of a fire. No branch of the family that had ever lived in that part of the county before us.

They had deliberately hidden her.

My hands were trembling as I moved to the last archive, the one I’d been subconsciously avoiding: the newspaper microfiche. The local paper, The Clarion, had been in print since 1890. If there was a fire, a death, it would be there.

I threaded the film into the reader, the machine whirring to life like an ancient projector. I scrolled through the dates, my eyes straining against the flickering, inverted text. I passed advertisements for tonics and Model Ts, reports on Prohibition raids and town picnics. Then, I found it. An edition from late October, 1923. The headline, stark and grainy, made the air leave my lungs.

TRAGEDY ON OAK RIDGE: VANCE HEIRESS PERISHES IN MYSTERY BLAZE

My heart hammered against my ribs. I zoomed in, my knuckles white on the focus knob. The article was short, the language of the era stark and unemotional. A fire, late one autumn night, had consumed the Vance family home. The body of the eldest daughter, a young woman named Genevieve, was discovered in the ashes of her bedroom. The cause of the fire was undetermined, but authorities noted it seemed to have started in her room and burned with a suspicious intensity.

Then came the final paragraph, the turning point that connected all the frayed threads into a horrifying tapestry.

”The sole survivor is the younger sister, Miss Lillian Vance, who was fortunately staying with friends in the city that evening. In the wake of this terrible tragedy, Miss Vance becomes the sole heir to the Vance family estate and fortune. She has expressed her intent to rebuild on the property as a tribute to her beloved sister’s memory.”

I stared at the screen, the words burning into my mind. The cold from the parking garage last night seemed to seep back into the room, coiling in my stomach.

A suspicious fire. A mysterious death. And a survivor, a hidden branch of my own family tree, who inherited everything. Lillian.

My parents hadn't just bought a house. They had bought back a piece of family history, a piece so dark and terrible they had surgically removed it from our records, hoping to bury it forever. The rule—Never open the bedroom window—wasn't just an arbitrary display of parental control. It was a desperate, fearful attempt to keep a seal on a tomb. The room Luis and I had shared, the room where I first heard that possessive, chilling whisper, had been rebuilt on the ashes of another girl's bedroom. A girl who had been murdered.

I shut off the microfiche reader, the light dying with a soft click, plunging the screen into darkness. The silence of the archive pressed in, but it was no longer peaceful. It was the silence of a secret kept for a century.

The entity in our house, the thing that had followed me, wasn't a random specter. It had a name. It had a history. And it was family. My father’s command, “Because I said so,” was no longer the end of an argument. It was the beginning of a conspiracy. And I finally understood. They weren’t just hiding a ghost. They were hiding a killer.