Things That Refuse to Stay Buried

“History isn’t written by the victors — it’s buried by them, and the rest of us spend our lives digging it back up.”

I slumped back into my chair, letting the worn leather creak beneath me as I exhaled—loud, deliberate, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with the weight of unanswered questions. My desk was a disaster zone. No, more than that—it was a bureaucratic landslide, an avalanche of paper that hadn't budged since this morning and had, if anything, grown larger through some mysterious process of administrative mitosis.

Reports awaiting review, statements needing signatures, half-written notes scattered across surfaces like leaves after a storm. All spread out in a chaos that looked deceptively purposeful to anyone but me—like maybe I had some system, some method to the madness that would make sense if you understood the underlying logic.

I didn't. There was no system. Just accumulation and avoidance in equal measure.

Working detective services taught you one truth early, drilled it into you through repetition until it became gospel: paperwork was a weed. Cut it back and it came back thicker, meaner, more aggressive. Stronger than before, like it fed on your will to care about procedural documentation.

You could spend an entire day processing reports and wake up the next morning to find the pile had regenerated overnight, spawned new forms that demanded attention, multiplied through some dark magic that defied natural law.

My eyes wandered, uninvited, toward Karl's desk—still empty, still untouched, exactly as it had been this morning. The chair sat pushed in with geometric precision, desk unnaturally neat in that way that screamed temporary absence rather than abandonment. His laptop powered down, files stacked with the kind of careful organisation that suggested he'd left in a hurry but expected to return.

Or maybe he'd just known he'd be gone long enough that leaving things scattered would invite questions, speculation, interference from well-meaning colleagues who might rifle through his work looking for context.

He was probably still out chasing that lead on Luke Smith, pursuing his theory with the single-minded determination that characterised everything Karl did. That was Karl—always chasing ghosts and calling it instinct, following intuitions that seemed to come from nowhere but somehow led somewhere more often than not.

Sometimes, he was right. More often than probability suggested he should be, which either meant Karl possessed genuinely exceptional instincts or the universe had a soft spot for rewarding stubborn pursuit of unlikely theories.

I leaned back further, letting my head tip up to the ceiling tiles—water-stained squares that had probably been white once but were now various shades of beige and grey, marked by decades of leaks and repairs and institutional neglect. Eyes closing just long enough for my thoughts to regroup, to try assembling themselves into something coherent.

But the darkness behind my lids offered no reprieve, no relief from the questions circling like sharks. Instead, it sharpened everything. The whispering conversation between Claiborne and Louise replayed like a broken tape, looping endlessly. His hand on her arm. The crumpled paper I'd stolen from his desk. The word—Killerton—still echoing through my skull like a stray bullet looking for somewhere to lodge, ricocheting off neurons and refusing to settle.

A prickle moved over my scalp—curiosity dressed as dread, that particular sensation that told you that you were about to discover something you couldn't unknow, cross a threshold you couldn't uncross.

I snapped forward and flicked the monitor awake with more force than necessary. The fan sputtered like it had been startled from sleep, groaning into its familiar wheezy hum. The hard drive clunked in that rhythm I'd learned to recognise as normal rather than alarming—a heartbeat that suggested the machine was still clinging to life despite being years past its recommended replacement date.

Once it had dragged itself reluctantly into consciousness, I opened the internal database and typed with deliberate precision: Louise Jeffries.

Hit enter.

Waited whilst the ancient system processed the request with all the speed of continental drift.

No results found.

The words appeared on screen with that particular finality that suggested the database wasn't just empty—it was certain. Confident. Not "we can't find this right now" but "this has never existed in our system."

I frowned, staring at the cursor blinking with mechanical indifference. Typed slower this time, checking each letter as though maybe I'd made a spelling error: Kain Jeffries.

Enter.

The same grinding wait.

No results found.

"Come on," I muttered, tapping the desk with the flat of my palm—a frustrated rhythm that matched my pulse. It wasn't unusual for records to be incomplete, especially if someone had changed names through marriage or deed poll, moved interstate and fallen between bureaucratic cracks, existed in that grey space where paperwork failed to follow people across jurisdictional boundaries.

But this wasn't incomplete. This was gone. Absent. Erased.

Too clean.

Either these people had never officially existed in Tasmania's law enforcement databases—which seemed unlikely given Louise's obvious wealth and social position, given Kain's age suggesting decades of potential interaction with various government systems—or someone with access and motive had gone in and scrubbed them out.

Deleted them with the kind of thoroughness that suggested intention rather than oversight.

