"That's nothing,” Susan replied sarcastically. “I find people all the time. All you have to do is go to a chat room. They’re full of people."
"Very funny. I found people connected to this situation of ours."
"Really? How?” she asked, putting the chair down in front of Justin. “I thought they were all dead—at least that's what the family trees and the other information I had gathered led us to believe," she stated.
"Yes, well, if you go back far enough, then come forward carefully, you can find just about anyone," he explained, opening different files and programs on the laptop. "Okay. We already knew that Jebediah was killed having fathered only the one child, so that clipped a branch off the family tree. And, we know that all of his sister's descendents ended up dead. Directly or indirectly, the 'Warning Killer' pruned that entire half of the tree away. But, what the killer didn't do was look into the family line before Jebediah.” Justin paused and looked up at Susan, then said, “His mother had a sister. That sister's descendents weren't affected by whatever curse manifested itself to cause all of those murders."
He navigated a file to the top of the screen and turned it toward Susan, then studied her face as she read of it. She stared, stunned, for on the page was a roughly constructed family tree. On one side were Jebediah and his sister listed below their mother’s name. Next to their mother was her sister, and the family tree continued down, tracing a hundred years of her descendents. “I located the last living descendent, your cousin of a sort, a Mr. John M. Johnson. He just lives over in the next county and I thought that maybe he might know something about the other murders. There was no e-mail address listed in the internet white pages, but there was a phone number, if you want to try contacting him.”
Susan minimized the file and quickly reviewed the others that Justin had discovered during the night, showing where he had located all of his data. She sighed and turned to look at her husband. “Well, it would appear that you have, once again, come up with more information than I did.” Shaking her head, she continued, “I should let you take over the research aspect and just worry about writing my paper.”
“Why don’t you shower while I call this guy to see if he’ll even talk to us,” Justin said with a smile, looking at his wife’s scruffy pajamas and sleep tousled hair.
“Yeah, go ahead and call him. I’ll be back down in a few minutes,” she told him, then headed upstairs.
