Misha still had classes during the week, so she had more free ti on Saturdays and Sundays. She preferred to take on part-ti work during the weekends.
Based on her class schedule, she filtered out jobs with low pay, unsuitable conditions, or ti conflicts… After the first round of screening, there were seven job listings left on her phone.
She sent these seven listings to Everly, and the two of them lay on the bed together to look through them.
Among the seven postings, the highest-paying job was working as a caregiver for a paralyzed elderly person. The job required going during the day and returning at night, with a private car provided for transportation. The daily pay was as high as 200 dollars. The duties included reading books to the elderly person, feeding them lunch, helping them turn over, and assisting with changing adult diapers when needed.
The employer preferred to hire a female caregiver, and the work was scheduled for weekends. Although the job was sowhat demanding, the pay was very attractive, so Misha felt tempted.
Another job that interested her was working as a babysitter for a family’s child.
According to the laws of New Osebuch State, children under the age of 14 are not allowed to be left ho alone and must have soone supervising them. However, as many parents know, it’s impossible to stay with a child at all tis. Various situations inevitably arise that force parents to leave their children to handle other matters.
As a result of this law, a very special type of job has erged in this state—temporary child babysitters.
These babysitters usually don’t need to do much. They simply stay at the employer’s ho for a while, play gas or watch TV with the child, and make sure the child isn’t left alone. Once the employer returns ho, they can leave.
This job doesn’t pay much—only 10 dollars per hour—but it’s easy work. You can even do your own things while working, like reading, writing papers, or doing group assignnts. As long as you keep an eye on the kid, no one will interfere, so it’s still quite worthwhile.
Misha was fairly short on money, so jobs with low pay weren’t originally within her consideration. However, this particular listing was long-term. It seed that every Thursday evening, the child’s parents would go out for four hours, from 6 PM to 10 PM. The child at ho was a girl, so the applicant was required to be female.
As a female college student, Misha had plenty of free ti on weekday evenings. Earning 40 dollars for four hours of doing almost nothing made it a perfect side inco.
The remaining jobs were more ordinary—such as waiting tables at a restaurant, working as a supermarket delivery person, tutoring, or doing yard maintenance. The hourly pay was around the market average, and the work was quite tiring.
Everly stared at the photos carefully for a while, frowning as she zood in on the caregiver and babysitter job postings. After examining them closely, she shook her head at Misha.
“I think there’s sothing wrong with these two jobs.”
Misha sighed.
“So there really is sothing off… The caregiver job pays way too much—I did feel that was strange. But the babysitting job only offers average pay. What’s odd about it?”
Everly replied, “The problem with the caregiver job is pretty obvious. Normally, families with a paralyzed patient who needs care tend to hire soone long-term. That way, they avoid the hassle of frequently changing caregivers, and it’s more reassuring to have soone familiar. The second issue is the price—it’s too high. I don’t rember where I saw the data before, but caregivers usually earn around 2,000 to 4,000 dollars a month. Instead of spending 1,600 dollars a month hiring different caregivers to co in, this employer might as well hire a full-ti one for 2,000.”
Misha nodded. “Then what about the babysitting job? What’s wrong with that one?”
“On its own, there’s nothing wrong with it,” Everly said. “But Misha, you got lucky—you took a picture of the caregiver listing too. When you put these two job postings together, that’s when the problem becos obvious.”
As she spoke, Everly opened the caregiver job ad, used two fingers to zoom in on the lower-left corner of the page, and pointed Misha to a tiny spindle-shaped black dot at the edge of the A4 paper. Once Misha had morized the mark, Everly swiped to the babysitting ad and zood in on the sa lower-left corner—there was an identical spindle-shaped black dot there as well.
Individually, it might not stand out. But when the two pages were compared side by side, it beca clear that the black dots appeared in exactly the sa position on both sheets, and even their shapes were highly similar.
“Black dots from a printer are usually caused by dirt or defects in the drum, toner, or internal components. This kind of issue can happen with any printer—but it’s impossible for two different printers to produce identical marks. Unless both pages ca from the sa printer.”
Misha imdiately understood.
“The bulletin boards where they were posted aren’t the sa, the contact persons are different, and the job locations are in two separate areas of the city. Logically, they shouldn’t have co from the sa printer!”
“Exactly. Two completely different job postings coming from the sa printer is already suspicious—and both of them just happen to only recruit won. If you connect that with what Barbara ntioned about the missing won cases… it’s hard not to think sothing’s wrong.”
After eliminating those two clearly suspicious jobs, the remaining ones all seed normal.
Everly and Misha spent so ti choosing among the remaining five options. They even went in person to check out places like the restaurant and the supermarket that were hiring. In the end, they selected a part-ti job as restaurant servers.