I leaned in closer to the screen, a flicker of stubborn defiance sparking in my chest. If the system didn't want to cooperate, if someone had cleaned these records deliberately, then fine. I wouldn't rely on internal databases.

I opened a new browser tab—the internet connection crawling along like everything else in this building, constrained by infrastructure that hadn't been updated since before smartphones existed—and punched in the next name I could think of.

Jeffries Manor.

This time, the search lit up like Christmas. Dozens of links appeared, cascading down the screen. News articles from various publications, real estate blogs speculating about property values, heritage listings from government sites documenting historical buildings, amateur ghost-hunter forums discussing paranormal activity.

But one result stood out immediately, catching my eye through sheer professionalism: a long-form investigative piece on Tassie Independent, their logo familiar from countless other stories I'd read over the years. The byline was stamped with a name I recognised instantly, one that carried weight in Tasmanian journalism.

Adam Panchak.

Senior Investigative Journalist. The kind of reporter who'd built a career on digging into stories that powerful people wanted buried, who'd won awards for exposés that had toppled politicians and exposed corruption, whose name on an article meant it had been thoroughly researched and fact-checked to within an inch of its life.

If Adam had written about Jeffries Manor, it wasn't tabloid speculation or ghost-story sensationalism. It was serious investigation presented as serious journalism.

I clicked.

The article loaded with agonising slowness, images rendering line by line like we were still living in the dial-up era. At the top, a brooding black-and-white photograph gradually unfurled—Jeffries Manor rising from the screen like a gothic spectre made manifest.

The building was all angles and shadow, photographed in that particular light that made everything look dramatic and vaguely threatening. Victorian architecture gone slightly to seed but not quite ruined, the brickwork dark—probably red originally but rendered charcoal-grey by the monochrome treatment and decades of weather exposure.

The structure rose against an overcast sky, its lines sharp and unforgiving. Windows like empty eyes, some reflecting light and others completely dark, suggesting rooms unoccupied or deliberately kept that way. A widow's walk crowned the roof—that particular architectural feature that spoke of maritime heritage, of women watching for ships that would never return.

The overgrown lawn stretched out before it in wild abundance, grass that had once been manicured now growing knee-high, dotted with what might have been garden beds but were now just raised patches of earth being slowly reclaimed by weeds and wildflowers.

It looked like a castle in hiding—too proud to fall apart completely but too haunted to be lived in comfortably, caught in that liminal space between grandeur and decay that characterised so many of Tasmania's historical properties.

The headline appeared beneath the image in bold typography:

"Jeffries Manor: Legacy, Land, and the Vanishing of William Jeffries"
By Adam Panchak, Senior Investigative Journalist

I settled into my chair properly, ignoring the continued protests of ancient leather, and began to read. The words pulled me in immediately, Adam's prose carrying that particular rhythm that characterised good long-form journalism—information delivered with narrative momentum, facts woven into something that read almost like fiction but was meticulously documented.

William Jeffries, the article explained, was the convict-turned-landowner who'd built the manor in 1817 with his own hands after receiving his ticket of leave. Transported for theft—stealing a pocket watch, according to trial records Adam had apparently tracked down in British archives—he'd arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1815 at age thirty after completing his seven year sentence in New South Wales.

Through a combination of hard labour, strategic alliances with other former convicts who'd made good, and what the article delicately termed "questionable land acquisitions" during a period when Aboriginal displacement was being systematically enacted through colonial policy, he'd accumulated enough property to build himself a manor house that announced his transformation from criminal to landowner.

The building itself was a monument to ambition and denial—constructed in deliberate imitation of English country estates he'd probably only seen from a distance before transportation, an attempt to recreate or claim a status that had been denied to him by birth and criminal record.

He'd married Madelyn Bally in 1819—a merchant’s daughter, which represented a significant social achievement for a former convict. Their son, William Jeffries Jr., was born in 1820, apparently healthy and thriving according to parish records.

And then, in 1821, William Jeffries Sr. disappeared without warning.

Just vanished. Left behind his young wife, his infant son, his manor, his accumulated property, his carefully constructed new identity—all of it abandoned without explanation or apparent cause.

According to the article, Madelyn's behaviour following his disappearance had been... unsettling.

Adam quoted from letters written by neighbours and preserved in the State Archives—correspondence that painted a picture of a woman unravelling in real-time. She'd sealed herself inside the manor for weeks, turning away visitors with increasing hostility. Refused to speak to the local magistrate when he'd come investigating William's disappearance. Rejected offers of help from the church.

Several letters mentioned her standing at windows at all hours, staring out toward the orchard, sometimes talking to herself in ways that suggested she thought William could still hear her.

