The Girl and the Hidden Truth

Copyright © 2025 by A.J. Rivers

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

When last we left Agent Emma Griffin…

While trying to uncover the identity of a young woman found in the middle of a road, battered and without any knowledge of who she was or where she came from, Emma got involved in the investigation of a teenage girl who went missing from a local concert.

As more missing girls and horrifying attacks surfaced, Emma went undercover to bust a trafficking ring operating underneath a popular college nightclub. But even as she rescued the missing girls, the question of Doe’s identity remains…

It was a day crafted for time outside.

The woods looked like stepping into a painting, bathed in autumnal red and gold, dappled with rich, melted-butter sunlight.

The trail through the trees wasn’t really a trail at all. It was just a footpath, worn there over time by countless hikes. It was there when Jeremy moved into the little white house at the curve of the cul-de-sac. Judging by the soft edges blending into the overgrowth and the packed dirt that felt secure even on rainy days, it seemed like it had been there for many years already.

Sometimes when he came out here with Piper, he thought about the feet and paws that made the path. Everyone who spent time in these woods before him and gradually formed the way through the trees. He wondered if it was just quiet patience that wore down the ground there, the same kind that brought him there for reflection and peace away from the chaos of everyday life. He thought of the people who roamed here and what they were thinking as they found the same steady routine that carved the path through the undergrowth and hardened the ground beneath.

Or maybe there was something more urgent in the way they traveled through the woods. The path had been there long enough that it was possible there was something else beyond the woods when this path was created. Maybe it had been there even longer than the neighborhood, back when the area was just houses scattered on plots of farmland. The people who made the way originally could have been shaving time off their commute to work or finding the easiest and fastest way between their home and that of someone they loved.

Not that it really mattered. Jeremy never would have said any of that to anybody else. He knew how dramatic that made him sound. So he kept it to himself. Sometimes he said it to Piper as the loyal dog trotted along with him. He loved exploring the woods too. He held his tail high and sniffed at everything he could get near. Jeremy once read that just ten minutes of sniffing for a dog was the equivalent of an hour of physical exercise. He wasn’t sure how that worked exactly, but if it was true, it explained why Piper was always so exhausted when they came home and spent the rest of the day sprawled out on the wood floor napping.

This day the big red Irish setter seemed more curious and energetic than usual. He wanted to get into everything. Even before he was finished investigating one fern or a pile of leaves, he was already on to the next. He pranced and jumped in the middle of the path, looking back over his shoulder at Jeremy as if to try to encourage him to walk faster. Finally, Jeremy took him off his leash. He knew the woods well enough to explore a little bit on his own. Piper was well behaved and attached to him enough that he wouldn’t go too far. And he would always come back if called.

He stayed close to Jeremy for a few moments, then seemed to realize he had been released and set off on his own. Jeremy could still see his thick red coat in the distance, so he wasn’t worried. They had been exploring for several more minutes when suddenly Piper took off running. He darted into the distance as fast as Jeremy only saw him run when he was throwing him his ball in the park. He must have seen a squirrel or some other little inhabitant of the woods and was unable to resist a game of chase.

“Piper!” Jeremy shouted into the trees. “Come on, boy. Come back.”

Usually, just hearing that would have brought the dog rushing to his side, but this time Jeremy didn’t see him coming even after waiting several seconds. He could still hear him bounding through underbrush and fallen branches, but he didn’t seem to be getting closer. Soon it fell quiet.

Jeremy called for him again, but Piper still didn’t come back. Now he couldn’t even hear the dog’s feet on the dried leaves. He started to worry. Calling him again, Jeremy walked faster down the path. He looked around for the flash of red of Piper’s coat but couldn’t see him. His hand tightened around the leash in his hand. He shouldn’t have let him off the leash. He usually behaved so well, but now Jeremy was worried that something happened to him.

“Piper! Come here, boy!”

The sky overhead had started to fill with steel-colored clouds. They blotted out the sun and made the woods more ominous. The roll of thunder was like growling in the shadows beyond his field of vision. The rain started not as individual warning drops but as an immediate deluge. It poured down from the sky and soaked through his clothes, immediately chilling him to the bone and making his skin sting with the bumps that sprang up on his exposed arms. But Jeremy wasn’t going to let the rain force him back to his house. Not without Piper.

He ducked his head into the sheet of cold water and pressed deeper into the trees, still calling for Piper. Somewhere in the distance, the woods ended, but he didn’t know where. He’d never gone that far. There was a point on the path that opened into a small clearing, and he always turned around there, not wanting to venture onto anyone’s property or somewhere else he wasn’t supposed to be.

Searching for Piper brought him through the clearing and onto an unfamiliar stretch of the path. It was the same and yet felt totally different. He couldn’t predict roots jutting out from the ground or dipping branches reaching down for him to get tangled in if he wasn’t paying attention. One scraped the top of his head, and he nearly fell as his foot hit something in his path. He didn’t see it because he was trying too hard to see Piper in the gathering gloom and driving rain.

Finally, he heard something ahead of him. It wasn’t very loud against the sound of the rain, but it sounded like Piper running. He stopped and called for him again, looking around and trying to figure out which direction it was coming from. Relief rushed over him when he saw the bundle of red fur bounding toward him. Jeremy crouched down and opened up his arms as Piper surged out of a row of low bushes and ferns to the side of the path.

There was something in his mouth, and at first, Jeremy thought it was a stick. When Piper stopped in front of him, his tail wagging excitedly and his eyes sparkling despite the water streaming down his face and dripping from the thick fur on his sides, he kept the object clenched in his teeth. Jeremy reached for it, thinking they would play on their way back to the house, but as his hand wrapped around it, he realized it wasn’t a stick.

There was no bark. No knots. It was eerily smooth and of a color he couldn’t quite describe. Something between gray and cream. It took several seconds after Piper’s teeth released the object into his hand for Jeremy to really see the rounded knobs at the end and realize he was holding a bone.

It was the kind of moment in a true crime documentary where someone would say they thought it was an animal bone or some sort of Halloween decoration. But that thought never crossed Jeremy’s mind. He was a nurse. He’d been through anatomy classes. He already knew what it was when it rolled across his outstretched fingers and dropped to the muddy ground.

A human arm bone.

Jeremy swiftly hooked the leash back on Piper and gave him a slight tug.

“Come on, boy. We need to go.”

He started away, then stopped himself. He knew he needed help. He couldn’t just leave the bone and pretend they hadn’t found it. But he wanted to make sure they were able to find it. Shucking the small backpack he always carried during these hikes off his back, he took out the bright-green bandana he had tucked in the front pocket. Tied tightly around a nearby branch, the vibrant color stood out against the autumn backdrop to clearly mark the spot where they were leaving the bone.

All Jeremy could think of as he and Piper rushed back along the trail was the rest of the body.

How had Piper found the bone?

Was it buried?

He didn’t notice any dirt clinging to the bone when Piper gave it to him, but that would have to mean that his dog found the bone simply sitting out on the ground, exposed. He didn’t know which was more unnerving—the thought of the bone being out in the open, or it buried in the cold, wet earth.

Piper ran back through the woods with no idea there was anything different. He didn’t know the significance of what he’d found. He only knew that the rain was getting in his eyes and soaking his fur, and Jeremy was moving faster and faster toward the entrance to the path. It was still afternoon when they finally reached the gap in the trees that led them onto the path, but the storm made it look much later in the day.

They burst out of the trees into the curve of the cul-de-sac and ran for the house. Jeremy forgot to take off his shoes when he got to the mudroom, and the soles of his boots slipped when they hit the tile floor of the kitchen. The impact sent a shudder of pain through his knees, and the end of the leash fell from his hand. Piper ran toward his food bowl to snuffle in the corners and find any little morsels left behind. Jeremy got on his feet and scrambled a few feet to the wall where the phone was attached. He snatched it from the cradle and dialed 911.

Talking to the dispatcher was a blur. He didn’t know exactly what to say or how to instruct them. He always thought he’d be the kind of person who could stay calm in this kind of situation. That he could keep himself together, give details when they were needed, filter out what would only muddy the situation. That wasn’t what happened when he opened his mouth.

Everything poured out. He babbled out his name, a description of his walk, his address, how far he’d walked into the woods, the type of bone he believed it was. He didn’t even know if he was really answering what the dispatcher was asking. He just kept talking until he heard the woman say the officers were nearly there.

Maybe he shouldn’t have hung up the phone when he did. He probably should have stayed on the line and kept talking until he was actually with the officers, but he didn’t think about it. He just hung up and went for the door. The rain had faded to a mist, and he didn’t want to waste a second when the officer arrived.

When he ran out to his front yard, his neighbor across the street was at his mailbox. His son was playing not far away. Both stopped and turned to look at Jeremy. He wished he knew them better. He had only exchanged a few words with the man since the family moved in a few months before.

Or maybe it had been a year? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t even know the people living right next to him, and they’d been there when he moved in.

It was a nice neighborhood, but not the kind to throw block parties in the cul-de-sac on the Fourth of July or have trick-or-treating setup at the end of the driveways so the children could run free and collect bags of candy. It was more the type to smile and wave politely when you drove past and say hello if you crossed paths during a walk or jog.

This was the first time it really mattered to him. If he knew the man, Jeremy could ask for help. He could tell him what was going on and at least get some sort of moral support from another adult human being. Instead, he just stood there until the police car slid to a stop in front of his house.

The next-door neighbor opened their front door and stepped out onto the porch. Jeremy knew his name. Francis. And his wife was Magnolia. Those were the only things Jeremy could remember about them at that moment, and the only reason he could was because they were so strange. The first time he heard them, he almost wondered if the man was joking. It would have been an odd joke.

“What’s going on?” Francis asked.

“Go on inside,” the neighbor across the street—Josh maybe—said to the boy playing in the grass.

Seemingly empowered by each other’s interest in what was unfolding at their neighbor’s house, both Francis and Josh walked toward the yard as the police officer got out of the car. The young boy went up the steps and opened the screen door, but Jeremy noticed he didn’t go all the way inside. He peeked out curiously with his hand firmly on the handle, like he was preparing just in case his father turned around.

Another neighbor, this one from next door to Josh, opened his door as well and came down onto the sidewalk. There were more people gathering together than Jeremy had ever seen in the neighborhood. He didn’t know if he should feel comforted and reassured that in a time of apparent crisis, the neighborhood really would pull together—or if he should be offended at their prying and entitlement.

The police officer didn’t seem to care either way. He didn’t pay any attention to the neighbors but walked toward Jeremy with a confused and concerned expression on his face.

“Did you call?”

“Yes,” Jeremy said.

“What’s going on?”

The rain was getting stronger again, and Jeremy noticed Francis start to retreat back toward his house. He lingered at the edge of the property line between the two houses, like a single step backward would take him out of some sort of bubble and he wouldn’t know what was happening. Josh’s neighbor—Jeremy really had to learn his name—was still visibly uncomfortable with being a part of what was happening. He wouldn’t come any closer and seemed to look around his yard, poking at the grass with his toe like he was just outside to check on his landscaping rather than having been lured by the lights of the squad car.

He didn’t make a move closer until Josh crossed his arms over his chest and came across the road.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“I found a bone in the woods,” Jeremy said.

“A bone?” Josh asked.

“Did you just say a bone?” asked the neighbor still standing across the street. All pretense of him not paying attention was gone. He’d heard about the gruesome discovery, and he couldn’t hide his intrigue.

This was enough to push the police officer past his patience. He turned to hold up a hand toward the neighbor. “Please get back inside your house.”

The man lingered and looked over at Francis like he was getting validation.

“We want to know what’s going on. This is our neighborhood,” Francis said.

“Your neighbor here called, and I need to speak with him,” the officer said. “Please step back.”

The neighbors gradually crept back toward their houses, but Jeremy didn’t pay attention to whether they actually went inside. He was focused on talking to the officer, explaining what he saw. He tried to keep his words more organized and tell him with steadier thoughts than when he was talking to the dispatcher. Inside he could hear Piper whining. The dog knew someone was outside, and he wanted to get out to greet them.

“Go through that one more time,” Officer Kenton said.

“I was taking a hike with my dog, and I took him off the leash. He ran off, and when he came back, he had a bone in his mouth,” Jeremy said.

“And you’re sure it was a human bone?”

“Yes, I’m a nurse. I know how to recognize human bones. This was an arm bone.”

“All right. Did you see any more of the remains?”

“No. He just brought back that one bone, and I dropped it where we were and came back here to call for help.”

“Can you tell me where you found it?” Kenton asked.

“I tied a bandana on a branch of the tree right next to where I dropped it. If you go on the path right there at the end of the cul-de-sac and just follow it, you’ll eventually cross through a clearing, and then on the other side, you’ll see the bandana,” Jeremy told him.

The officer muttered into the radio clipped to the front of his uniform, requesting backup.

“Where did your dog come from with the bone?”

“Further in the woods and to the left of the path. I don’t know exactly where he was. Like I said, I didn’t go look any further. I came back here.”

The officer looked up at the sky like he was staring at the raindrops.

“Do you mind if we get up on your porch so we can get out of the rain?” he asked.

Jeremy led him up under the cover of the porch. From there, he could see that his neighbors were all back in their houses. Even without being able to see them, though, he had the feeling he was being watched. The officer tried to engage him with some small talk as they waited, but fortunately, the second squad car didn’t take long to arrive.

Another officer got out of the car and headed toward them. Officer Kenton filled her in on what Jeremy told him, and the two of them walked together to the path leading into the woods.

He could have gone inside. They said they would come back to talk to him when they were done. But he couldn’t bring himself to. He sat down on the top step and stared at his grass. It needed to be cut.

“You okay, son?”

He looked up and saw Francis standing in front of him. He hadn’t even realized he was walking toward him. The familiarity in the words was strange. He was touched by it. It was nice to hear some reassurance. But it was also odd coming from someone with whom he had never had a full conversation before.

He nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

“What happened?”

Josh was coming toward them across the street as he told Francis about the bone.

“Everything okay? Where did they go?”

For what now felt like the thousandth time, Jeremy described finding the arm bone. The more he said it, the less the words felt like they had any meaning. They were just sounds coming out of his mouth. They were almost nonsensical, like he was making it up.

“Could it have been old?” Josh asked. “Maybe there was some sort of family plot or really old cemetery back there and nobody knew about it?”

“Wouldn’t there have been markers?” Jeremy asked.

“I don’t remember anything about a cemetery anywhere around here,” Francis said. “I’ve lived in this house for forty years. I’ve been in those woods more times than I could possibly count. I think I would have known if there were people buried back there.”

Even as he said it, though, Jeremy knew that wasn’t really true. Just like Josh had suggested, it was entirely possible that there could be graves from families or even settlements that predated the neighborhood by decades. There could have been a family plot on one of the farms that had been taken over to create this community years ago. But that didn’t mean Francis was the authority on it. Unless he knew about that bone, he was just as unaware as Jeremy.

As much as he tried to convince himself that there was a reasonable explanation like that, though, Jeremy knew it wasn’t true. That arm bone didn’t belong to someone from centuries ago. It hadn’t just worked its way up from the ground after decades or been dug up by Piper. It was much more recent than that.

The officers must have moved down that path much faster than Jeremy and Piper had because it didn’t feel long before they were back. He immediately noticed neither of them was holding the bone. He stood as they approached.

