The narrative had shifted.
Maya sat cross-legged on the floor of her home office, surrounded by the physical debris of her investigation. For weeks, she had been operating under the assumption that the Podcaster was a predator—a voyeur reliving his glory days, a killer returning to the scene of the crime to taunt the new tenants.
But Episode Seven had changed the frequency.
“You can’t delete a transaction,” the voice had said.
The tone wasn’t lustful anymore. It was litigious. It was the voice of someone holding a receipt for a debt that had never been paid.
“He’s not protecting the lie,” Maya murmured to the empty room. “He’s exposing it.”
She picked up her red marker and walked to the corkboard she had mounted on the wall—her analog brain. She drew a thick line through the word COVER-UP and wrote RECKONING in jagged capital letters.
If the Podcaster was a vigilante, the suspect profile had to be inverted. She wasn’t looking for someone who benefited from the HOA’s silence. She was looking for someone who had been crushed by it.
She went back to her laptop. The HOA archives she and Elena had stolen were incomplete, physically vandalized by whoever had ripped out the August 1994 pages. But court records were harder to shred.
She navigated to the county clerk’s portal. She didn’t search for criminal records this time. She searched for civil suits. Small claims. Liens. Foreclosures.
Search Term: Gables Homeowners Association vs.
The list that populated was a testament to the community’s litigious soul. There were dozens of entries spanning thirty years.
Gables HOA vs. Smith (2002) - Unpaid Assessments Gables HOA vs. Davies (2008) - Architectural Violation
Maya scrolled back to the mid-nineties. The years immediately following Juniper Black’s murder.
The logic was simple: If the “Blue Suits”—Marcus Thorne, Rick’s father, Elena’s father-in-law—were a cabal of enforcers, who did they enforce against?
Her finger hovered over the trackpad as a familiar name caught her eye.
CASE NO. 96-CV-0442: Gables Homeowners Association vs. Martha Thorne.
Maya frowned. Thorne.
Elias’s last name.
She clicked on the file. It was a PDF of a scanned docket, grainy and speckled with digital noise. She zoomed in.
The filing date was February 1996. Two years after the murder.
The plaintiff was the HOA Board, represented by Marcus Thorne, President.
The defendant was Martha Thorne.
“His wife,” Maya whispered. “He sued his own wife?”
She read further. It wasn’t a standard dispute. It was a barrage.
Citation 1: Failure to maintain landscaping standards (Bylaw 4.2). Citation 2: Unauthorized structural modification (Bylaw 7.1). Citation 3: Moral Turpitude / Conduct injurious to community reputation (Bylaw 12.4).
The fines were astronomical. Five hundred dollars a day. Compounding interest.
Maya cross-referenced the dates. In 1996, Elias would have been nineteen or twenty. Old enough to understand what was happening. Old enough to watch his father use the neighborhood association as a weapon to bludgeon his mother.
She kept reading. The legal battle lasted eighteen months. It ended in a default judgment. A lien was placed on the property—Number 5, the house next door to Maya’s. The “Cursed House.”
Outcome: Foreclosure proceedings initiated October 1997.
Marcus Thorne had evicted his wife from their family home.
Maya sat back, the leather of her chair creaking in the silence. The cruelty of it was breathtaking. It wasn’t just a divorce; it was a bureaucratic execution. Marcus Thorne hadn’t just left her; he had used the bylaws he wrote to destroy her.
“And Elias watched,” Maya said.
She closed her eyes, picturing the boy next door. The quiet teenager who had watched Juniper Black through the window. He had seen Juniper murdered by the system in 1994. And then, two years later, he had watched the same system devour his mother.
It changed everything.
She had dismissed Elias as a suspect because he was the current HOA President. She assumed he was the heir to the throne, protecting the legacy.
But what if he wasn’t protecting it?
What if he had infiltrated it?
“The long game,” Maya murmured.
She pulled up Elias’s current bio from the Gables community portal.
Elias Thorne, President. Elected 2018. Platform: Fiscal Responsibility and strict adherence to historical standards.
He ran on a platform of strict rules. The same rules that destroyed his mother.
Was it Stockholm Syndrome? Did he identify with the aggressor?
Or was he accelerating the rot?
The Podcaster’s voice echoed in her memory. “You can’t delete a transaction.”
Maya looked at the foreclosure document again. The total debt listed was $48,000. In 1997, that was a fortune.
Where did the money go? Into the HOA reserve fund. The fund Elias now controlled.
She stood up and walked to the window. Through the slats of her blinds, she could see the side of the empty house next door—Number 5.
It was dark. It was always dark.
But if Elias’s mother lost that house… where did she go?