She'd claimed—according to one particularly detailed letter from a neighbour named Eleanor Sutton—that William hadn't left. That he'd changed. That he was still there, somehow, just... different. Not gone but transformed into something she couldn't quite explain or describe, something that existed at the edges of her perception.

The phrasing was Victorian-era flowery, full of circumlocutions and euphemisms, but the underlying message was clear: Madelyn Jeffries had either suffered a severe mental break following her husband's disappearance, or she genuinely believed something supernatural had occurred.

Rumours spun from there, as rumours always did in small colonial communities starved for entertainment and explanation. Some said she'd killed him—snapped under the pressure of marriage to a man twice her age with a criminal past, perhaps discovering some secret about him that made violence seem like the only option.

Buried him beneath the orchard, according to these theories, in soil he'd once claimed as the finest on the property for growing European fruit trees that refused to thrive in Tasmanian conditions.

Others claimed he'd run—back to England under an assumed name, or deeper into the bush to escape debts or enemies or the weight of respectability that sat heavy on former convict shoulders. Some versions had him taking up with Aboriginal people, living wild in the forests, rejecting civilisation entirely.

But the most unsettling theory came courtesy of one Rita Larkin.

Adam had dedicated substantial space to Larkin—clearly fascinated by her story or recognising its narrative value. She'd been a self-proclaimed "spiritual medium" and "seer," terms that carried less ridicule in 1840s Tasmania than they might today, when communication with the dead was considered plausible by significant portions of the population.

She'd arrived at Jeffries Manor in 1841—twenty years after William's disappearance—claiming to have been summoned by visions. Had spent several weeks on the property before her own behaviour became alarming enough that she was committed to the New Norfolk Asylum in 1842.

Adam had sourced scans of her diary—actual photographs of yellowed pages, the handwriting slanted and frantic, written in ink that had faded to brown but remained legible. The entries were dated but increasingly incoherent, suggesting deteriorating mental state or growing terror, depending on how generously you wanted to interpret them.

She'd claimed William hadn't disappeared through normal means. Hadn't run away or been murdered or suffered any mundane fate. Instead, she wrote that he'd been taken—pulled through what she called a "hole in the sky" that had opened in the orchard behind the manor.

A rainbow gate, she'd written in one particularly detailed entry that Adam had reproduced in full. A shimmer in the air that appeared at certain times, under certain conditions she couldn't quite articulate. Where the air buzzed—she used that specific word, "buzzed," repeatedly across multiple entries—and where the manor's dogs refused to go, where birds wouldn't land, where the grass grew strangely or didn't grow at all depending on which entry you read.

The entries had a quality of eyewitness testimony mixed with fever dream—specific details about location and phenomenon combined with increasingly baroque descriptions of colours that didn't exist in normal spectrum, sounds that hurt to hear, sensations of being pulled toward something invisible.

I felt a chill slide along my spine despite the stuffiness of the office, despite the rational part of my brain that insisted this was obviously the writings of someone experiencing severe mental illness rather than documenting genuine supernatural events.

But the specificity of the details...

Her warnings were ignored, of course. Victorian-era authorities had little patience for mystical explanations when conventional theories—murder, abandonment, accident—were available. She was dismissed as unstable, her claims treated as delusions born from a disordered mind.

Until she, too, vanished.

One night in spring 1844—the exact date recorded in asylum logs Adam had apparently examined—her bed was found empty. The window still latched shut from the inside. The door locked from the outside, key in the possession of staff who swore they hadn't opened it overnight.

No sign of escape. No staff who'd seen her go. No indication of how she'd managed to leave a locked room without disturbing the mechanisms that should have kept her contained.

Adam's voice cut in with a dry aside that carried weight despite its understatement:

"Larkin's disappearance was dismissed at the time as an escape or accident, but the asylum's own incident report—preserved in State Archives—lists no trace of her found despite extensive search of grounds, no staff on duty who witnessed her leave, and 'no marks upon the lock or door to suggest forced exit or entry.' The report concludes with the notation that her disappearance 'remains unexplained by conventional means' and recommends 'enhanced security measures for future patients displaying similar tendencies.'"

I sat back in my chair again, the leather protesting, staring at the screen whilst that chill refused to pass. Instead it seemed to settle deeper, working its way into bones and marrow.

There was no suggestion in Adam's writing that he believed Larkin's supernatural claims—his journalistic neutrality was carefully maintained throughout. But he hadn't dismissed her either. Hadn't written her off as simply crazy or attention-seeking or unreliable.

Instead, he laid out the facts with meticulous care—plain and unnerving, documented and sourced, letting the strangeness settle like dust in an old room without trying to explain it away or sensationalise it into something more dramatic than the documents suggested.