“We found it,” Kenton said. “It definitely looks human. You’re right about that. We called a forensic unit to come out here and photograph it, and we’ll search the area for further remains. I don’t know how long this is going to take. Get on inside your house, and we’ll be by to talk to you about it when we’re finished.”

It wasn’t a caring suggestion. He wasn’t thinking about Jeremy’s feelings or the fact that he was soaked to the bone and starting to shiver. The officer was giving an order, getting him out of the way. Even though he was just sitting on his porch and not trying to interfere with anything they were doing. Just his eyes on them was enough to feel intrusive.

He stood up, the ache in his knees from the tumble to the floor coming back.

“Francis!”

Magnolia had come out onto the porch, but not all the way. Just one foot. The rest of her was behind the glass of the storm door, standing in the house like it was protecting her. She was wearing a dark-blue housedress with white around the collar, like one Jeremy’s grandmother used to wear when he was young. She didn’t have to say anything else. Her husband knew exactly what that tone of voice meant. He looked at Jeremy for another moment, like he didn’t want to leave him sitting there, then shuffled back across the wet grass to his house.

Jeremy went inside and took a fast shower. He didn’t know how long it would take for the officers to come get him, but he couldn’t stand the clammy, wet feeling of his clothes on his skin anymore. When he came out of the shower wearing a sweat suit and thick socks, Piper ambled across the room to lick his hand. His curiosity had worn off, and the tiredness from their walk had set in.

Jeremy perched on the couch, flipping through channels, waiting. He heard doors slamming just outside, and without even realizing he was doing it, he got up and walked over to the front window that overlooked the road. Peering out through the curtains, he watched a team head into the woods. One of them was carrying a black bag, and Jeremy knew that they had found more of the remains. He went outside again and stood on the porch. By now the sun had set, and he stayed within the glow of the porch light.

To his side, the porch light for the older couple illuminated the empty front steps. Across the street, Josh’s house was quiet. Next door, a light was visible at the back of the house and up on the second floor. Beside it, a sliver of a flickering television glow was seen from between the partially opened curtains. And there Jeremy could see the faint outline of a face watching him.

Emma

“You look like you feel better,” I say as I walk into Doe’s room.

Up until this point, she’s been sitting on her bed every time I’ve seen her. Now she’s sitting on a chair next to the window. Rather than a hospital gown, she has on a sweat suit someone on the medical team must have gotten for her. It’s a stark reminder of just how disconnected she is. It’s beyond just not having any memory, which is clearly traumatic and impossible to comprehend. But it also goes to the misery of having nothing. No name or concept of who she is or what brought her here, but also the more practical things like not having any clothing.

“I’m definitely enjoying not being connected to several different machines,” she says. She gets a quizzical, almost-frustrated look on her face.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“It’s just a weird thing I’ve been thinking about. If I can’t remember anything, not my name or where I’m from, anything… how am I talking to you? How do I still have a grasp of language or know what anything is? Shouldn’t I have forgotten everything? I mean, I remember how to eat, but not what I like or don’t. I can talk to you, but I don’t know how I know any of the words. It’s like I don’t know what I know until it comes up. Does that make sense?”

“It does. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t give you any sort of scientific explanation for it. I don’t know why the brain works the way it does beyond there being a difference between memories and learning. I really can’t explain it any further than that,” I say.

I wish there was something else I could say that would help her make sense of the completely nonsensical situation she’s found herself in. But all I can do is keep working to get her answers and hope that somewhere in the depths of her mind, everything that’s been locked away will resurface.

Even just hoping for that, though, feels almost dangerous. Someone losing their memory is already a rare phenomenon. For it to last more than a day or two brings the statistics down even further. But the concept of something like that happening to somebody who hasn’t experienced severe trauma is almost unheard of. It has happened, yes. There have been cases of people spontaneously going into fugue states without any type of major catalyst. There are even individuals who experience recurrent memory loss throughout their lives that goes beyond what Dean experiences and literally wipes away all concept of themselves for days, weeks, or even months at a time.

Those situations, though, are far from the norm. In most cases, if someone is experiencing a loss of their memory, a loss of grip with their own reality, it’s because they’ve been through something so extremely traumatic, so deeply horrific, that their mind couldn’t process it and went into survival mode. Everything was compartmentalized, put behind a firewall of sorts, so they could simply focus on survival.

There’s really no question that this is the situation for Doe. She was found bloodied and battered with obvious scars and other signs of repeated, long-lasting abuse. Whatever brought her to that road was not a gentle experience. She did not just wander off because of a spontaneous shutdown in her mind. Something awful happened, and she clawed her way out of it. Her remembering anything would be painful and terrifying, but it could also be our only route to finding out who she is.

“So I came today because I wanted to check on you, obviously, but there were also a few things that I wanted to talk to you about. Are you up for that?”

“Actually, I’m going to be moving rooms pretty soon. And the doctor said I could go outside for a little while today if I want to,” she says.

“Wow,” I say. “Look at you, living it up.”

“Living on the edge, breathing fresh air and not getting lost in the courtyard. Heading straight for the top.”

There’s a sass and sparkle in her that comes out every now and then. It’s an innate quality, something that was born into her. Most of the time, it exists just beneath the surface. She looks at me through a haze, the same one I’ve seen veiling the eyes of inmates and victims of constant, systematic torture. It’s like she is at a distance and looking at me through a window rather than actually sitting in the same room with me. But then something clicks, and that personality shines through the cracks.

It makes me want to know more about her, but it also makes me curious. I have encountered situations before of people losing their memory and their loved ones describing them as being very different people after the incident. Not just because they didn’t have their memories and it strained their relationships, but at a more fundamental level.

Their personalities were different. Suddenly, these people—whom they thought they knew so well—had undergone a total shift in their sense of humor, temperament, interests. It was like being no longer beholden to the identity they were accustomed to enabled them to discover another side of themselves that surfaced as the other personality sank back.

This wasn’t dissociative identity disorder. These people weren’t sharing their bodies with a multitude of identities. It was more like they had freed another version of the same person. Xavier once described life as being like the video game with the squishy, pink ball that collects stuff as it rolls around: Katamari Damacy. He had a very distinct vision of himself as one of those giant sticky Katamari balls and all the people, places, and memories he experienced along the way were clinging to him.

He told me that we can’t help what clings to us as we move through life. There are things we purposely pick up and others that simply attach to us as we go, and either way, they affect us. Every element of our existence shapes us in some way, whether it’s just a tiny shift or a massive reformation. And every one of those is irreversible. The simple act of smiling at a person walking down the street or trying a new flavor of ice cream changes you. Life-altering events like getting married or the death of a parent shape you. Choosing favorite music, leaning toward specific foods, deciding where to travel, selecting your college major, naming your pet… Everything you do makes changes in the fabric of your reality.

Until it’s all gone.

When people enter a fugue state, they are no longer beholden to those things in the same way. They don’t have to operate based on the expectations that others have formed of them or the identity that has been shaped by the choices they’ve made, or experiences they’ve had. None of that matters anymore, so they’re able to shed the impact of those things on how they show themselves and interact with the world.

And sometimes that means a wholly different person than what their family and friends know.

That makes me wonder about Doe.

How much of that spark I’m seeing has always been there? How much of it was tamped down and extinguished by whatever gave her the scars and lasting injuries? And how much of it has only just started showing itself because it doesn’t have to hide behind everything her memory loss allowed her to shed?

A nurse I’ve seen a few times comes to the door and smiles at me.

“Morning, Agent Griffin. How are you doing today?” she asks.

“Doing fine, Sierra. How are you?” I ask.

“Can’t complain,” she says.

And now the pendulum in my head has swung the other way, and I’m glad Xavier isn’t here to hear that and take it as a teaching moment to show her that she could, in fact, complain.

“Good. I hear that our friend here is getting a change of scenery,” I say.

“That’s right. We’re moving her away from critical care.”

“And I’m going to get to go outside, right?” Doe asks.

Sierra smiles. “Absolutely. We’re ready to get you settled into your new room now, but if you want to head out for a bit first, you can do that. I can get you a wheelchair—”

“I’ll walk,” Doe says.

“Are you sure?” Sierra asks.

“I think she can do it,” I say. “If she gets tired or anything, I can always come in and get one for her.”

“All right,” the nurse says. “I’m just going to collect your things and bring them to your new room. I’ll come find you in a bit.”

Doe looks at me with gratitude in her eyes and stands up from the chair. She’s slightly shaky, but in the same way that anyone who has been sitting in a hospital bed for days battling dehydration, malnutrition, and infection would be. Her body has been fighting to keep going, and the medical support she’s received since being brought into the hospital has gotten her out of the worst of it. There’s a very strong possibility—even if you remove the obvious, imminent physical dangers of where she was found and the circumstances she was likely in—that if she hadn’t been rescued when she was, she wouldn’t have survived much longer.

She’s wearing thick hospital socks with grippy soles, which make it difficult to stuff them into a pair of rubber clogs tucked under the bed, but she manages it. Tugging a bathrobe on over her sweat suit, she looks at me and gives a nod.

“Ready?” I ask.

“Let’s go.”

I guide her through the hallways and down to the main floor where we walk out into a courtyard surrounded on three sides by tall brick walls covered in ivy. Two corners of the courtyard have water features while trees, flowers, and shrubbery in small beds create stone walkways reminiscent of the old labyrinths at convents. My mind brings me back to a rose garden and broken walkway stones hiding an unspeakable secret beneath them.

Shaking away those memories, I stand beside Doe as she looks down into a fountain fed by a waterfall. I know there’s a motor and filter in there somewhere that cycles the water through, but it still looks like it just falls and goes on forever. She wraps her arms around herself and rubs them.

“Are you cold?” I ask.

Doe shakes her head. “No. It feels good to be out here.”

“I’m sure it does. How have things been since I last saw you?”

It’s been a few days, while I’ve handled other cases, and I know the critical role of every single day in situations like this. Even minute-to-minute can make a difference.

“Pretty much the same,” she tells me. “Noah has come by a couple times. And apparently, somebody came with a camera wanting to put me on the news.”

I note the way she says it. Not just the discomfort of the idea of being splashed up on the evening news like just another segment or oddity, but the uneasiness of the idea altogether. The one memory she’s been able to share, even without realizing it, is that she never watched TV. A few times I’ve come to see her at the hospital, she’s been flipping through the channels and seemingly absorbed into the programming, but the way she talked about the media coming to the hospital in an effort to interview her speaks to something else. It’s not that she has no exposure to media. It’s that she was kept from it. There’s a difference.

She didn’t come into the hospital never having seen a TV and having no understanding of what it was. Instead, if the memory that seems to have come to mind is accurate, she wasn’t allowed to watch TV but was aware of its existence. She has an understanding of what news is. She grasps the concept. But the thought of actually appearing on it, possibly just the idea of anyone being interested in hearing her story, is foreign to her.

It makes me wonder what she’s been told about the media. It’s unlikely the control stopped with TV. She was likely not exposed to any type of media, and it would have gone beyond just that limitation. Someone has said something to her about it. They’ve given her a reason behind her restrictions. I’m not going to ask about that right now. I don’t want to delve deeper into just the abuse and trauma. While that’s a critical part of what she’s gone through and plays a key role in unlocking the truth of her identity and who did this to her, it’s not the only path.

Continuing to focus only on the abuse she suffered carries the risk of traumatizing her further and keeping her memories locked away from her for even longer. This isn’t just about what she’s endured. It’s about helping her overcome, restoring her identity, and guiding her into a new life.

“I made sure the doctors knew no one is allowed anywhere near you or your room. Especially reporters,” I tell her. “I’m glad they listened.”

The information we’ve given to the media about Doe has been extremely limited. All details about her are being strictly regulated in order to protect her. Chances are very high there’s someone looking for her. I don’t know where she came from or how she got to where she was. There’s a possibility she fell or jumped from a vehicle, but there’s also the possibility she ran from somewhere Either way, whoever did this to her is likely trying to find out what happened to her and will want to stop her from revealing the truth.

If a picture or detailed description of her were to show up on the news, it would give them far too much information. She would be in even more danger, and I can’t let that happen. So far, I’ve only allowed the media to report that an unidentified woman was found in the general area and that investigation is currently underway. No details about where or how she was found, the condition she was in, or her amnesia. I certainly don’t want to have any image of her popping up on TVs everywhere.

“You said you wanted to talk to me about something,” she says. “Is it about those girls?”

She knows about the case I just finished investigating. It was actually brought to my attention because of my involvement with her. But I haven’t fully updated her on all the details. As of right now, I don’t think that there’s any connection between her and any of the victims I learned about in this investigation. While there were enough similarities to bring my attention to the case of Brianna Wright and eventually the others, there aren’t any other links I’ve found.

It doesn’t mean I’m not still looking. I’ve been digging through every shred of information I’ve been able to find about the grotesque underground operations at the Fallout Zone nightclub, including records of each of the auctions. The owner kept detailed logbooks of each of his acquisitions and the sale or rental transactions completed during the auction events. Though the names were rarely full—usually only a first name or sometimes even just a nickname—there was enough information provided to identify all the victims.

I’m neither naive nor inexperienced enough to believe that every single nefarious activity committed by this ring was outlined in those logbooks. I already have proof of at least three assaults committed in conjunction with them that were never mentioned in those records. But there’s enough in them to tell me that no one fitting Doe’s description and who hasn’t been identified was bought at one of the auctions.

Which means it’s unlikely her situation has anything to do with that one.

I’ll continue to search. As long as there are more documents and other properties to search, I will look for connections. But it’s also important that I keep my mind open and look for any other paths that may reveal themselves. Being too focused on one possibility, or jumping to conclusions too early in a situation, only limits the effectiveness of the investigation and possibly shuts one off to the real answer.

I don’t want that to happen. Thus my investigation has brought me to many other cases as well, and notes about those cases are outlined in the files I’ve brought with me to the hospital.

“Why don’t we sit down.”

I take out the stack of files and put them on my lap, flattening my hand on top of the stack.

Doe takes a breath. “What are those?”

“I don’t think that your case is related to the disappearances and murders I was just investigating,” I tell her. “I know that there were similarities, but the differences are more significant, and right now I can’t make any concrete links,” I say.

“I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse,” she says.

“I’m not just looking at that angle,” I tell her. “That’s what these are. I found some other cases that share some similarities with yours. I thought we could go over them and see if they trigger anything. Would that be all right with you?”

I don’t want to push her too hard. Obviously, the information she has to share is important, but bombarding her with the harsh realities of other cases in such a fragile moment could be more detrimental than helpful if she’s not ready to hear it and work through it.

But Doe doesn’t hesitate. She nods and turns her body just slightly toward me, a body language that signals open receptiveness. She’s ready to hear what I have. I’ll keep paying close attention to how she’s holding herself and the nonverbal communication she gives off to gauge how she’s handling the conversation.

“If it starts to become too much, I’ll stop,” I tell her.

“I’m ready.”

I open the first folder.

She’s trying. I know she is. She wants to hear something familiar as much as I want her to. Probably more. I see her listening to every word and straining to find them in the recesses of her mind. At some moments, it seems like maybe she’s found something, only for the flicker of recognition to slip away just as quickly as it came.

None of these cases mean anything to her.

I was hoping there would be something. Even if she couldn’t give me specifics, I was still hoping that I’d say a key word or mention a name and see a flicker of recognition on her face. Just a flash across her eyes or a slight tightening of her spine to communicate discomfort and unease would have been enough. She might not even realize it. Just like the comment about not watching TV, it could be something that just showed up in the back of her mind without her processing it consciously.

