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No, this was happening. Pop was a mechanical engineer who had worked for a rocket booster company. A rocket engineer. Wow. She could hardly fathom that. Then again, she could look back on their previous conversations and it made sense.

But what happened? “Why isn’t Pop still a rocket engineer? Why didn’t he stay working with Resonant Solutions?”

“Well, one thing, it was absorbed by Advanced Technologies,” Cole whispered over her shoulder. She hadn’t known he’d come back. “So that also connects him to Jim Jordan, the COO of Advanced Technologies, with whom he had lunch.”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Checking in.”

“Look at this article. This is everything. Pop worked with Mason Hyde for a decade in structural mechanics.” Her throat closed off completely.

“Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project.” Cole scrolled to the bottom of the article. “Look. The Liberty orbiter is in this picture.”

“Resonant was one of the many NASA contractors,” she said. “The Liberty , just one of several orbiters, including Enterprise , Columbia , Challenger , Discovery , Atlantis , and Endeavour .”

“Where did I see the Liberty before?”

“In the museum. We literally just read about the Liberty disaster that happened in 1995, almost ten years after the Challenger in 1986, and eight years before the Columbia tragedy.”

Oh ... she pressed her hand over her mouth.

He worked on the NASA contract. She couldn’t breathe.

“Thirty years. This is it, then. If we’re looking for an incident, something that happened before , the Liberty disaster could be the incident we’re looking for.

” Pop was there with the company, and then bam, the Liberty malfunctioned, exploded, killing six astronauts.

He started a new life in Forestview. Less than a year after the incident, Jo was born in Michigan.

“Go. Go find my mother. Search through this event.”

The thought that she was finally onto something, finally going to get answers, overwhelmed her.

Tears streaming, frantic, she searched for her mother through the employees listed on the project.

In total, tens of thousands of employees across multiple contractors worked on the space shuttles.

But Jo kept her search close to her father’s department, or she’d be at a loss, unless some of the records were digitized and she had a name she could search.

There. Mom’s face smiled back at her. “Cole!” she practically shouted.

He was at her side again. “Shh. We’re not the only ones here.” He glanced over his shoulder. “We are now. It’s almost closing time. We need to wrap this up. We can come back if we need to.”

“Sanders is keeping guard, remember?”

“Exactly. He’s too far away to help.”

“But you’re here. Look.” She pointed.

She couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down her cheeks.

“She’s here, hugging the unidentified woman in the photograph.

Mom’s name is Myrna Carter, not Mira Cattrel.

I still don’t have the woman’s name.” She pointed along the screen as she read.

“We’re getting somewhere. I can’t believe this.

We need to get copies of this. Find the librarian.

Oh...” Her heart palpitated. “They both worked on the—”

“ Liberty .”

“I’m just so proud of them. Why would either of them hide and leave behind their lives? Live separate lives?” Painful emotion clogged her throat. “They worked with NASA, for crying out loud.”

“The reason remains to be seen.” Cole sounded distant.

Through blurred vision, Jo continued reading about the shuttle’s explosion killing all astronauts on board. Inquiries and investigations occurred for weeks and months afterward. And yet here they were, searching the microfiche archives to find information about Pop.

“I’ve got him. Looks like the gang—your mother, father, and Mason—worked under Troy Martin. I found his picture.” Cole pulled up the man’s picture on the screen for Jo.

She sucked in a breath. “Everyone in that picture is accounted for, except for Troy and this woman.”

“We know the company and the situation, so I want Allison to track the employees down. See where they are now. That’s asking a lot because Resonant employed almost an entire town in Nevada. Probably still does but under the new name of Gemini.”

“Since both Mason Hyde and my mother were murdered, and my father has gone into hiding, do you think there could be other Resonant employees who disappeared or died under suspicious circumstances?”

“I hope not, but we’ll find out.” He quickly typed a text. “Letting Allison know all the names. She has enough and can put it all together for us. If she weren’t human, she would be AI. She’s brilliant.”

Jo sank back and stared at the screen as she scrolled. “I can’t find any references to Pop after the incident. Mom either. They could have been fired.”

“Lots of moving parts here. Employees come and go. Contractors too.”

“I get it. Even with over half a million people employed in the industry, many of them engineers. Physicists and the like.” The weight of this news pressed against her, weighing her down. “This must be what ‘before’ means.”

“Before?” He angled his head, lifting his gaze from the cell.

“Naomi said her brother knew my mother ‘before.’ And her garbled word makes sense now. She said ‘free.’ What if she meant the word freedom ? To look up freedom. What’s another word for freedom?”

“ Liberty . Before the Liberty disaster.” Cole said it for her.

“Yes.”

“And after?” he asked. “Might be another disaster if we’re not careful with what we’ve learned.” He leaned closer. “I think we’re onto something, and it’s highly volatile, dangerously explosive information.”

“We don’t have all the information. We just know that something happened, and now we might know what it was. But there is obviously more to this.”

He nodded and started taking pictures of the information on the screens. Was that even allowed? Not that it mattered to Cole. Not to her either. They needed images of this stuff.

“We’ll ask for copies of everything, now that we have enough information to ask, but I don’t want to wait for it.”

Jo scrolled through and snapped images too.

“Is there anything else we need to know?” He stood and looked around with his protective, on-guard demeanor. “Because we probably need to get out of here.”

“I’d like to stay as long as possible. I don’t want to leave only to think of something I could have looked into. I’m going to read everything I can about this.”

Cole continued taking pictures. Looking over his shoulder. Watching the exits. He was getting nervous, and that was making her nervous.

Jo kept reading, and all of it made her cry.

The tragedy, losing all those astronauts.

Had Pop gotten fired? Mom too? Then she read about another tragedy surrounding the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project.

One of their employees—the unidentified woman with Mom, Pop, and Mason in the picture she’d found in Michigan—had gone missing .

.. thirty years ago. Jo couldn’t breathe.

Her name was Helen Martin. The man in the photograph—Troy Martin.

Helen Martin was his wife. “She was missing,” she whispered.

Oh God , oh Lord ... this is no surprise to you.

Her heart pounded erratically.

Mom found you , Helen. Mom found you because someone intended for her to find you.

But who was behind her disappearance? Who was behind sending Mom the skull?

Caught up in her devastating thoughts, she hadn’t realized that Cole was there, crouching next to her so that he was at eye level. “We’ve learned enough,” he spoke in low tones. “We need to hand this off to Sanders completely.”

“What? No. Why?”

Cole stood and started pacing. He scraped his hand over his mouth, rubbed it. The lights flickered. Cole froze.

Jo slowly stood. The microfiche screens went out.

And so did the lights.