Then came the paragraph that made my stomach tighten with recognition.

Louise Jeffries.

Not as I'd known her in the station, not as the worried sister and mother reporting missing family members with that particular composure that suggested either shock or something else I hadn't identified.

The article mentioned her by her married name—identifying her as Louise Greyson who had wed Thomas "Tom" Jeffries in 1995. Tom was identified as the current patriarch of the Jeffries estate, great-great-great-grandson of William Jeffries Jr., inheritor of the manor and the considerable property holdings that had somehow survived generations of economic change.

I sat frozen, cursor blinking on the screen like a pulse marking time I wasn't tracking. The shift in context was sharp and disorienting—like realising you'd been holding a live wire the whole time without knowing it, that the tingle you'd felt wasn't static but actual electricity capable of real harm.

It was the first time I'd properly connected her to those Jeffries. Sure, I'd known the case involved someone named Jeffries—it was in all our files, had been from the beginning. But I'd filed it away as just a surname, common enough in Tasmania where naming patterns meant half the island shared a dozen family names passed down through generations.

I'd known she was wealthy—that much was obvious in everything from the cut of her clothes to the way she spoke. Polished, curated, with that particular confidence that came from never having to worry about money or status. Like someone used to hosting gallery openings and charity fundraisers, someone who moved through social circles where your surname opened doors before you'd finished introducing yourself.

I'd pegged her as connected, sure. Old money, probably. Third or fourth generation wealth that had been managed well enough to survive economic shifts. But not Jeffries-connected.

Not the name that echoed through Tasmania's corridors of power like a quiet threat you didn't fully hear until it was already shaping your reality.

The Jeffries name wasn't just old money. It was old blood—the kind that had soaked into Tasmanian soil so deeply it couldn't be washed out, that ran through the state's history like a vein you couldn't remove without killing the patient.

Politics, land, legacy, influence. Whispers of manipulation behind every significant deal, fingerprints on decisions that shaped the state's development without those fingers ever being visible. Jeffries Industries still turned up on building permits and mining applications and state tenders from Devonport to Dover, a name so common in official documents you stopped seeing it as significant.

There were roads I'd driven on without knowing whose money had paved them. Schools I'd studied in without realising whose donations had funded their construction. Buildings I'd walked past every day—including, apparently, this station—without ever examining the plaques that might have revealed whose signatures lay beneath the concrete and steel.

A stone dropped into the pit of my gut, that physical sensation of something fundamental shifting.

This wasn't just a missing persons case anymore.

This was a Jeffries case.

And that meant the rules had just changed in ways I was only beginning to understand.

Whatever had happened to Jamie, whatever Kain had been dragged into—whatever Louise was hiding behind that cool, carefully maintained exterior—it all came wrapped in something far older, far more dangerous than I'd initially understood.

A web of influence stitched together across generations, so intricate and pervasive that you didn't see it until you were already caught in its threads. Property deals and political alliances going back two centuries. Vanishings and rumours swept into family folklore, transformed into stories that might be fiction or might be sanitised history, depending on who was telling them and what they had to hide.

From William Jeffries' mysterious disappearance in 1821 to Rita Larkin's impossible vanishing from a locked asylum room in 1844 to the rumours that still clung to the manor's bricks like damp—this wasn't just a timeline. It was a shadow that had never lifted, a pattern that repeated with enough consistency to suggest either coincidence stretched past breaking point or something else entirely.

I leaned back slowly, the plastic arm of my chair creaking beneath the shift in weight with a sound that seemed too loud in the quiet of the office. The screen in front of me glowed softly, a rectangle of truth I wasn't sure I wanted to keep staring into but couldn't quite look away from.

The cursor continued its steady blink, marking time, waiting for input I didn't know how to provide.

Was this what Sergeant Claiborne had been trying to keep under wraps?

The thought arrived fully formed, sharp-edged, impossible to dismiss. That scene in the courtyard—his hand on Louise's arm, the whispered conversation, the intimacy that spoke of relationship rather than professional interaction—suddenly took on new dimensions I hadn't considered.

Was this why Louise had insisted on speaking to Karl specifically—and why Karl had reacted the way he had?

The memory surfaced unbidden: Louise in the interview room, asking for Karl by name, Claiborne's expression when she'd made that request, Karl's strange mixture of frustration and something else I hadn't been able to identify when he'd told me about it later.

My eyes slid toward Karl's desk again—still vacant, still untouched, exactly as it had been all morning. But now, the emptiness felt charged rather than simply neutral. Like the space itself had a presence, like the absence was saying something I needed to understand.