So I watched her face and her body language intensely. A shift in weight, a hardening of the face, even the movement of her eyes could have told me that some detail touched a nerve. But so far, none did.

I’ve gone over various cases I dug up from the local area and even a few farther-flung investigations just to cover my bases. But she remains unmoved.

I’ve already talked to her about Brianna and Walker, as well as all the other victims of the Fallout Zone auction ring, and several other cases from the area. Without her attaching to any of those, I go back further. It’s another of my cases, but one I haven’t discussed with her.

“Does the thought of hiking bring up any kind of feelings for you?” I ask.

“You mean besides walking through those woods up to the road?” she asks.

“Other than that,” I tell her.

“No,” she says. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. Why?”

“One of the cases that came to mind when I was thinking about you and what you may be connected to. That situation actually came to my attention while I was investigating another case. A girl went missing and then ended up being photographed hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Since then, there hasn’t been any contact with her, and no one knows what happened to her,” I say. “The stretch of the trail where she was photographed is closer to the bottom of the state, but the whole point of the trail, obviously, is to travel. She went missing from a place near here. This was a little more than ten years ago.”

“What’s the Appalachian Trail?” she asks.

It’s the first time she’s really indicated a total disconnect from something she should, by all rights, have at least heard about. Not many people ever take the leap to venture down the Appalachian Trail, and a fraction of those do the entire multistate stretch.

But people know about it. It’s one of those things people just know about even if they have no interest in hiking and would never even consider strapping on a pair of boots and taking to the trail. It’s very unusual to find someone her age who has never even heard of it.

“It’s a hiking trail that goes from Georgia to Maine. It’s more than two thousand miles long.”

“That’s a serious trail,” she says.

“It’s actually the longest hiking-only trail in the world,” I tell her.

“And there are people who go hike the whole thing?”

This incredulity is far more understandable and makes me chuckle rather than tipping off my radar.

“Yeah, I started looking into it a lot more when I found out about the missing girl, and apparently, a few thousand people head out with the intention of actually doing the entire thing every year. Not many of them actually make it. Something like one in four. The ones who do make it take like six months,” I say.

“Wow.”

“From your reaction, I don’t feel like the thought of going out on the trail touches anything deep within you.”

“No,” Doe says, “I can comfortably say I don’t feel any inner hiker responding to that.”

I laugh again. “Fair enough. I guess it was a long shot, but I had to at least throw it out there.”

She sighs, her shoulders slowly dropping as she turns her head to look toward the water again.

“I guess that’s really all you can do.”

We stay out in the courtyard a little while longer until the snap of the winter air sends us back inside. Sierra is just coming down the hallway toward the entrance to the courtyard when we step back in. She gives us a wide smile.

“Look at your timing. I was just coming to find you. The new room is all set up, and it’s just about time for lunch,” she says.

We follow her to the elevator and up to the new floor. Doe seems to naturally defer to walking a step or two behind me, and I make an effort to hesitate enough for her to catch up every few seconds. It’s not a subtle sign. This is a clear indication of psychological control and abuse. She’s been conditioned to stay behind someone, likely taught she doesn’t have the worth or value to walk alongside them and certainly not to lead.

When we get to the new room, I step far back, giving a wide berth so she has to go in before me. This room is much nicer than the last one. The ward where she’s been was focused more on acute stabilization and close monitoring of patients than it was on comfort, never intended for long-term stays. But it’s obvious this room is more equipped for such a purpose.

It’s larger and features a bigger bed, a couch and a couple of chairs, a large window, and even a dresser. A few decorative touches and design elements almost make it look like a hybrid between a hospital room and a hotel room. While I’m sure it is far more comfortable and welcoming for Doe than the last one, it sends a specific message. Moving her into this section of the hospital isn’t just an indication that her body is starting to heal and she doesn’t need the same intensity of medical support that she did when she first arrived.

This is also a sign of the uncertainty of her future. While none of them came right out and made specific projections about her recovery, I know at least a few of the members of her medical team fully expected that she would regain her memories within a few days. Even if she didn’t completely get everything back, the core of her identity and some details of what could have led up to her being here should have resurfaced.

But they haven’t. She is still just as blank, just as confused as she was at the very beginning. Which means we don’t know what comes next. It would clearly be seriously unethical to just send her out into the world on her own once she is fully recovered physically. She has no means of taking care of herself, no ability to get a job, and no familiarity with her surroundings that would enable her to start a new life. Which means the hospital will keep her for a while.

It’s not a permanent solution. She cannot stay here indefinitely. But she can remain here in the hospital for the foreseeable future while her body continues to heal and she works with mental health professionals. What happens then is something we’ll have to decide when the time comes. For now this is the closest thing she has to a home.

She obviously has conflicting feelings over this, but there is a look of something like happiness in her eyes when she glances over the room.

“I wanted to let you know, I’ve been in touch with an organization in the area that wants to help you,” I tell her. “They’re putting together some clothes, toiletries, and things to hopefully make you more comfortable.”

“Thank you.”

A worker from the nutrition department comes in behind me with a tray of food, and I leave her to eat. I try not to let myself feel frustrated as I get back to my car. Bringing these case files was a stab in the dark, I knew. I hoped that something in one of them would spark a memory or at least a reaction in her, but I knew from the start it was a long shot. I’ve tried to temper my expectations and not let myself get too invested in this being a turning point, but I still feel a bit deflated.

I decide to go back to the place where she was found. I’ve already been once, but I feel the compulsion to look around again.

My drive in this case isn’t slowing down. This is a perfect example of how my choice of career is not really about criminals but about victims. It’s not the cases—it’s the people. I obviously want to bring justice down on whoever hurt Doe and stop them from doing it to anyone else. But my deepest motivation is to help her. I am determined to find out who she is and what happened to her.

I pull off on the side of the road right around the same place I did when I came here with Noah. Getting out, I make an initial scan of my surroundings to see if I immediately notice any differences. Seems nothing has changed. I can still see the broken branches where I feel certain Doe climbed up onto the road. Beyond that, there’s almost no indication of what happened here.

I identify the specific area by the skid marks on the pavement, along with a few bits of remaining debris and a section of chipped-off bark on the tree struck by the men who found her on the road. The rain washed away any possibility of biological evidence such as blood or hairs that might have been left on the pavement, but I still stand in the spot where I think she was found.

The positioning of where she was found along with the place I’m sure she climbed up indicate she was not just following the road but trying to get across it when she collapsed. I’ve seen pictures of her body posture, but they also showed the markings on the pavement. That would indicate that she was more than halfway across the lane where she was found, further away from the place where she climbed up than from the other lane.

I walk over to the broken branches. I think back on my conversation with Grant and Leroy, the two young men who were driving this way and nearly got hit by another vehicle apparently veering away from Doe crumpled on the ground. That conversation brought up one intense theory. The driver of the other vehicle stopped, but he never got out of his vehicle. He wouldn’t communicate with either of them. It immediately conjured the possibility that she didn’t just run from someplace nearby.

She could have jumped or fallen from that vehicle as it traveled, causing her to tumble down the embankment. The direction the vehicle was coming from could indicate that the driver turned back around to come find her, but he was put off his goal by encountering Grant and Leroy.

I’m not yet completely convinced that’s what happened. It would definitely explain some of her injuries and why the team who came out here to search wasn’t able to find anything that specifically showed where she came from. But there’s just not enough solid evidence yet. I keep it as a possibility in the back of my mind, but I’m going to keep looking for anything that can be verified.

Treading carefully, I make my way down the embankment. Doe described climbing up toward the road. That tells me she was a pretty good distance down the incline when either she physically woke up or her brain clicked, so to speak, and gave her a starting point of consciousness and awareness.

When I get onto flatter ground, I stop and glance around. I try to put myself in her position, trying to understand what it would have felt like to suddenly be aware and be here. No context. No explanation. No knowledge or understanding beyond the immediate radius. What would I have done?

My gut instinct tells me I would have responded very much like her. Just like she doesn’t have specific memories but retains her basic knowledge, like language and daily functioning, she would have the innate compulsion to escape and find help. Human beings simply naturally reach out to others, and that drive within her would have pushed her to seek out someone in those terrifying moments.

As I stand here, though, I’m not just thinking about Doe and the will to survive that brought her directly in the path of oncoming traffic. My mind has gone back much further, sinking into a time many years ago when I stood in a grassy clearing looking at a spot where a woman’s body was found frozen to the ground.

She was also called Jane Doe. When she was found there by unsuspecting campers, no one knew who she was or how she came to be stuck on the ground with a layer of ice and frozen blood. She was transferred to a morgue and kept there as details about her were disseminated through various avenues of media. There was a detailed description of her, a composite sketch, and important identifying details. Everyone involved in the investigation was desperate to find out who she was so we would know what happened to her.

But for a long time, she lay there on the slab, unidentified and unclaimed. She had no name. That situation was deeply disturbing to me.

Everyone deserves an identity. We all deserve to have the world know who we are. And yet it took a year before Serena’s name and her dignity were returned to her. This situation has the same dark implications, the same inherent wrongness of a person not having any distinct sense of self and differentiation from others.

And at the same time, it’s different. Because this time, the victim is alive. The woman found frozen to the ground couldn’t tell us anything anymore. She had been silenced. But Doe is here. She isn’t just someone whose story we need to know so we can punish an offender. She’s a person who needs to build a life beyond this road.

Taking out my phone, I snap some pictures of the area, turn on the video recorder, and walk around slowly, narrating where I am and what I’m seeing. I’ll show these to her and see if they mean anything.

As I look around, I try to find any signs of her movements. Others have already searched here extensively, but there is always a benefit to more sets of eyes and going over something multiple times. It’s like not being able to find your keys and eventually locating them on a table in a room you passed through five times during your search. Sometimes you see something and don’t realize it.

But I don’t see anything else.

Trying to understand exactly where I am, I activate my GPS to orient me to my location. I have a basic idea of this place, but I don’t know what’s around me or where I am in context with the towns and villages in the area. Seeing these locations may give me an indication of where she could have come from. There’s not much around in a reasonable radius. But again, I don’t know for sure if she walked through the woods. She still could have been transported. There’s still so much unknown.

I leave and go back to the hospital to show her the pictures and video. She has a visceral reaction to seeing the locations, immediately turning her head away when an image of the broken branches comes up.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I should be better about this. I shouldn’t have so much of a reaction just to a picture.”

I shake my head. “You don’t need to apologize about any of this. No one knows exactly what you’re going through, and no one gets to tell you what to think or how to feel. You are a survivor.”

“No,” she says. “Not yet. You haven’t survived what you’re still living through.”

Those words are still reverberating through my head when I get back home that night.

After so much time already spent in Stoneville for my last case, I wanted to get back to Sherwood for as many days as possible. The drive isn’t too long to commute as long as nothing is urgent, and it feels good to slide into my own bed at night and wake up next to my husband.

Sam is in the kitchen chopping vegetables and tossing them into a giant salad bowl when I walk in.

“Hey, babe,” he says. “How was your day?”

“She didn’t remember anything,” I tell him, setting my bags down and shrugging out of my coat. “I keep waiting for something to trigger at least some sort of memory. Something that could at least point me in the right direction. All we have right now is where she was found. That’s it. I don’t even know if she walked there or if she got out of a car. I have no idea. So I don’t know where to go next.”

“You’ve solved crimes without knowing who the victim was before,” he says, popping a piece of red bell pepper into his mouth.

“I know, but that was different. There was evidence. There were breadcrumbs that I could start following. With Doe, there’s nothing. We have the description of the car that the two guys in the truck saw, but they didn’t get a license plate, and the description of the driver was vague at best. Essentially just a completely normal-looking guy. None of the businesses in the area got a clear image of the car on their security cameras. One of them got a brief view of a car that looked like what they described, but nothing solid to go on.”

“And the witnesses are solid?”

“Grant and Leroy have been completely cooperative. They tell the exact same story, but with enough variation and personal details that it’s reliable. I have verification from other people of where both of them were before they got to that place on the road. They even consented without a single second of hesitation to the truck being thoroughly examined.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. It’s a completely normal truck that I would expect from a couple of guys. Not the cleanest vehicle I’ve ever seen. Not a total trash heap or anything, but it doesn’t look like it has a standing appointment at the car wash and detailer. The carpets and seats needed to be vacuumed. There were some papers and things around. A couple of pieces of mail and a dirty shirt in the back seat. Enough that the car looked lived in, and if she had been in it, there would be evidence of her. But there was no hair, no fiber, no blood. Not inside the truck, not in the bed. They didn’t have her. They did not make up what they said happened.

“I know we’ve already run her picture through missing persons databases, and today I had Noah run the description through the child databases too. Just to cover our bases. But nothing showed up. There are a couple of open missing person cases with victims that match some parts of her description, but then there are details that don’t fit. She doesn’t have any tattoos, so that eliminates a lot of them. She had X-rays done, and though there are some signs of healed injuries, there aren’t any of the medical implants or devices that the missing women have. She doesn’t have any distinctive birthmarks.

“Essentially, we’ve eliminated the possibility of her being any of the women listed on local, state, or national databases. The missing children is more difficult to do a full process of elimination just because we don’t know really how old she is or where she came from. So much could have happened over the course of her lifetime that we can’t use the description for those children as set in stone. A couple of children seem like possibilities, but I’m not really holding my breath that they hold the answer we’re looking for.”

I sit down at the kitchen table where Sam has collected the ingredients for homemade salad dressing so I can start mixing.

“Why not?” he asks.

“Just that none of them specifically mentions a particular shape of the earlobe. It doesn’t change as we get older, and she doesn’t have it. I understand that growth patterns can be difficult to predict, and they’re not always accurate from the time of childhood, but most of the time, you can take a child’s size at particular ages and project their adult size.

“Obviously, this doesn’t always work. Bellamy was supposed to be about six feet tall according to her growth, and she just stopped getting any taller when she was in middle school. But that’s not the norm. Basing assumptions on the size of the children and predictable growth patterns, it’s unlikely that the missing children that do fit with her characteristics are her.”

“So what’s the next step?” Sam asks.

“Well, I’m planning on going back to talk to her tomorrow. I want to ask if she would be willing to submit DNA. If she is, we could run her profile through other databases to see if there are matches. If she consents to her DNA being collected and tested, I can contact the parents of the missing children and ask them to submit to testing as well. Just to cover our bases and make sure that none of them match,” I say.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” he says.

After dinner, Sam and I put on our pajamas and curl up on the couch to watch some mindless TV. Just as we are picking a show, he gets a call.

“Sorry, I have to take this,” he says. “I swear I answer more calls now than I did when I was sheriff.”

It’s true, and he complains a little, but I know that Sam loves his new role. He is thriving as mayor of Sherwood, and the town is doing the same. It was difficult for him to transition from the role that he filled for the majority of his adult life and that he had watched his father and grandfather hold before him. There were even a couple of times during his preparation and campaign when I thought he might change his mind and withdraw, but I’m glad he didn’t. He can do so much more in this office than he could as sheriff, and the people of Sherwood love him so much. They trust him and know that even if he makes decisions that they don’t fully support, they know it’s for the best if Sam is doing it.