Maya went back to the search bar. She typed Martha Thorne obituary.
Nothing.
She searched Martha Thorne Gables.
Nothing.
She searched Martha Thorne address history.
A hit on a people-finder site.
Martha Thorne. Current Age: 74. Residence: Shady Acres Assisted Living, 12 miles north.
She was alive.
Maya checked the date of the address update. 2019.
Elias became HOA President in 2018.
A theory began to crystallize in Maya’s mind—a jagged, ugly shape. Elias Thorne takes over the board. A year later, he moves his mother into a facility. Maybe he’s using the stolen HOA money—the laundered funds the podcast talked about—to pay for her care? Is that why he plays poker? To wash the money?
But if he’s the Podcaster… why expose the scheme?
Unless the scheme isn’t his.
Unless the laundering was done by the other fathers—Rick’s dad, Elena’s father-in-law—and Elias is using the podcast to burn them down while keeping his own hands clean.
“He’s the inside man,” Maya whispered.
It fit. The access to the files. The knowledge of the “Blue Suits.” The hatred for the hypocrisy.
But there was a problem.
The poker game.
She and Sarah had watched him. At the library. He was playing Texas Hold’em Extreme while the episode uploaded. Chloe said the upload came from a different device in the parking lot—the blue SUV.
“He was a decoy,” Maya reminded herself.
But maybe he wasn’t a decoy for a partner. Maybe he was a decoy for an automated script.
Chloe had said the upload was scheduled. What if the “Blue SUV” was the distraction? What if Elias triggered the upload remotely?
Or… what if the person in the SUV was working for Elias?
“His son,” Maya said, the thought striking her like a physical blow.
Elias had a son. Maya had seen him once or twice—a sullen, pale twenty-something who sometimes mowed the lawn at Elias’s current house. He drove a beat-up sedan, not a blue SUV. But kids borrowed cars. Kids knew tech.
If Elias was the architect of the revenge, his son could be the hands.
Maya grabbed her phone. She needed to talk to Chloe. She needed to know if the “Ghost_01” device ID from the library could be linked to a younger demographic.
But as she unlocked her screen, a notification popped up from the neighborhood app, Nextdoor.
ALERT: Vandalism reported at Community Garden.
Maya clicked on it. A photo loaded.
It was the sign for the Gables Community Garden. Someone had spray-painted over the gold lettering.
Instead of THE GABLES, it now read THE GRAVES.
And below it, in bright red paint: ASK ELIAS ABOUT MARTHA.
Maya stared at the screen.
The Podcaster wasn’t Elias. The Podcaster was targeting Elias.
“Ask Elias about Martha,” she read aloud.
The vigilante knew about the mother. He knew about the bankruptcy. He was using it to shame Elias publicly.
“He’s not the hero of this story,” Maya realized. “He’s another target.”
The Podcaster was going down the list. First the women. Now the leadership.
But why target Elias if Elias was a victim too?
Unless Elias had betrayed his mother. Unless he had sided with his father to keep his inheritance.
Maya looked at the foreclosure document again.
Co-Signer on Defaulted Loan: Elias Thorne.
He had signed it. He was twenty. He had signed the papers that evicted his own mother.
“You sold her out,” Maya whispered. “You traded her for the approval of the Blue Suits.”
The complexity of the web was suffocating. It wasn’t just a murder mystery. It was a generational tragedy. A cycle of sons betraying mothers to please fathers.
Rick Vance and his debt. Elias Thorne and his betrayal. Thomas Garrett and his cover-up.
They were all compromised. They were all weak.
And the Podcaster despised weakness above all else.
Maya grabbed her keys. She wasn’t going to the garden. She was going to Number 5. The empty house.
Because if Martha Thorne was evicted from that house in 1997, and Elias had helped do it, the ghosts in those walls weren’t just metaphorical.
She needed to see what was left behind.
She texted the group chat.
Maya: The Podcaster just outed Elias’s family secret on Nextdoor. He’s accelerating.
Chloe: I saw it. ‘The Graves’. Subtle.
Sarah: Elias is going to panic. He’ll lock down the neighborhood.
Maya: Good. Let him panic. Panic makes people sloppy. I’m going to the Cursed House. I think I know why it keeps getting sold.
Elena: Maya, don’t. It’s dark.
Maya: It’s been dark on this street for thirty years, Elena. I’m just turning on a light.
She pocketed her phone and walked to the back door. She would go through the wetlands. Through the blind spot.
As she stepped into the humid night air, the smell of the marsh hit her—sulfur and rot.
The Sinks.
The place where they buried the truth.
Tonight, she was bringing a shovel.