Was Karl involved more deeply than I thought?

The question tasted bitter, felt like betrayal even thinking it. But I couldn't unknow what I'd seen, couldn't unsee the patterns forming.

Had he known who the Jeffries were—not just as a surname in a case file, but as a force? As power and influence and the kind of connections that made cases disappear or transform into something unrecognisable?

I caught myself chewing the inside of my cheek, tasting blood faintly on my tongue—copper and salt and the flavour of anxiety made physical. My chest was tight, the pulse in my neck fluttering like a warning I didn't know how to interpret.

For the first time since I'd slipped that crumpled scrap of paper from Claiborne's desk—Killerton Enterprises, still unexplained, still mysterious—I felt something worse than guilt.

I felt watched.

Not literally. The office was mostly empty except for me, the usual ambient noise of the station continuing beyond these walls. But the sensation persisted anyway—that prickling awareness that comes from realising you're caught in something larger than you'd understood, that forces you couldn't see were already moving, already responding to actions you'd taken without fully comprehending their consequences.

I hadn't even clicked the next search link. Hadn't explored deeper into Adam's article, hadn't followed the obvious threads to learn more about the Jeffries family history or current operations.

And suddenly, I wasn't sure I needed to. Wasn't sure I wanted to.

There was a feeling now—a low, rising certainty that bypassed conscious reasoning and spoke directly to some more primitive part of my brain. Not a theory supported by evidence. Not even a hunch based on experience. Just a weight settling onto my shoulders, pressing down with increasing insistence.

That this case wasn't just strange.

It was ancient.

And for the first time, I found myself wondering if I wasn't investigating a crime in the present—recent disappearances that could be explained through conventional means like murder or kidnapping or voluntary flight—but unearthing one that had been buried alive centuries ago, soil piled on top of secrets that had never quite died, that had been waiting for someone to dig deep enough to disturb them.

The Jeffries name had always been tangled in myth—I knew that vaguely, the way you know things about prominent families without ever examining the knowledge too closely. Ghost stories about the manor, rumours about cursed land, whispers about deals made in darkness that had funded empires.

But now that name was tangled in my case. In Jamie's disappearance and Kain's vanishing and Louise's careful composure and Claiborne's whispered words and Karl's strange behaviour.

And suddenly, I didn't know which version of the story I was more afraid of—the ghost tale that suggested supernatural forces at work, rainbow gates opening in orchards and pulling people through to places unknown... or the cover-up.

The possibility that powerful people were using myths and legends and carefully cultivated supernatural atmospheres to hide something far more mundane but equally terrible. That disappearances blamed on ghosts and portals and family curses were actually just murder dressed in Victorian gothic clothing, bodies hidden in places no one would look because everyone was too busy staring at the theatrical distraction.

My hands were shaking slightly where they rested on the keyboard. I pressed them flat against the desk, trying to still the tremor, trying to ground myself in the physical reality of cheap veneer and accumulated coffee rings.

The screen still glowed, Adam's article waiting for me to continue reading, to click through to the next section, to learn more about what the Jeffries family had become in the two centuries since William's disappearance.

But I couldn't make myself move forward. Couldn't make my hand reach for the mouse, couldn't make my eyes focus on the next paragraph.

Because some part of me—the part that had kept me alive through dangerous situations, that had developed instincts for when to push and when to retreat—was screaming that I'd already learned too much.

That every connection I made, every thread I pulled, every secret I uncovered was pulling me deeper into something I wasn't equipped to handle. Something that had consumed people before me, that had a gravity I couldn't escape now that I'd fallen into its orbit.

But sitting at my desk, staring at a screen that told me my simple missing persons case was actually something far more complicated, I felt the weight of history pressing down. Felt the accumulation of centuries of secrets and disappeared people and questions that had never been properly answered.

And I thought about Jane—dying slowly, counting down her remaining time—and about Karl somewhere out there chasing Luke Smith, and about Louise and Claiborne whispering in courtyards, and about two men who'd vanished as thoroughly as William Jeffries and Rita Larkin had vanished generations before.

And I wondered, with a chill that reached bone-deep despite the office warmth, whether I was investigating their disappearances...

...or whether I was just next in a very long line of people who'd asked the wrong questions about the Jeffries family and found themselves unable to look away before it was too late.

The cursor continued its steady blink.

Waiting.

Always waiting.

I took a breath—deep, deliberate—and reached for the mouse.

Whatever this was, whatever I'd stumbled into, there was no going back now.

The only way through was forward.

Even if forward led somewhere I didn't want to go.