While he takes his phone into the office to talk, I scan through the TV and land on the news. I’ve gotten through a “gray and chilly” weather forecast, sports news that doesn’t really mean anything to me, and human interest stories. I’m on to the more hard-hitting reports when Sam comes back into the room.

“I thought we were going to watch something stupid,” he says. “It seems to me you are watching the news.”

I wave a hand at him to quiet him. He sits beside me as I finish listening to the gut-wrenching story unfolding on the screen.

“Have you heard about that?” I ask.

“About what?”

“A boy was murdered just outside of Cherry Hill,” I tell him. “Nine years old.”

“When?” Sam asks, sitting down and reaching for a handful of popcorn from the massive bowl I put on the coffee table in front of us.

“Apparently, he went missing a few days ago, and his body was just found this morning. How did we not hear about that? Cherry Hill is an hour from here,” I say.

I am very familiar with the small city outside of Sherwood. I investigated a series of murders there over Christmas a few years ago and spent a considerable amount of time in the area. It’s hard to imagine something as gut-wrenching as a young child being missing happening so close and not hearing about it at all.

“Do they know who killed him?”

“No. He was apparently abducted while playing in a park after school, and no one saw anything. They’re not saying how he was killed. They’re not giving many details at all,” I say.

The news broadcast moves on to another story, and Sam picks up the remote to change the channel. He turns on an old sitcom we’ve taken to watching in long binges of reruns and wraps his arm around me. I curl up against his side and pull the popcorn bowl into his lap, but I have trouble getting into the episode. I’m thinking about Charles McGeary and what his family must be going through tonight.

The next day I stop by the bakery I discovered during my last investigation. Scarlet, the owner, smiles at me from behind the counter as she slides a tray of fresh chocolate chip muffins into place.

“Hey, Emma. You just can’t stay away, can you?” she asks.

“Seems like it. I’m still investigating the case I was handling before I started investigating Brianna Wright’s disappearance. Seems like you’re going to have to deal with me hanging around here for a while longer,” I tell her.

“I think I can live with that,” she says with a smile. “Get you a cup of coffee?”

“Absolutely. To go though. Do you have any banana nut muffins today?”

She packs a couple of muffins into a bag and hands me a large paper cup with a travel lid. I tell her I’ll see her soon and head out to go to the hospital. Noah meets me in the parking lot, and I hand him one of the muffins.

“No coffee?” he asks.

“I see your travel mug in your squad car,” I say. “Don’t think I don’t know how picky you are about your coffee.”

“Fair.”

He reaches into his car and takes out his mug, downing a swig and then taking a bite of his muffin. We go inside, and I lead him to the new room.

“Morning,” I say. “I smuggled you a muffin.”

I take the third muffin out of the bag and hold it out to her.

“Thank you. I don’t know how many more plates of scrambled eggs and sausage links I can possibly have.” She looks at the muffin. “I hope I’m not allergic to nuts. That would be a fun discovery.”

“Now that you say that, banana nut maybe wasn’t the best choice. We should probably talk to the doctor about running a panel of allergy tests,” I say.

“Might not be the worst idea,” Noah says.

Doe takes a bite of the muffin and pauses. “Seems okay.”

“All right. Well, you let me know if you spontaneously start not being able to breathe or something. Anyway, I am here to get your permission for the next step in our investigation.”

I pull up one of the chairs and sit next to the bed.

“Permission for what?” she asks.

“DNA testing. There are a few children on the missing registries that are close enough in your description to be possibilities. It isn’t as easy to eliminate someone who went missing as a young child as it is someone who was an adult, and really, the only way we can do it is through fingerprints and DNA. We already have your fingerprints on record, but unfortunately, the missing children were never fingerprinted, so the strongest option we have is DNA. If we get your permission to generate your DNA profile, we can then go to the parents of the missing children and get their DNA if the direct DNA of the missing child isn’t on record,” I say.

“Why do I feel like there’s something else?” she asks.

“It’s not just a matter of your DNA being compared against that of the parents of missing children. If you submit your DNA profile, it will be compared against criminal databases,” I explain. “I just want to make sure that I am giving you full disclosure. This is something you’ll need to think about because it does have certain implications.”

“You mean in case I have committed a crime at some point,” she says.

“Exactly. Without you having any memory of your past, there’s no guarantee of what could be found when we run your DNA. If you have committed any sort of offense that had DNA evidence, that will be in the database, and we could make the connection. At that point, the legal process would begin and I would not have any control over that.”

She looks like she’s trying to let it all sink in. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

“I mean that even though I am handling the investigation into what happened to you, that doesn’t give me oversight of everything involving you. If you are to give us permission to collect your DNA and run your profile, and it did come back connected to a crime, what happens next would be up to law enforcement and prosecutors in the jurisdiction of that particular crime. I couldn’t stop them from pursuing an indictment and prosecution.

“This isn’t a trick or some sort of manipulation. I’m not telling you this because I know anything that you don’t. I just want to make sure that I give you all of the information so that you are making an informed decision. I don’t ever want you to feel like I am trying to go behind your back or getting you to do something that you don’t realize you’re doing.”

“So essentially, I could give you my DNA to check to see if I’m one of these missing children, but you would also check to see if I’m a criminal on the run,” she says.

“Yes.”

I’m not going to elaborate any further than that. I know the moral and ethical arguments vary widely. And I can’t say that I don’t fully understand the stance of people who don’t think it’s right to use the DNA of a victim in a way that could implicate them in a crime, especially one who is suffering from extensive amnesia. It is an extremely touchy situation.

I won’t say there’s a perfect solution. I’m not so blindly loyal to the policies and protocols of law enforcement or the Bureau that I automatically assume everything that is done is correct or that there is a single black-and-white argument. For now there are no strict laws that lock victims or missing people into one decision or another.

And that’s why I leave it up to her. I want to be able to run her profile. DNA is a powerful tool that can provide a wealth of information and could fast-track us to the answers that we need. But it’s not my life that’s being held in the balance. It’s not my privacy or my possibility of learning things about myself that could land me with serious consequences. Doe has to make the choice.

“Can I think about it?” she asks.

“Absolutely. Just give me a call, and let me know what you decide.”

Noah and I leave the hospital. He walks with me to my car.

“We could have offered those separately,” he says. “You could have mentioned the databases but said that there’s the option of just testing against the families.”

“I’m fully aware,” I tell him. “And if it comes down to it, I’ll give her that option. If she calls me back and says that she adamantly doesn’t want me comparing her DNA to the criminal databases, then I’ll assure her that won’t happen and ask if she’s still all right with the comparison with the families. I want to get as much information as possible. Even if she hasn’t committed any crimes herself, there’s the chance she was involved in something or a victim that was never identified but her DNA was at a scene. I want to have the chance to find that.

“If I immediately gave her the option of only doing the family comparison, that’s probably what she would have gone with, and I wouldn’t have even the chance at the other testing. I did exactly what I told her I was doing. I gave her all the information so she could make the decision that’s right for her. Hopefully, that means she’ll allow the full range of comparison. We’ll just have to see.”

I’m on my way back to the bakery with plans to look into local businesses, yet again in hopes of seeing something I didn’t notice the first five or six times, when a video call from Xavier comes through. I click the button on my phone where it sits in a holder attached to the dashboard. As usually happens when I have these conversations with him, Xavier’s eye appears on the screen. It takes a few seconds for him to adjust himself enough that I can see most of his face.

“Hey, X. How’s everything?” I ask.

“Where are you?”

Sometimes Xavier just glosses over any small talk offered to him. It either means that he’s just not in a place where he can communicate effectively and needs to get the words he’s already holding in his mouth out, or there’s something so significant he needs to tell me that he didn’t even process what I said to him.

“I’m in Stoneville. I’m still working on Doe’s case.”

“Are you going back to Sherwood today?” he asks.

“I was planning on it. Why?”

“Can you go back to Sherwood now?” he asks. “I’m sitting on your front porch.”

“X, why are you sitting on the front porch? Just let yourself into the house. What is going on?”

“Do you remember me telling you about Sheridan Donovan? Her assistant, Posey, got in touch with me a while back?” he asks.

“Is that the woman who does pretty much the same thing that Lakyn Monroe did?”

“Similar, yes.”

“I remember,” I say.

“Posey just called me. There’s a case, and they need your help.”

“My help? Why would they need my help?”

“I’ll explain it all to you when you get here,” he says. “They really need you, Emma. A woman is serving life in prison, and they don’t think she should be.”

He hangs up without saying anything else. That is very much his process. He said everything he needed to say, and that meant the conversation came to an end in his mind. I close the call window on my phone and change direction. I need to get back to Sherwood and find out what’s happening.

Xavier first told me about Sheridan and Posey a few months ago. They contacted him right before the holidays to introduce themselves. He has been casually following Sheridan’s online content for a while, kind of drawn to it by the similarities between what she does and the social justice work of Lakyn Monroe.

Like Lakyn, Sheridan and Posey are heavily focused on bringing attention to wrongfully convicted people and seeking ways to clear their names and get them out of jail. Some situations come with investigating old cases in an effort to find the truth. Even in situations where the accused is dead, they emphasize the value of victims and their families knowing who really caused their pain.

It’s something I admire. Coming under the scrutiny of an investigation for a serious crime is an intense experience—one that can have lasting, catastrophic effects on the lives of the people who live through it. Even when they don’t end up charged or are publicly cleared, there are always people who will think of them only in connection with the accusations. The suspicion will hang over them, and no matter where they go in life, it is very likely they will encounter people who will still suspect them. Often these people lose out on job opportunities. Friends and family members cut off all contact with them. They can lose their homes, their entire lives. All for something they didn’t do.

This only becomes worse when the justice system fails completely and an innocent person ends up behind bars. Paying for a crime they had nothing to do with is a tragedy and something a person never really recovers from. Even if they are exceptionally resilient and choose to frame it as an opportunity to bring good into the world, they as an individual will never be the same. They will always carry the trauma and scars. They can never gain back the time that they lost. Those people who contributed to these miscarriages of justice should be held accountable and forced to face what they have done.

Not that it’s always intentional. I try very hard to believe that in most of these situations, the system works. The prosecutors, law enforcement, judges, and other officials dedicate their lives to find true justice for victims. They don’t purposely convict and condemn innocent people.

Sometimes, though, that isn’t the case. There are definitely situations when members of law enforcement or prosecutors use their access and power to manipulate a case. So adamant that they have the right answer and determined to punish someone, anyone, that they are willing to do anything it takes to get that conviction. They will plant evidence, ignore laws, and conflate details to create the outcome they want.

When that happens, when there is even the smallest amount of impropriety, I believe that consequences should be swift and severe. They are playing with people’s lives, and they should be held liable when those lives are damaged because of their actions.

In today’s world, that kind of accountability largely stems from the internet. People are far more informed about their rights now than they used to be, and the internet provides platforms that enable activism and advocacy on a level that has never been possible before. It’s not just friends and family members who personally know the wrongfully convicted. Now people can share these stories across the mass population. They can provide details, even offer a look at public records and other details, so people know what’s happening. From there they can gather support, collect funds, and mobilize efforts to ensure the justice system remains just.

It’s a valiant effort. One I wish weren’t necessary. A goal I wish was universally applied.

I’ll admit I have my own personal love-hate relationship with the involvement of the internet in the world of crime. Sometimes it is extraordinarily beneficial, and other times it can lead to severe interference in already-challenging cases. But I have a special place in my heart for this type of activism.

Sheridan and Posey got in touch with Xavier because they noticed he was following their content and knew his story. He is a poster child for this community. Even though he has chosen to remain largely quiet and out of the spotlight, anyone who has any interest in clearing the names of those who ended up behind bars for something they didn’t do knows his story. They probably don’t know the details. They don’t know everything he went through or all of its significance. But that doesn’t really matter. They just know that he was accused of killing his close friend and spent more than a decade being processed through the system like he was dropped into a rock tumbler.

Finding out that he was interested in what they were doing had to have been a thrill for both women. When they contacted him, they told him they were thinking about writing a book and were hoping that he would be willing to be interviewed for it. From there they started asking if he would be willing to use his own voice, to essentially leverage his own fame to bring more attention to what they were doing and advocate for the cases they were working on.

It’s not a small ask for Xavier. I know he’s willing to do interviews. He would happily write down his experiences. But the thought of standing up in front of people and talking about what he went through or going on tour, for lack of a better term, is something he has struggled with. That would be indescribably challenging for him, and I don’t think they really understand how difficult it would be for everybody involved.

If they could get Xavier in front of a crowd to talk, they would have to deal with whatever came out of his mouth. They would have to try to understand his way of telling his story. Xavier is a precious, irreplaceable part of my life and has been for many years, but I’m still working my way through speaking his unique language. He is not what I would consider beginner-friendly.

That being said, I’ve been trying to encourage him to be as involved as he can be. He has experience and perspective neither of them has. He could be invaluable to what they are trying to accomplish. Now that phone call has just made me think he is getting more involved.

He’s still on the porch when I get to my house. Sam’s car isn’t in the driveway, but I also don’t see Dean, Cupcake, or Nicole anywhere. Unless he has convinced Bruce the tow truck driver to start going all the way to his new farm to drive him back to Sherwood, one of those three has to be around somewhere.

“Why are you sitting on the porch?” I ask him when I get out of the car. “It’s cold out here.”

“I am aware,” he tells me.

I reach into the back seat to get my bag and start up the driveway.

“Then why are you sitting there?” I ask. “Is Dean at y’all’s house?”

Xavier sold the house in Harlan, but they kept the house here, the one where my grandparents lived. It’s as much for the connection to them as it is to give Dean and Xavier a place to stay when they are in Sherwood. They know that they are more than welcome to stay with Sam and me anytime they come, though, if they decide to sell the house. Before Sam and I moved from that house to the one he grew up in, and transferred ownership of my grandparents’ house to Dean and Xavier, they stayed with us all the time.

Obviously, having an entire house is more comfortable and convenient, especially when all the different tentacles of our increasingly sprawling chosen family start to make their way back to Sherwood for large gatherings. It’s much easier to fit the four of us, the three in Bellamy’s family, Cupcake and Heather, Nicole, Vance, Owen and his girlfriend, and the occasional appearance of my father when we have two houses we can fill.

But it’s more than just the extra space. Dean never had the opportunity to meet our grandparents. This is his only way of being close to them. I think he holds on even tighter because of that. But he’s not always there when they are in town.

“No,” Dean says, sticking his head out of the front door. “I’m here.”

“Why are you in the house and he’s on the porch?” I ask.

“Don’t let him fool you. He came inside and had tea about ten minutes ago,” Dean says.

“As I said, I am aware that it is cold,” Xavier says.

“Well, so am I, so let’s go inside.”

The house is filled with a rich, sweet smell when I go in and set my bag down by the front door. I take a deep breath of it.

“I found the frozen cinnamon rolls in the freezer,” Dean says. “Thank you for putting the baking instructions on them.”

“When will they be ready?” I ask.

“Five minutes,” he says.

“All right, that gives me time to change. I’ll be right back.”

I go up to my room, and by the time I change out of my work clothes and get back downstairs, the rolls are out of the oven. I take out the ingredients for the cream cheese frosting, and Xavier comes into the kitchen.

“Charles McGeary,” he says.

The name immediately strikes a chord. It’s the little boy whose murder was reported on the news last night. I stop what I’m doing and look at him.

“Charles McGeary? You said someone was serving a sentence for something they didn’t do. He was murdered, but no one has been sentenced for anything having to do with his murder,” I say.

