Speculation Desiree crumpled and uncrumpled the paper in her hand, absentmindedly gazing at the slight scorch marks it had acquired in the Floo fire. She wasn’t quite sure why she had kept it - it was an odd souvenir from the day their father died - but something had always felt off about it, and she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. At first she had wondered if it was just because of the nature of the situation, the fact that it had clued her in and, in the end, resulted in her finding Arnold and Sally and Ross, with only two of the three breathing. She had seen her father’s corpse that day, had seen the gun that killed him. If anything, it would be a day to block out. But Desiree Kent could not forget.
So she read it and reread it again and again, searching for answers in between Arnold’s brevity. She never found anything, but she always kept trying.
Desiree,
I would love to, but we’ve got plans with Sally today. Maybe tomorrow you and I could get coffee if you’re free? Let me know.
-Arnold
It was, if she hadn’t lost count, the seventeenth time she had read it that day. It was, she had definitely lost count, more than the thousandth time she had ever read it. But for whatever reason, this one seemed to do the trick.
“...Wait... 'we'?” she pondered aloud.
“You say something?” called a boy’s voice in the other room.
“Just talking to myself, Jake,” she called back. After he’d joined her and Arnold at school in Portland, he’d had a string of difficult roommates. But now that he was no longer a freshman, he was allowed to have more diverse accommodations. Desiree and her sorority sister Judy had been in search of a third person to help pay rent, and it had all just fallen into place.
“Mkay!” Jake chirped.
Desiree returned her attention to the parchment. She could only imagine one other person that Arnold could have meant by “we”, but when she had arrived, only two of her siblings had been present.
So the question remained: where was Jake when their father died?