The restaurant they chose was the sa internet-famous pizza place they had eaten at on their first day in Dalami City, known as “the must-eat number one spot in Dalami.” The job duties included guiding custors to their seats, taking orders, serving dishes, and helping cut pizza for guests. The work schedule was on weekends, with an hourly wage of 15 dollars. It didn’t seem particularly high, but in the U.S., servers receive tips—so if they were lucky enough to et generous custors, the earnings could be quite good.
Another reason they chose the pizza place was its location—it was in a busy downtown area where police patrols frequently passed by, so public security was relatively good. Working there felt safe, and they could even get discounts on pizza.
After Misha successfully got the job, every weekend when she returned to the dorm after work, she would bring pizza back for Everly. Thanks to Misha, Everly began enjoying the good life of having delicious food every week.
As a side note, Misha also kept her earlier promise—she treated the kind senior Barbara and her friend Nori to a pizza feast as well. Thanks to Barbara’s reminder, she had avoided many pitfalls while job hunting, and Misha felt extrely grateful.
“Barbara helped , and I also want to help others like she did… Everly, what do you think about giving those suspicious job postings to the police and letting them investigate?”
“We can give it a try.”
Even if it ultimately turned out to be a misunderstanding, it was still better than staying silent despite noticing sothing wrong and letting others fall into a trap.
However, for safety reasons, it would be best to have soone else handle this matter.
In many thriller stories, not everyone in the police force can be trusted. In fact, considering how ineffective the Dalami City police had been in solving the disappearance cases, it was even possible that there was a “traitor among them.”
So Everly and Misha never showed up in person. Instead, they contacted their old friend Rebecca in Micano City and asked her to find that hacker acquaintance—who had once been terrified by Paimon—to post a bounty online. They outsourced the task of writing an anonymous report letter to random netizens with too much free ti.
To be absolutely safe, even the photos of the two suspicious job postings attached to the report were re-taken by soone else. They didn’t want to risk Misha being seen taking the pictures and becoming a target of suspicion.
After finishing all this, Everly put the matter out of her mind and didn’t follow up any further. There were simply too many injustices and cris in the world—if she insisted on seeing every case through to the end, she would exhaust herself to death.
Unlike Everly, Misha would occasionally pay attention to the female disappearance cases in Dalami City. From her observations, even though Everly had sent the letter, it had virtually no effect.
In unnoticed corners of the city, young won continued to vanish, and the police would occasionally receive reports of new disappearances. Each ti, officers told the families they would “search with all their effort,” yet to this day, not a single missing person had been found—their efficiency was ironically “impressively” low.
Over ti, the citizens of Dalami City seed to grow used to seeing missing-person notices appear on bulletin boards only to vanish shortly after. The disappearances were like stones dropped into a lake: at first, they caused small ripples on the surface, but as the stone sank, everything quickly faded from public attention.
After all, in the U.S., people go missing all the ti. If no bodies are found, it’s hardly considered a major event.
The only ones who suffered were the families of the missing, day after day, aging with anxiety and despair…
Just as Misha was almost becoming numb to the seemingly endless disappearances, one day, a sudden change occurred.
It was an ordinary day near the end of the sester. After class, Everly and Misha, carrying their backpacks, were walking toward the library to study and aim for good grades on their finals.
Suddenly, a dark figure dashed out from the side and blocked Everly’s path.
“E-E-E… Everly, please help !”
“?”
Everly pulled back the fist she had almost thrown and looked at the boy in front of her, confused.
He had slightly curly black hair and wore glasses. His skin was very pale, which made the freckles on his nose stand out. Strictly speaking, he could barely be considered a bit handso, but his sowhat unkempt appearance gave him a slightly awkward look.
“I’m Orff, a senior from the Computer Science departnt, two years ahead of you. You probably haven’t seen before—this is actually our first ti eting—but I really need your help… Oh, and the Fountain of Youth! You told to say that I’d be willing to offer clues about the Fountain of Youth as a reward, and that you’d pay attention to if I did…”
Perhaps from running earlier, the boy was slightly out of breath. As he spoke to Everly, he kept looking around nervously, his eyes full of fear and worry—he looked exactly like a soldier fleeing from a battlefield.
His words were disjointed and rambling. Everly was certain she had never t this “Orff” before, so his line about “you told to say…” clearly hadn’t actually happened.
If it had been the old Everly, she might have dismissed his words as a made-up story ant to get a girl’s attention. After all, ever since she beca well-known on campus, boys confessing to her were endless, so with wild imaginations: claiming to be alien princes, saying she and they were Roo and Juliet in a past life, even comparing themselves to refrigerators and claiming she was the perfect microwave—destined to be together.
The U.S. is a very free country, especially among college students, and people often take that freedom to quirky extres. Compared to those eccentric types, Orff’s words were, at most, a clumsy attempt at familiarity, nothing particularly special.
But still, Everly’s attention was caught by his ntion of the Fountain of Youth.
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