“But they should be,” he says.

I set the unwrapped cream cheese on a plate and put it in the microwave to soften.

“Dean, when that’s done, put it in the bowl and use the rubber spatula to cream it,” I say. “I’ll be back.”

Xavier and I go back into the living room, and he drops down into his favorite corner of the couch.

“What are you talking about?” I ask. “Start from the beginning.”

“Which beginning?” he asks.

“Your beginning. When Sheridan called you about this.”

“Posey called me,” he says.

“When Posey called you about this.”

“About a year ago, they found out about a woman who is in prison for life for murdering her son. But she insists she didn’t do it. Sheridan and Posey have looked into the case, and they believe her. They think she was convicted based on her personality rather than actual facts. But they haven’t been able to do anything to change it. But now that Charles has been murdered, that could change,” he says.

“What does Charles have to do with that case?” I ask.

“He was found on the sixteenth,” Xavier says.

“Right,” I say.

“Dustin Reed was found on the thirteenth.”

I sigh. “I’m going to need more information.”

Cameron Reed

Three years ago

“Dustin! Are you ready yet, bud? It’s time to go. We don’t want to be late!”

Cameron dug through her purse looking for one of the pair of earrings she’d tossed in the day before. She glanced at the clock on the stove. Her son still hadn’t made it downstairs, and she was getting impatient. They should have already left. It was Parent Appreciation Day at Dustin’s school, and he had been looking forward to the festivities for weeks. Her husband Avery hadn’t been able to get time off work to be there, so Cameron arranged her schedule for the day so she could go with her son for the morning.

She went into the living room and grabbed Dustin’s backpack off the floor. It was unzipped and tipped open as she lifted it, dumping papers out onto the carpet. An old banana tumbled out, splitting when it hit the floor. She let out a frustrated sound and swooped down to grab the banana and the papers. Shoving them in the trash, she stomped to the bottom of the steps.

“Dustin! We need to leave!”

He finally came out of his bedroom, his untied shoes flopping on his feet and his dark-blond hair standing up at odd angles from his head. It looked like he either hadn’t bothered to brush it at all since getting up or had tried way too hard to style it the way his father did. Cameron wasn’t going to care about it right now. They just needed to leave.

Dustin grabbed his backpack and slung it onto his back.

“You need a jacket,” Cameron said.

“It’s gonna be warm today,” Dustin argued.

“But it’s not right now. Just put it on. You can put it in your backpack when you get to school and don’t have to put it back on.”

He reached up and yanked the jacket down from the coat rack by the front door, nearly toppling it over. Cameron reached out and grabbed the rack to stop it from falling down onto him, setting it back up. She closed her eyes and took a breath to settle the nerves rattling inside her. They stepped out onto the porch, and she made sure the front door was locked as Dustin ran for the van like he always did. Movement caught her attention across the street. She looked up and saw the curtain in their neighbor’s window fall back into place. He was spying on them again. Avery always said that the man living in the house across the street was perfectly nice, but he gave her a creepy feeling every time she saw him watching them from the window.

As they headed for the car, her phone rang in her pocket. She used her key fob to unlock the doors of her minivan and activate the door on the side. It slid open to let Dustin inside.

“Yes?” she answered, pressing the phone to her ear as she opened the driver’s side door.

“Hey, honey,” Avery said. “Did you call the hotel?”

“What?” Cameron asked, getting into the van and adjusting the mirrors.

“The hotel. I was saying that we might need to go by after the flight lands but before the official check-in time and drop off our luggage. I wanted you to call the hotel to make sure that was okay. Did you do it?”

“No,” Cameron said. “Why can’t you do it?”

Avery let out the familiar heavy sigh that told her he was annoyed and disappointed. “I’m working, Cameron. I have to put my energy and attention into my job. I thought that we’d already talked about this.”

“You talked about this,” Cameron said, fighting with the seat belt that didn’t want to straighten and was resisting locking into place. “You made it very clear that you believe you’re the only one who does anything.”

“I’m the one who works full time,” he said. There was a note of condescension in his voice, the kind of soft, almost-sing-songy tone that always made her feel like he was talking to her like a child.

“And what is it that I do, Avery?” she snapped, twisting around in the seat to look behind her so she could back out of the driveway. “Do you think I just sit around all day waiting for you to come home with your paycheck? Who do you think does all the cleaning, all the cooking, packs your lunch, packs Dustin’s lunch, does the laundry, does all the grocery shopping, picks up your dry cleaning, arranges for the landscaper and the pest control… Do you want me to keep going? And all of that is on top of work. Because I do still work, if you’ve forgotten.”

“I don’t understand why. You’re so busy, but you won’t just stop working entirely. You said that you wanted to be a housewife,” Avery said.

She cringed at the word. Even though that was what she was, the word felt outdated and disrespectful. Like he was putting her in her place by calling her that. She couldn’t even remember the conversations that brought her to that decision anymore. It didn’t even feel like her decision. It felt like a lifetime ago.

“What I said was that I hated my job and I wanted to go back to school so I could pursue a different career. You were the one who told me that you made enough money to support the household and I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to,” she said. “And yet I still do.”

“And then we had Dustin, so you decided not to go back to school, and then you decided to start working again, but only part-time,” he said.

“I didn’t decide that. It just happened.”

“Look, this is ridiculous. I just wanted to know if you called the hotel. We are supposed to be there one week from today. All of these plans should have been done already.”

“Then you should have done them. You’re the one who’s worried about your luggage. We already know you’re going to pack ten times more than you actually need,” Cameron said.

“Just call them. It will take you two minutes. And I need you to go by the post office and pick up a couple of packages that were held there,” he said.

“I’m on my way to this parent thing at Dustin’s school. I already have my day planned out. I’ll talk to you later.”

With a disgusted sigh, she dropped the phone into the passenger seat and kept driving.

“Don’t you want to come, Mom?” Dustin asked.

Her eyes flickered to the rearview mirror, and she saw her son sitting in the center seat of the second row, looking at her with slightly widened eyes. Guilt made her stomach twist.

“Of course, I do. You’ve been talking about this for so long. I’m excited to see everything that you and your classmates have been preparing,” she said, trying to sound as enthusiastic as she could.

“Don’t listen. I’m going to practice the song.”

He didn’t have to tell her not to listen to him. As he sang, Cameron was fuming. She couldn’t believe Avery’s nerve. She had already done everything else to prepare for their vacation. She chose the hotel. She booked the reservations and the flights. She reserved dinner for the two of them and arranged for childcare. She created the itinerary. And yet, not only did he still manage to take credit for the trip, but he was piling more on her.

The worst part about it was that she had already told him that she had arranged for early check-in at the hotel and verified it with their payment. By the time they got off the plane and got the airport shuttle to the hotel, the verified window for them to arrive would have started. There would be no need for them to drop off their luggage at the front desk and go find something else to fill their time until the room was ready.

But she wasn’t about to remind him of that. She wanted him to think about it, to remember what she’d already told him. She felt stupid for even thinking that. There was no way he was ever going to keep up with anything that mattered to her. He might retain it for a few minutes, but the next client that called or the next idea that popped into his head would just shove it right out of his thoughts.

They got to the school, and Cameron could see that the parking lot was already brimming with cars. The event involved all the students from kindergarten up through the fifth grade. Everyone was encouraged to invite the “significant adult influences” in their lives. She hadn’t been able to stop herself from rolling her eyes when she read that in the school-wide email. This event had been going on for years, according to the advertisement, and was still called Parent Appreciation Day on all the reminder emails and information sheets she’d been inundated with for at least a month. Yet they were going to throw around the buzzy neutral descriptor when talking about it.

Cameron didn’t mind the concept of inclusivity. She thought it made sense that the school was reaching out to the students who didn’t have traditional families. But if they were going to virtue-signal like that, at least they should actually change what it was called.

Whatever it was called, and however they were going to describe it, this event meant at least one, often two, and sometimes more adults for each of the students flooding the building for the morning. With families that had multiple siblings all still attending the same school, grandparents and even aunts and uncles often joined in to make sure that each sibling had adults in their specific classroom.

It made for a busy and chaotic scene around the school. For the first part of the day’s program, all the adults were supposed to go inside and follow the cheerful, student-crafted signage to the individual classrooms for their children. Somehow, though, even with these simple instructions, the huge crowd of adults seemed confused and unsure of exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

Finally, some office staff started directing everybody inside. Cameron and Dustin pushed through the densely packed hallway and made it to his classroom. His teacher immediately popped up in her path like she had been waiting for Cameron to appear.

“Mrs. Reed! It’s so wonderful to see you. Dustin has been so excited that you were attending today,” Ms. Applewhite gushed.

“Mom! Come over here. I want to show you something!”

Cameron looked over and saw Dustin standing by a wall full of art pieces. She started to step toward him, but the teacher moved with her, so she couldn’t go anywhere.

“I was also really glad to hear you were coming. I haven’t seen you since Orientation Day over the summer.”

“I know, it’s great to see you again,” Cameron said with a forced smile.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about your participation in the classroom. I sent out a few emails with sign-ups for volunteer roles throughout the year, and I haven’t seen your name on any of them. We really do value a community of cooperation here at Willowbrook. It’s so important for our students to see that they have a support system of adults around them.”

“Mom!”

Cameron waved in Dustin’s direction and offered a tense nod to the teacher.

“I know,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons I chose the school.”

“So I can depend on you to pick up a few roles this month? I know you work outside the home, but there’s still so much you could do when you’re not there.”

Cameron’s jaw tightened, and her teeth clenched. She forced her teeth to stretch into a smile and herself not to react in the way she wanted to.

“Dustin is trying to get my attention. He wants to show me something,” she said.

“Of course! Enjoy! I’ll send you those sign-up sheets again.”

Ms. Applewhite scurried off to talk to a cluster of mothers near the front of the classroom. They were probably constantly at the school filling in the insane list of volunteer positions the teacher sent out before the year even began. What first-grade class needed a parent to be a lunch-line monitor? And why was that different from the recess-line monitor? How many special occasions could they possibly have that they would need something called a celebration committee?

The teacher’s assertion that Cameron hadn’t volunteered for anything wasn’t exactly accurate. Before the school year started, she’d come to help set the classroom up. She’d been responsible for organizing the reading corner. In the first two weeks of class, she’d also come back to that reading corner to listen to the students learning how to read.

She hadn’t done anything after that, but there were other things she had to do.

She walked over to Dustin, and he showed off a series of pictures done in different mediums. From there he brought her over to another display and proudly picked up what appeared to be a statue of a chef constructed entirely out of recycled materials, right down to the pan made of a soda bottle cap attached to a tiny rolled-up piece of aluminum foil. Cameron vaguely remembered him collecting bits of trash and recyclables a couple of weeks ago. She was about to compliment him on his creativity when she noticed the base the chef’s pop-top shoes were glued to.

“Is that my magnet?” she asked, startled to see the square magnet depicting a tranquil beach scene with two starfish nestled in the sand.

“I found it in the trash,” Dustin said. “Remember? You threw it away.”

Cameron was going to argue with him, but she didn’t want the rest of the parents packed tightly in the classroom to overhear them. Besides, she realized he was right. She had thrown the magnet away. It was an impulsive decision. Something she did without thinking it all the way through. In a moment of frustration and anger, she snatched it from where it was hanging on the refrigerator and tossed it into the trash can. She didn’t realize Dustin had seen her do it or that he would go behind her and take it out to use in his project.

“Is everybody ready for the presentation?” Ms. Applewhite trilled from the front of the classroom.

The students all rushed excitedly to their places on the bright-orange furry carpeting that reminded Cameron of pictures of her father’s basement rumpus room when he was a teenager. Parents tried to fit themselves into the tiny chairs at the desks set up in pods of four in the center of the room while others went to the walls to stand and watch. Cameron stayed where she was.

Ms. Applewhite guided the students through a series of songs they’d obviously worked hard to learn, completely with choreography. When they were finished singing, they performed two short skits based on stories they’d already read during the school year. With that over, it was time to go into the cafeteria for breakfast. Cameron couldn’t even imagine trying to fit all these people in the cafeteria, but Dustin grabbed her hand and tugged her along with him.

It turned out the school had actually prepared for the tremendous overflow of people who couldn’t fit in the cafeteria. Tables were set up along the adjoining hallway and in two resource classrooms. Cameron and Dustin stood in line and gradually crept their way up to the buffet where they filled their plates with food and brought them out of the cafeteria and to a table in the hallway to eat.

As she was eating, Cameron felt eyes on her. It was the unmistakable sensation of someone watching her every movement, and she looked up. As she did, her eyes caught a hazel stare that made her heart go still in the center of her chest. She blinked, knowing when she opened her eyes again, that hazel stare wouldn’t be there anymore. It had to just be her imagination. But when she looked over again, those eyes were still there.

They lingered too long. They stayed locked on her until it felt like there was nothing else, like the stare had gripped her and was holding her suspended while everything else went to haze, then melted away. The impact of that moment, even after it was over, left her feeling breathless. She thought she knew what to expect here, but that proved she didn’t.

She needed to get out of there. The rest of the day was looming. Everything she was supposed to be doing. Task after task. Goal after goal. And beyond that, the stretch of the rest of her life. Not for the first time, she wondered what it would look like.

She used to know. At least she thought she did. Now it was there, just beyond today, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she would even recognize it.

Dustin jumped up from the table and ran over to a boy he knew from the neighborhood. And she felt herself smile.

Cameron

She only worked two or three days out of the week, but Cameron hired Chloe to pick Dustin up from the bus stop and watch him until early evening Monday through Friday. This meant that even on the days when Cameron wasn’t in the office, she could still fill her afternoons with whatever she needed to. Many days it was continuing the grind of trying to get her business off the ground. Without the education she thought she was going to have, building the company she envisioned was much more difficult, and the limited time she had to work on it made it even harder. But she was determined for it to happen, so she kept working.

On other afternoons, she didn’t work at all. Chloe didn’t know the difference. All she knew was the time that Cameron and Avery were expected back at the house. Cameron rarely heard from the babysitter. That was part of the reason why she liked her so much. As soon as she met her during the process of interviewing the possible candidates, Cameron knew Chloe was the right sitter. Dustin was only three years old at the time, but Chloe was confident and professional. Cameron immediately felt at ease and knew that her son would be taken care of.

She appreciated that she wasn’t constantly getting check-in calls or questions. She could just trust that everything was fine and that she didn’t have to worry. Chloe would follow the same routine each day, and it fit perfectly into their lifestyle. That was why when she heard her phone ring that afternoon, her mind didn’t even go to Chloe. It was a surprise to see the babysitter’s name on her phone screen.

“Chloe?”

“Mrs. Reed, I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what to do? What’s going on, Chloe?” Cameron asked.

“Dustin wasn’t on his bus,” Chloe said.

Cameron stopped I her tracks. “What?”

“I stood there waiting at the bus stop like I always do, but when Mrs. Weaver opened the doors, he didn’t come out. I thought that maybe he had gotten stuck on the bus again like he did that one time, so I went to the next stop to wait for him. He never got off, and Mrs. Weaver told me that he was marked absent from class,” Chloe said.

Cameron could hear the panic in the young girl’s voice. She was obviously extremely upset by the situation and was hoping for some comfort and guidance from Cameron. But Cameron didn’t know how to give that to her. Her mind was ticking, trying to piece everything together.

“I don’t understand. I was at school with him earlier today. We did the whole Parent’s Day thing. He was there at school,” Cameron said.

“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “All I can tell you is that the bus driver said he was put on the list of absent kids so they knew they didn’t have to wait for him. It gives them the right number of passengers to account for. Basically, it’s a safety measure.”

“Yeah, I understand the concept, Chloe,” Cameron said tersely. “But I want to know why Dustin was on that list. You are absolutely positive that the bus driver knew who you were talking about?”

“Absolutely. She’s the same bus driver Dustin had last year in kindergarten. I’ve seen her nearly every day for the last two years. She recognizes me and knows exactly who I’m asking about when I say ‘Dustin.’ There’s definitely no mistake. There’s no way she could have thought I was somebody else. She actually asked me by name who I was there to pick up, and when I told her that I was there for Dustin, she seemed really confused. She said he was on the list of students who were absent. He didn’t get on the bus,” Chloe told her.

“I’m on my way home,” Cameron said, trying to tamp down the fear mounting in her chest. “Stay there.”

She hung up and ran for the car. She called Avery on the drive home but got voicemail. It wasn’t unexpected. It was nearly impossible to get ahold of her husband during the day. Maybe she should have been more tactful and just said that it was urgent that he call her back as soon as he got the message, but Cameron wasn’t thinking about being tactful. Instead, she told him bluntly that Dustin was missing and he needed to come home.

When she arrived at the house, Chloe was waiting outside, pacing the yard. Tears pooled in her eyes and dripped down her cheeks when she came toward Cameron.

“Did you find out anything?” she asked.

Cameron shook her head. “No. Tell me again what happened.”

Chloe went through the story again. There weren’t many details, but Cameron couldn’t expect much. She was just the babysitter. The only reason she knew anything was wrong was because she’d been waiting for him and he wasn’t on the bus. She had no way of knowing anything else. The school didn’t have her contact information, much less permission to call her about anything regarding Dustin. Chloe was limited only to what she found out from the bus driver and the little boy himself each day.

As Chloe told her the same story she’d already told, she walked alongside Cameron toward the bus stop. Cameron looked around and then walked in the direction of the next stop. Rushing home, she hopped back in her car and started driving around the neighborhood. Avery was just getting out of his car in the driveway when they pulled in.

“What the hell is going on?” Avery demanded when she stepped out of the car. “Dustin didn’t make it home from school?”

“No,” Cameron said simply.

“And you thought it was a good idea to just leave that on my voicemail?”

“I thought you needed to know the urgency of the situation as quickly as possible,” Cameron said. “You never answer your phone when you’re not here.”

“I’m working!”

Cameron stepped around him to go back to Chloe. She knew the teenager didn’t have any extra information, and she was putting more pressure on her by talking to her so directly, but she needed to talk to someone.

“Maybe he didn’t make it to the bus and someone was just confused about whether he was at school today,” Cameron said. “There was a lot going on today, and they could have just been mixed up. I’m going to call them and have them check to make sure he’s not just sitting outside the front door waiting for me.”

“Why would he be waiting for you?” Avery asked. “You never pick him up from school. Why would you start doing that now without talking about it?”

“What else would he do if he realized he’d missed his school bus?” Cameron asked.

“He’d call. He’d find someone who had a cell phone, or he’d go to the principal’s office and have them call us. I don’t think he knows either one of our phone numbers right off the top of his head,” Avery said.

“He does,” Chloe said. “It’s something I go over with him all the time. I thought it was really important that he could call one of you in any kind of situation that might come up instead of being dependent on the saved phone number. I didn’t want that for him, so I taught him both of your numbers along with the basics. Both of your names. The address.”

“So if he had just missed his bus, he would have been able to call one of us,” Avery said.

“Definitely.”

“I’m calling the school,” Cameron said.

She dialed the front office, and the secretary, Wendy, answered.

“This is Cameron Reed. My son, Dustin, didn’t get off the bus this afternoon, and the driver told me that he was on the list of students absent from class this afternoon. I need to know what’s going on.”

“Hi, Cameron. Yes, I made that list. I can tell you he was not on it,” Wendy said.

“Why?” Cameron asked.

“He wasn’t in his classes this afternoon,” she said.

“I brought him to school this morning. I was there with him for the events in his classroom and then breakfast. He was most certainly here today.”

“I know. He was marked as here for his morning classes, but then he wasn’t here for the afternoon,” Wendy said.

“Why wasn’t I informed? My six-year-old son was in class at one point in the day and then suddenly wasn’t. Why is it that no one picked up the phone and called me to find out what was going on?” Cameron asked.

“Didn’t you come pick him up? There was a note in his file that he was being picked up early because your family was leaving on vacation. That’s why nobody called you when the teacher for his afternoon class didn’t see him.”

“That vacation is next week. I arranged for him to be picked up early from school next week, not today,” Cameron said through slightly gritted teeth.

“I’m so sorry. There must have been some sort of miscommunication,” Wendy said.

“Well, now we don’t know where my son is. I have to call the police.”

She hung up without saying anything else. Avery looked at her with his eyebrows raised in anticipation.

“Well? Anything?” he asked.

“Wendy in the front office said that he was marked absent from his afternoon classes and everybody assumed that we had picked him up early for vacation because it was written down wrong. He was definitely there this morning, but he didn’t go to the second block of classes.”

“I don’t understand. What could have happened to him in the middle of the day at school?” Chloe asked.

“I don’t know,” Cameron said.

Avery yanked his phone out of his pocket and called the police.

Six hours missing

Mary Pace, the principal of Willowbrook Elementary School, was confused as she pulled back into the parking lot of the school alongside two police squad cars. She’d only left campus for the day an hour before, but she got a call from the police demanding she return to meet them there. Three officers were already standing out on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance to the school. She got out of the car into the cold that just seemed more pronounced with the sun quickly setting and the eerie chill of the situation rolling down her spine.

Grabbing the keys to the school, she went toward the officers

“Mary Pace,” she introduced herself. “Principal.”

“Hello, Mrs. Pace. I’m Detective Joseph Klappner. We spoke on the phone.”

“Yes,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“One of your students did not return home today, and his mother was told that he was marked absent from classes, but she did not pick him up early.”

Mary looked shocked. “Who? Which student?”

“Dustin Reed.”

“Oh my goodness. Yes, of course, Dustin. I spoke with my secretary this afternoon when she received a notice from his teacher that he was not present in classes after lunch. But we were all certain that his mother must have come and picked him up. She made arrangements weeks ago to pick him up early and for him to miss several days of school because the family was going on vacation. The teachers put together assignments for him and everything.”

The detective nodded. “Yes, his mother did mention that. But the vacation isn’t until next week. She did not come to pick him up early today. Don’t you have some sort of process that parents have to go through when they are picking up their children?”

“We do. Come inside with me, and I will look into this.”

She scurried toward the door and swiped her school identification card through a keypad. It beeped, and she put in a code. The magnetic locks inside the door clicked, and she opened the door.

“Does everyone who enters the school have to go through that process?”

“No. Only when the school is closed. Only a few of us have authorization to enter the building when it has been locked for the day. We all have to swipe our ID cards to unlock the door and deactivate the alarm system. The rest of the time, anyone coming to the school has to put in a specific access code, then be manually let in by the office. If they don’t know the code and the office staff doesn’t recognize them, they don’t get let in,” she said.

They were moving down the hallway toward the main office. She hadn’t turned on the lights, so they only had the sunlight filtering through the windows, which made up the majority of the front wall. The red emergency lights at regular intervals just beneath the ceiling made for more illumination.

“Is that a normal kind of security for a school? I don’t know. I don’t have any kids. But when I was in school, there definitely weren’t locks like that,” Detective Klappner said.

“There wasn’t anything like that when I was in school either. But these days, security is an utmost priority. We highly value the safety and security of our students and all our faculty and staff at Willowbrook,” Mary said. “I wish that the world today were still the type of place where it was okay for school doors to just let people in. But that’s just not the way it is anymore. We have to be wary of anybody who wants to come anywhere near the school. Making sure that the doors are locked at all times and that access is strictly limited to protect our students. At least that’s the intent.”

“Does every family have a different code?”

“Yes. Kind of like a locker combination. Every student is issued a particular code, and it changes each year. The families are under strict instruction not to share that code with anyone, including any visitors or anyone they have authorized to pick up their children. In that kind of circumstance, they have to alert us in advance that someone else will be coming to the campus. They have to give the person’s name, the reason that they are coming, and a statement of consent. Once this is approved, a temporary visitor code is issued. This allows us to specifically track when that person has entered the building, just like everybody else. There is a computer system that monitors when each of these codes are put in and can pinpoint exact times that each individual put their code in.”

Joseph nodded. “I’m sure that’s not always possible though. There have to be emergencies or things that suddenly come up and parents can’t call in advance. What do you do in that kind of situation?”

“If something like that happens, the parents still have to call the school and let them know that someone is coming to the campus. They give a name and an approximate time of arrival. We then have security meet them at the door and check their identification. Even then, if somebody shows up, we hold them outside until we can reach the parents directly and confirm with them.”

“Okay, that sounds all well and good, but it’s pretty impractical for when there are a lot of people going into the building at the same time. You don’t expect everybody to shut the door behind themselves and then have the next person put in their code and enter, right? That would be ridiculous. And people wouldn’t do it, frankly. They would open the door and hold it for other people.”

“The intention of the codes is to use them during the times the authorized adults enter the building outside the usual hours. At morning drop-off, the locks are deactivated on specific doors, and security stands by to monitor who enters. Since we have a smaller student body here than you would find in a public school, the security staff gets familiar with the students and the parents, so it’s easier for them to stay on top of who is coming and going during those times,” Mary explained.

They had arrived at the front office, and she flipped on the lights as they walked over to the main desk. Turning on the computer, she went through a few screens before pulling up the attendance record for the day. She scrolled through the list of students who had been marked absent, either since the morning for the whole day, or since after lunch when students shifted classrooms and attendance was taken a second time.

“There. Dustin Reed,” she said, pointing at the screen. “He didn’t change classes after lunch and was marked absent. There’s a note here that the secretary must have put in that he was absent due to a preplanned family vacation. There’s attached documentation.”

She clicked on a link embedded in the note next to Dustin’s name, and an email appeared on the screen.

“This is the original email that Cameron Reed sent to the school.”

“What’s the date on it?” Joseph asked.

She hesitated for a second. “Next week.”

She clicked on an arrow at the side of the screen that indicated another document. This one showed a scanned form that had been filled out by hand.

“This is what both parents filled out, giving the specifics of the plan and approving the work the teachers offered to provide so that Dustin wouldn’t lose any instructional time.”

Joseph saw the signatures for both Cameron and Avery Reed at the bottom of the forms. He could also clearly see the dates of the planned absences.

“So essentially, your secretary wasn’t paying attention and just decided that he must have been absent because of a vacation that doesn’t start until next week,” the detective said.

Mary didn’t take her eyes away from the screen. She looked shocked, the color draining from her face.

“I can’t believe Wendy would do that. She’s usually so careful. But this is why the parents weren’t notified that he was marked absent. It is policy that as soon as a student is noted to not be in class, whether it’s first thing in the morning or after lunch, she calls the student’s parents. This doesn’t happen if a parent has called in the morning to let us know that the student is not going to be there or if there is a preplanned absence. Because she was under the impression that he was leaving for vacation, it wasn’t a surprise that he wasn’t in class, and so she didn’t call.”

“What about the procedure for taking a student out early? You said that there was a process that everybody follows,” Joseph said.

Mary took a breath. “Yes. Anyone picking a student up from school early has to come into the office, show their ID, and fill out a release form. Each family has specific authorized adults who can pick students up, and they have to show that they are on that list if they are not a parent or guardian.”

“Was a form filled out to pick up Dustin today?”

Mary opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out a folder.

“Wendy keeps all the forms and then scans them at the end of the week to upload them to each student’s file.”

She flipped through the pages in the folder and got a quizzical look on her face. Going back to the beginning, she flipped through them again with a shake of her head.

“There isn’t one here. No one filled out a form to pick him up early.”

The detective frowned. “Essentially, what you’re telling me is that this student left school without anybody realizing it, and there is absolutely no documentation to show where he went, who he was with, or when he left.”

Tears started to form in Mary’s eyes, and spots of color appeared on her cheekbones. The situation was getting to her. All of the fail-safes put into place to guard the students in her care had fallen apart.

“I don’t understand how this happened. This never happens.”

“Well, it happened today. And right now, there is a six-year-old boy who is unaccounted for and has been for many hours at this point. We need to find out exactly what happened. I need to know who came into the school today.”

“That’s the thing. Everybody did.”

“What do you mean everybody did?” Joseph asked.

“It was Parent Appreciation Day today. It’s a major event for the families. Teachers prepare presentations for the students to perform, put artwork and projects on display. Then everybody gets together to have breakfast, watch other presentations, and participate in some activities. It takes up the whole morning, and the school is full of families for that entire time,” Mary said. “I don’t think we had a single student today who didn’t have at least one adult with them. Because of the sheer volume of visitors, the locks were deactivated.”

“There was no way to monitor who was actually here.”

“Students were asked to submit the names of the adults who were coming, but we didn’t have anybody put in their codes or check identification or anything. It would have massively slowed down what is a very big event,” Mary said.

“Are there security cameras around the school?” Joseph asked.

“They weren’t working today. The system malfunctioned a couple of days ago, and we’ve been having problems with it, so we called the company to come repair it. They weren’t able to identify the issue, so they have to come back tomorrow to keep working on it.”

“You had hundreds of people on campus, who aren’t usually here, without any type of security system in place?”

“It wasn’t intentional. Obviously, we wouldn’t have done that on purpose. Like I said, safety and security are top priority for us here. The camera system malfunctioned, and we tried all the different processes that we had used before to get it back online, but we weren’t able to, so we had to have a team come in to look at it. They weren’t able to respond immediately and came today. There was nothing we could do. The event was already planned, and we couldn’t cancel it or reschedule it just because of the cameras,” she said.

“Which means that in addition to all the parents, grandparents, and significant adults,” Joseph said with a touch of derision, “there were also the security system repair workers.”

“Yes. But I have documentation for all of them. I have their names, scans of their IDs, and even photographs of them working on the cameras.”

“I’m going to need to see that.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“I’m going to call in a team to search the school. I’ll need you to stand by to unlock any doors.”

Cameron

Ten hours missing

Avery hadn’t stopped pacing back and forth across the living room since they got the call from the detective that he would be coming by to talk to them about his visit to the school. Cameron was sitting at the very edge of the couch cushion, her elbows resting on her knees and her legs bouncing as she waited. Even with her own nervous movement, Avery’s relentless pacing elevated her anxiety.

“Can you sit down?” she finally asked.

“Sit down? No, no, I can’t sit down. My son is missing.”

“He’s my son too,” Cameron said.

Avery rolled his eyes. “Don’t start now.”

Cameron got to her feet and crossed over to her husband. “I’m sorry, you’re right. We shouldn’t turn on each other right now. I’m sorry.”

She reached for him, and Avery stepped into her arms, gathering her close to him. He buried his face in the curve of her neck and shoulder, and she could feel him struggling to control his breath.

“Where is he?” he murmured into her skin.

A heavy knock on the door separated them. Cameron stepped back as Avery went over to the door and opened it. Detective Klappner stood outside. Avery stepped back and gestured into the house.

“Please come in. You remember my wife.”

Joseph looked over at Cameron and gave a single nod of acknowledgment. He had come to talk to them after she called 911 earlier.

“Come on in,” Cameron said. “Can I make you a cup of coffee or anything?”

“Actually, yeah. That would be really great, if it isn’t any trouble.”

“Of course not. I’ll be right back. Honey?”

Avery nodded, “Yeah, please.”

“Okay, I’ll just get that started.”

She hurried into the kitchen and pulled a bag of coffee beans out of the cabinet. She poured them into the grinder and started it. She hated the way the loud sound obscured their voices in the other room. She wanted to know everything that was being said. When the beans were ground, she went through the familiar movements of getting a pot of coffee brewed, filling the time it took for the pot to fill with emptying a box of cookies on a plate and trying to arrange them.

When the coffee finished brewing, she put the pot and three mugs onto a tray with the cookies and brought it into the living room. She set it on the coffee table and filled each of the mugs. The detective scanned the tray with his eyes.

“Do you have creamer or anything?”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll get some. Sugar?”

“If you have it.”

She rushed back into the kitchen and returned with a small glass of milk and the sugar bowl.

“Sorry. We both take our coffee black. I didn’t even think about it,” she said.

“That’s fine. Thank you.”

The detective tipped some of the milk into his coffee and added a few heaping scoops of sugar. Cameron was surprised to see Avery add some milk to his own mug. She couldn’t remember the last time he put anything in his coffee.

“What happened at the school?” Avery asked. “What did you find out?”

“I spoke with the principal, and it seems there was a major miscommunication about some upcoming vacation,” Joseph said.

“Yeah,” Cameron said. “That’s what Wendy said when I called. But that vacation isn’t until next week. I filled out the paperwork a couple of months ago. It has the dates clearly marked on them.”

“I know. She showed them to me. Somehow, though, Wendy was under the impression that you had taken him out of school early because of that vacation. I’m guessing she just had it in her mind that it was coming up, and when he wasn’t in class, she just made the connection without thinking it through.”

“But what about the sign-out sheet? If somebody took him out of the school, they would have had to fill out a form and sign it,” Avery said.

“Yes. The principal explained that to me, but there isn’t anything on file for Dustin today.”

“What?” Cameron asked incredulously. “They just let my six-year-old leave with somebody without questioning it?”

Joseph took a sip of his coffee and gave a half shrug, holding up one hand, both to buy him some time to swallow the coffee and to gesture for her to hold on for a moment.

“Now, we don’t know for sure that anybody took him. I understand that he was not in class, but there is always the possibility that he left on his own. He could have walked out of the school during lunch or immediately after.”

“You think my son just wandered away from school?” Avery asked. “Why would he do something like that? He’s in the first grade.”

“I understand that. Obviously, if that isn’t something that he has done before, it would be unusual behavior, but we have to keep our minds open. We need to look at this from all angles and narrow it down until we find out exactly what happened. I ran a search through the entire school and the grounds. We searched every room, closet, shed, everything. There was no sign of him. So he did definitely leave the school property at some point between him going to lunch and the next class starting.”

“What about his backpack or his jacket?” Cameron asked.

“His belongings weren’t left in the school.”

“So check the cameras. Every door in that place is covered. Find out when he left and who he was with,” Avery said.

“They weren’t working,” Cameron said.

The detective gave her a questioning look.

“I saw the men working on the system, and I asked about it when I was there for Parent Appreciation Day this morning. It made me really uncomfortable that all those people were there without any kind of security measures in place.”

“What did you ask them?” Joseph asked.

“Just what was wrong with the system and when they thought it was going to be up and running again. I wanted to know when it stopped working. They told me that it hadn’t been working for a couple of days and that they were doing everything they could to fix it, but there was a problem with the hardware as well as some sort of network issue they couldn’t figure out. I don’t really know. They weren’t exactly clear about it.”

Avery blew out a heavy, fuming breath. “I can’t believe we spend so much damn money on this school with all these big promises of how safe it is and how amazing all the resources are, only for them to just let our child get snatched,” he said. “I’m contacting my lawyer in the morning and—”

“Here we go,” Cameron muttered under her breath, hanging her head down and pressing her forehead into the heels of her hands.

“Excuse me?” Avery asked.

“You just have to go straight to threatening to sue,” Cameron said. “We’re supposed to be looking for our son, and all you can think about is dragging the school to court.”

“They let this happen! We’re supposed to remember a code and put it in every time we get near the school building. We have to send in forms asking permission just to take our child out of class, then fill out other forms with our plans. If he gets sick, we have to call the school to let them know, then tell them when he’s going to the doctor, then bring in a doctor’s note… All of that and they still couldn’t manage to notice when he just disappeared. They are responsible for this, and they need to—”

“Look,” Joseph cut in. “I understand that you are extremely upset right now. I don’t blame you at all. I would be too. But we really should be focused on Dustin right now. Try to put aside your anger at the school and your plans for handling it, however you’re going to do that. Right now we need to be thinking about your son and trying to figure out where he might have gone.”

Avery pulled himself up, straightening his spine and lowering his shoulders like he was going to argue, but then he relented. He walked over and sat down on the couch next to Cameron.

“I’m sorry.” He reached for her hand, and she squeezed it. “I just can’t believe this is happening.”

“Then let’s work on resolving it. I need both of you to think about anywhere Dustin might have gone. Come up with a list of all of his favorite places, his friends’ houses, and any family that’s anywhere around. I know that he’s really young, but you can’t underestimate children. Especially these days. Kids are crazy resourceful and know a whole lot more than we give them credit for. If they wanna do something or go somewhere, they’re gonna figure out how to do it,” Joseph said. “Right now our focus is on finding him. We don’t have any evidence that points us in any direction other than him leaving on his own. The most important thing right now is to locate him. I don’t know if this is going to give you any sort of comfort or just piss you off more, but the statistics say that he probably ran away and we’ll find him within a few hours.”

“It’s already been a few hours,” Avery pointed out.

“He’s never been anywhere on his own. That’s just not Dustin. He doesn’t go walk to his friends’ houses or play outside by himself. He always has somebody with him. It’s either one of us or he’s at school or he’s with his babysitter in the afternoons,” Cameron said.

“Again, we have to try to not make assumptions about him that are going to limit our search. Just come up with those places so we can look for him. I have to ask you this. Is anything going on in his life that might have upset him or that he is struggling with?” Joseph asked.

“What are you asking?” Avery asked. “He’s six. What could possibly be going on in his life?”

“Just because he’s young doesn’t mean that the world around him doesn’t affect him. He could be dealing with all kinds of things. How about the two of you? Are things okay in the family? Is your marriage solid? Has he been witnessing a lot of arguing? I’m not trying to pry. Unfortunately, situations like this get very uncomfortable, very fast. But that’s what we have to do. We need to understand exactly what’s going on in his life so that we can get to the bottom of what happened to him. And children are really sensitive. If he was experiencing a lot of stress or anxiety, especially at home, he might have felt the need to escape it,” Joseph said.

“There wasn’t anything like that going on,” Cameron said. “I mean, we argue like any other married couple, but nothing over the top. We don’t scream and yell and throw things. And our marriage is solid. Dustin hasn’t ever expressed any kind of worry about our family or anything like that.”

“Okay. Let’s come up with some places to look.”

Cameron

Three days missing

“Who said that?” Cameron asked angrily.

“It was an anonymous tip. I can’t tell you who made it,” Detective Klappner said.

“Well, it’s ridiculous. Dustin didn’t leave the school with me. And I definitely didn’t have him while I was running errands that afternoon.”

“Tell me again what happened that day. Give me a step-by-step description of everything that you did.”

Cameron let out a sigh. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone through this. She knew it wasn’t for the detective’s benefit because he kept forgetting. He was listening to everything that she said and trying to trip her up. He wanted to make sure she was saying the same things every time she described her day.

“Avery left for work early that morning. He was trying to get some extra things done so that he could be ready for our vacation. I got up at my normal time, took a shower, made some coffee, then woke Dustin up. His clothes were already laid out for him, so I went and got dressed and ready. He was running late. I don’t know what he was doing, but he was late coming downstairs. I knew I had a ton of things that I was doing after going up to the school, so I got everything ready for that and finally got Dustin out the door.

“We got to the school, and it was really crowded. I remember actually feeling a bit better because we were running late, but it wasn’t like everybody was inside yet. We went to his classroom, and he showed me some of his art and a project. Then the kids sang some songs. After that, we all went to the cafeteria and had breakfast. He played with one of his friends after eating.

“There was another presentation and some more songs. Then they brought out crafts and games for us all to do together. All of it took a couple of hours. When it was over, I gave him a hug and a kiss and left. All the other parents were leaving at the same time, if they hadn’t already left, so I was far from the only one going out of the building at the time,” Cameron said.

“Exactly. Which is how this person claimed they saw you with him. They said he was holding your hand while you went through the parking lot, and you both got in the car and drove off.”

“Absolutely not. I can tell you right there that’s a bunch of crap. First, like I’ve said and will continue saying, Dustin was not with me when I left the school. But just beyond that, he doesn’t hold my hand at school. He’s not going to let the other kids see him holding his mother’s hand while he’s crossing the parking lot. Whoever said that definitely didn’t actually see us. Besides, can’t you talk to his teacher or the other people at school and know that he was in class after I left?”

“Well, that’s the thing. This tip didn’t say that they saw you with Dustin after the event. They said that they saw you leave later,” Joseph said.

“I don’t understand. What do you mean they saw me leave later?”

“They said that they were at the school as a parent volunteer and that they saw you walking through the parking lot with Dustin during lunch. Which would account for the teachers seeing him in class after the Parent Appreciation Day events but him not being there anymore for his afternoon classes.”

“I didn’t go back to the school,” Cameron insisted. “I left after the event and went about the rest of my day.”

“Okay. So go back to that. Tell me what happened. What did you do?”

“After I left the school, I went and dropped off some library books. I brought some dry cleaning in to get cleaned and picked up some shirts. I had a doctor’s appointment, so I went to that.”

“What doctor?” Joseph asked.

Cameron narrowed her eyes at him. She was offended by the question. It was intrusive, and the detective knew it. But he wasn’t going to back down. He was unrepentant about wanting to pry into every detail of what she did that day.

“Isn’t that private information?” she asked.

“I just need to know so that I can verify.”

She let out a heavy sigh. She was getting frustrated by the questioning and scrutiny.

“Dr. Raja Gosh, my gynecologist. I needed a checkup and to renew my birth control prescription.”

Cameron was expecting the detective to look uncomfortable with the information, but he didn’t. He just jotted the name down and seemed to linger over the idea of her birth control prescription.

“Okay. So you went to the doctor. What about after that?” he asked.

“I ran some errands. I had to go to the grocery store. I needed to pick up some things for our trip. Some clothes, sunscreen, those kinds of things. I stopped and had lunch.”

“Where?” he asked.

“A place called Short Crust. It’s a little sandwich and savory pastry shop.”

“Where’s that? I’ve never heard of it,” he said.

Cameron realized then that the detail about her stopping for lunch was one that she hadn’t included in other descriptions of her day. It had just skipped her mind until now. But she could tell that the detective was interested in the sudden change in her recollection.

“It’s near Sugar Hollow. There’s a little brewery and winery, and the restaurant is attached to it,” she explained.

“Sugar Hollow is a bit out of the way for just a quick lunch, isn’t it?” Joseph asked.

“It’s one of my favorite places. And I had taken a little time to drive around the area because it’s peaceful and helps me clear my head.”

“Why did you need your head cleared?”

“I was frustrated and stressed out after an argument with Avery that morning,” she admitted with a bitter note at the edge of her voice.

“What about?”

Cameron narrowed her eyes at him. “I thought your intention was to find my son. Not dissect my marriage or what I do with my personal time.”

“I’m just trying to understand the timeline for everybody involved.”

“Are you married, Detective?” she asked.

“I was.”

“Divorced?”

“About two years ago.”

“Okay, so you have experience with being with somebody for a long time. I’m going to assume that you didn’t have a whirlwind romance where you got married after a couple of weeks and then divorced a month later. Which tells me that you know it’s hard as hell sometimes to deal with another adult day in and day out. An adult with different perspectives and goals. Everybody has friction sometimes. It wasn’t any big deal,” she told him.

“So what was it about?”

She shook her head and sighed. “I was angry with him because he kept asking me to do things that he would be more than capable of doing on his own, then he made a snide little comment about working full time. I left my full-time career earlier in our marriage when we agreed that I would focus on building my own business, and then when Dustin came along, I just stayed home with him. But about three years ago, I went back to work part-time and have been working on my business since then.

“It makes me really angry every time Avery implies that I don’t do anything or don’t work as hard as he does. I’m not only working a job, but I’m also handling everything in the house and about Dustin. Avery doesn’t do any of that. I sign him up for all his activities. I interact with all his teachers all the time. I make sure that he has everything he needs. If it has to be done in the house or about Dustin or even the family as a whole, it’s on me. And Avery seems to think that that is perfectly fine because he is at the office full time.

“We got into that same argument yet again that morning. It aggravated me and really just threw off my whole day. So after I had run my errands and realized I had a little bit of extra time, I treated myself to a drive around that area and a mushroom-and-onion quiche for lunch. I’m sure I can find you the receipt without a problem.”

“Okay. After lunch?”

“I went to work. I have an office at a communal workspace in the city. I was there when Dustin’s babysitter, Chloe, called me to tell me that he hadn’t gotten off the bus and that the bus driver told her that he was marked absent.”

“In the time that he’s been missing, have you heard from anybody about the situation?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Like a ransom call?”

“Yeah, that could be one thing. Or just anybody mentioning him? Threats?”

“Obviously, I’ve heard from people mentioning him,” Cameron said. “But nobody has threatened me or said that they had him or anything. And I haven’t gotten a ransom call or anything like that.”

“Okay. Have you and your husband rethought doing the press conference? I really think that making a public plea for help could be beneficial,” Joseph said.

She wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea. It felt performative and strange to get on TV in front of the entire community and talk about her son being missing. People already knew. He had been on the news since the night that he disappeared. There were fliers with his face all over town. The police had gone back and interviewed his teachers and parents who were there that day. They had gone into Avery’s office and talked to his coworkers. This was not a secret. Yet the detective thought it would be valuable for the two of them to do a press conference and make a public statement about what they were going through.

She’d resisted at first, but at this point, it had been days. Avery was pushing her. They needed to do something else.

“We’ll do it.”

“Good. I’ll get in touch with you with all the details. And obviously, if you hear anything, or if your husband does, call me immediately.”

The detective put together the press conference quickly, and the next evening, Cameron and Avery stood behind a podium in front of what felt like dozens of cameras and reporters with microphones shoved toward them. Beyond them was a crowd that had gathered to watch what they had to say. She knew some were there purely out of curiosity. They had heard so much about Dustin over the last few days that they couldn’t help wanting to see the actual people involved. It had become a kind of entertainment for them.

She tried not to blame them for seeing it that way. It was human nature. The same thing that made people go to the gladiator games or slow down when they were passing by a car wreck. There was a level of fascination in the struggle and suffering of others. But there were others who were there in support. A group of demonstrators had appeared just a few minutes before the press conference started and stood holding signs about Dustin and calling out for the protection of our children. A few cradled framed pictures of other children.

Cameron tried to focus on them rather than the reporters shouting questions and the police officers around her trying to answer for them. A woman at the front of the demonstration group met her eyes and offered a smile, something that felt like camaraderie.

“Do you have any idea where Dustin is?” a reporter shouted.

“What kind of question is that?” Avery demanded.

“If we knew where he was, we wouldn’t be here,” Cameron said.

“Are you sure about that?”

Cameron’s head snapped in the direction of the voice. She couldn’t tell who asked the question, but it made her skin tingle, and her blood felt cold in her veins.

“What do you think about the school? Do you blame them?” another reporter asked.

The detective stepped up to the podium to play interference with that particular question.

“We’re not going to be answering any questions regarding outside factors. The purpose of this conversation is to give Dustin’s parents the opportunity to express how they are feeling and seek help in finding their son. At this point, that is the focus of the investigation.”

It was a carefully constructed way to skirt possible legal complications. Obviously, it wasn’t up to the police department to make any sort of qualification about the liability of the school or to give any advice to Avery or Cameron about what they should do. But they were well aware of the compulsion to lay blame and the possibility of a lawsuit down the line. Talking about that now could cause serious issues and make an already complicated and emotionally fraught situation even worse.

In all honesty, though, anybody who had heard about the situation was already thinking about how much responsibility the school had. Avery was already gearing up for a battle. It was in his nature. As a lawyer himself, albeit a corporate attorney, it was his first instinct to identify a culpable party and seek retribution. In this case, he laid the blame for Dustin’s disappearance squarely on the shoulders of the school administration. His laser focus was on Mary Pace.

According to him, as the principal, it was up to her to make sure that all the safety protocols in place were properly upheld and any lapses that did occur were effectively accounted for and modified to preserve the safety of everyone at Willowbrook. He believed it was her fault that the cameras were down and that the secretary didn’t follow through with checking to make sure that Dustin really was supposed to be out of class.

But both the police and his colleagues were heavily discouraging him from taking any step like that right now. They were still looking for Dustin. He was still missing, and they weren’t any closer at this point to figuring out what happened to him than they were when Cameron first got the call that he wasn’t on the bus.

“There are rumors that Dustin was dealing with bullying. Is that true? And if it is, do you think that could have anything to do with his disappearance?”

“We don’t deal in unsubstantiated rumors,” the detective said. “Again, the purpose of tonight’s conference is not to bounce ideas off each other or throw around accusations and innuendo. These are parents who are missing their greatly loved son. Their only child. What they care about right now, and what all of us should care about, is locating Dustin and bringing him home safely. They are happy to answer questions about Dustin, but please avoid making any assumptions about the investigation or its progress or outcome.”

For the next few questions, Avery and Cameron described Dustin. They talked about his sense of humor and quiet determination when he wanted to accomplish something. He loved school and was constantly coming up with the next thing that he wanted to be when he grew up. He was never short on ideas or questions. Maybe too many questions.

Like they already had so many times already, both detailed the last time each of them saw him. For Avery, it was going into his bedroom early that morning before he left for work to look at him and kiss him on the top of the head. For Cameron, it was that hug before she left the school after their activities together that morning.

“Mrs. Reed, you look very fresh this evening. Did you get your hair done today?”

The reporter who asked the question stared back at her from the crowd, his expression steady and serious like he genuinely believed it was a legitimate question to be asking in this situation.

“I don’t understand what that has to do with anything,” Cameron said.

“Again, please limit questions to ones that are pertinent to the situation,” the detective said.

“I think that is pertinent,” the reporter said.

“You’re asking about what my wife’s hair looks like?” Avery asked angrily. “We’re supposed to be here talking about my son.”

“Exactly,” the reporter said, “which is why I’m curious.”

“I think we need to move on here,” Joseph said.

“Your six-year-old son has been missing for three days now, and yet you take the time to go get your hair done?” The reporter continued defiantly, “I also have information here that you got your nails done at the same time.”

“It’s a standing appointment,” Cameron said.

“You don’t have to answer these questions,” Avery said.

“A standing appointment that you still felt needed to be a priority in the midst of searching for your missing child?”

“All right, that’s enough. We’re going to end this here,” Joseph said, putting a hand on Cameron and Avery’s shoulders and starting to guide them off the stage.

“Why did you pick up takeout for lunch the day your son disappeared rather than sit in the restaurant?”

Another reporter jumped on the bandwagon and peppered her with questions until she was off the stage and out of sight. She took a deep breath, planting her hands on her hips and trying to calm herself down. Her face was burning, her body shaking to its core.

“Are you okay?” Avery asked.

“No, I’m not okay,” she said. “I agreed to talk about Dustin and answer a couple of questions. I didn’t say that I was willing to run the gauntlet.”

“I’m sorry,” the detective said. “That’s not what was supposed to happen.”

“Don’t you screen the reporters who are allowed to come to these things? Or give them a list of approved questions or something?” she demanded.

“This isn’t a talk show,” Joseph said. “They aren’t props. They are real reporters. We can give them guidelines, but they decide what they are going to ask and the angle they are going to take on their own.”

“Angle?” Cameron asked. “There’s an angle for talking about a missing first-grader?”

“Why did you get takeout at the restaurant?” Avery suddenly asked.

Cameron turned to look at him with a disgusted, incredulous look. “Are you serious right now?”

“I just want to know. You didn’t tell me that you’d gotten takeout. You said that you went there and had lunch,” he said.

She rolled her eyes and threw up her hands. “This is ridiculous.”

“But why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think it mattered. I went to the restaurant, got my food, and brought it out to one of the gazebos to have a picnic. I thought it would be nice to get some fresh air and to just be by myself for a while,” Cameron said.

“It was cold,” Avery argued.

“It wasn’t cold. It was a little chilly, but I had a jacket. You are a lot more sensitive to temperatures than I am. You’re a lot more sensitive to everything than I am.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Cameron?”

She turned around to see the woman from the group of demonstrators who had smiled at her.

“Ma’am, this isn’t a public area,” Joseph said. He walked toward her, trying to get her to go away.

But Cameron held up a hand to stop him. She was curious what the woman had to say.

“It’s okay. Hi.”

“Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Rosa. Can I talk to you for just a second?”

Cameron went over to her, and Rosa gestured for her to follow her. The reporters were still milling around, and a few of them noticed her coming. They took a few steps toward her, and Rosa put an arm around her shoulders and spun her around, kind of leading her away. They ended up back around the side of the stage, and a few seconds later, the other people from the group joined them.

“We just wanted to introduce ourselves. We are members of Stolen Voices. We are a grassroots organization of people who have been personally affected by crimes against children. We push for changes in laws. Help design increased safety measures for public spaces and businesses. Hold safety awareness events for families. Aid in ongoing investigations and provide resources such as consultants and pro bono legal work,” she explained. “But we also just offer each other support and encouragement. We are part of a club that none of us ever wanted to be in. No one really understands what any of us have gone through unless they’ve gone through it themselves. You can give compassion and sympathy to somebody who is struggling through a situation like yours, but if you really want to have encouragement and get the kind of support that you need, it has to be from somebody who knows what you’re feeling. Dustin’s case caught our attention, and we’ve been following it from the first time we saw it on the news. We just wanted to be here for you tonight and to tell you that you aren’t alone.”

A cavalcade of emotion and bewilderment threatened to break Cameron apart.

“Obviously, we want to offer the same kind of support and encouragement to your husband, but I wanted to talk to you personally. I was with my daughter just a couple of hours before she went missing too. It’s a type of hell that no one else can grasp. You don’t have to try to get through this by yourself. Anytime you want to talk, you can reach out to me. Or to any of us,” Rosa continued. She glanced over her shoulder at the others.

Another woman stepped forward. “I’m Sheila. My sister was kidnapped when she was five.”

“Calvin,” the man behind her said. “My best friend was murdered the night he and I were supposed to go camping and I didn’t go.”

“Garrett. My neighbor and close friend was kidnapped and murdered.”

“Aspen. I survived a kidnapping when I was nine.”

It was a dizzying wave of information. Cameron felt overwhelmed by the names and the brief, matter-of-fact descriptions of the horrors that these people faced. Her throat felt like it was closing as she realized she really was one of them. Three more people introduced themselves, and she did her best not to show any of the emotion she was feeling. Avery came up behind her and rested a hand on the small of her back. He looked at each of the people standing in front of her.

“Honey? Is everything all right?” he asked.

Despite the apparent tenderness in the words, she could still hear the suspicion that was there when he asked about her getting her lunch to go. She gave him a quick recap of what Rosa told her and repeated the names that she could remember. The ones she forgot introduced themselves, and Avery nodded politely.

“Avery Reed. Thank you for being out here tonight. This was a lot more than either one of us was expecting. So on that note, we are going to head home.”

He started to pull Cameron away from the group, but she reached into her pocket and took out a business card to hand to Rosa. She would come to regret that small gesture.

Cameron

Ten days missing

“I’m not emotional enough?”

Cameron looked up from the computer screen. Detective Klappner shrugged.

“You can’t put too much thought into that. People want to find anything they can to cling to and pick apart. Unfortunately, they also all want to believe they know exactly how people respond to everything. This is why I tell people that they shouldn’t read anything online about their case. You don’t want to know what people are saying.

“There’s always going to be that reporter who tries to add their twist to make their story seem unique and ahead of everyone else’s saying the same thing as the others. And the comments are like the swamp of humanity. That’s where people go to let out all the aggression and nastiness they don’t get to in their regular lives,” he said.

“But why against me?” she asked. “What did I do to make them feel this way about me? To feel any way about me, for that matter. Not cry at the press conference?”

The detective reached out and pushed the laptop closed.

“Just stop reading. It won’t do you any good. I came here because I need to talk to you about something that just came to my attention. Where’s Avery?”

“He’s at work like he always is,” Cameron said bitterly. “Even more now than he used to be. It’s like he’s doing everything he can to try to avoid being home.” She let out a sigh. “Actually, I don’t know if he’s trying to avoid being home or avoid being anywhere near me.”

“That’s actually good. I’d rather just talk to you about this first.”

The comment and the seriousness in Joseph’s voice made Cameron’s chest tighten.

“What is it?” she asked.

“When you gave me your schedule for the day that Dustin disappeared, did you leave anything out?” he asked.

“No, I told you everything.”

“It was totally accurate? There’s nothing you said you did that you didn’t actually do or something you did that you omitted?” he asked.

She hated the twisting language. It always felt like a mind game. She just wanted people to be straightforward, to say what they intended to say without jumping through hoops to say it.

“I’ve already been through this with you probably a dozen times. I told you everything,” she said.

“Then why did we just get an anonymous tip that you were in the Mill Valley area after you stopped to get lunch?”

Cameron froze. “Mill Valley? Who said I was there?”

“We’ve already been through this. I can’t tell you who gives tips. And I just said it was anonymous. I don’t even know who gave it. But they said that you were in the area and that it seemed like there was somebody else in the car with you at the time.”

“That’s ridiculous. I didn’t go to Mill Valley, and I definitely didn’t have anybody in the car with me at any point.”

“Cameron, you need to be honest with me. You can’t leave things out or lie about anything.”

“Why would I do that?” she asked.

“You tell me.”

He had a folder with him that she hadn’t given much thought to until now. He opened it and pulled out a printout of a picture. Setting it on the table in front of her, he slid it closer so that she could look at it. It was undeniable. It was her. She didn’t know how the picture was taken or who would have taken it, but it was definitely her walking away from her car. She knew exactly where she was. In the parking lot near the trailhead of a hiking path that led down to the lake.

She’d chosen that parking lot specifically because it was always deserted. She had been there many times before and had only ever seen one other car there at the same time. It was a little hidden, tucked away in a corner, and she didn’t think anybody knew she had been there. But this was something she couldn’t argue against. Not only did the picture clearly show her, but it captured her license plate with the exception of one digit. Somehow somebody had gotten that picture of her. But she knew that there was nobody else there. She had looked around carefully before she even parked.

Just like she usually did when she went there, she’d driven past the parking lot before turning into it. She drove up and down the road checking for anybody else. She went to an overlook she had discovered that clearly showed the shoreline around the lake. Making sure that she didn’t see anybody else in the water or on the sand, she went back to the parking lot and went in, checking every spot to make sure that she was alone. She knew that she was. And yet, that was an unmistakable image of her.

“Where did that come from?” Cameron asked.

“I already asked you a question, and I need the answer to it.”

“I deserve to know why somebody took a picture of me when I didn’t know about it. I do have the right to privacy.”

“Technically, not when you’re on public land. If you are in a public space, there is the expectation that you could be photographed or filmed. Hence an entire career focused around getting pictures of celebrities walking their dogs and going for Krispy Kreme runs in the middle of the night.”

“Are you trying to tell me that a paparazzi was after me?” she asked.

“Cameron, why were you here? And why are you lying about it?” he asked.

“I…” She took a deep breath. “I went there to meet up with an old friend. I didn’t want anybody to know about it because it looked really bad on me. I was supposed to be running errands for my husband and getting ready for a vacation with my son, and what I was doing was going to a lake to spend the afternoon with my ex-boyfriend. But nothing happened. That was not the point of seeing him. I haven’t talked to him in years. I didn’t want Avery to find out because things are already tense between us, and I didn’t want him to think that anything was going on.”

“I’m gonna need to know the name of this guy and how to get in touch with him,” the detective said.

“Why? I just explained it to you.”

“Cameron, we are investigating the disappearance of your child. And every time I turn around, there’s something else that’s a little bit shady about what you told me. I asked you over and over again if you told me everything that you did that day, and you said that you did. But I’m sitting here with a picture of you in some desolate parking lot, apparently going down to a lake supposedly to hang out with an ex-boyfriend you didn’t want anybody to know that you were talking to.”

“‘Supposedly’? Are you accusing me of something?” Cameron asked.

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m trying very hard not to accuse you of anything. And I’m trying even harder to find everything I possibly can that will stop other people from accusing you of doing something. But you’re making it really hard for me. So give me the contact information for this guy, and tell me right now if there is anything else that I need to know,” he said.

“No, there isn’t.”

The detective snatched the picture off the table and tucked it back into the folder.

“There’s a trail camera. It’s set up on the side of the parking lot. Apparently, there are a lot of other people who know about this place and who think that nobody else does. There has been some vandalism and a couple of emergency medical calls out there in the last few months, so the Parks and Recreation Department set up a camera to monitor the area. It takes a picture every five minutes. You were just unlucky.”

Cameron gave the detective the contact information for her ex-boyfriend, reluctantly explaining that they hadn’t seen each other in a while and that she unexpectedly saw him at Dustin’s school. She had no idea that his son transferred into the school just that year. Planning to meet him at the lake was an impulse decision. It was the first place that popped into her mind when he said he wanted to see her. She wanted it to be far away from anyone or anything close to her, not wanting to be seen. Looking back, this would seem like the first moment when everything started to fall apart.

The next day Cameron showed up at the picnic pavilion of a little park. Avery, of course, was at work, but she was there. It was the first day that the temperatures weren’t so cold that she wanted to hide under long sleeves, and the baby-blue floral sundress she’d chosen made her feel alive for the first time in a couple of weeks.

The pavilion was surrounded by brightly colored balloons and streamers. Two grills set up just outside of the wooden structure were already going, and the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers cooking over the coals filled the air. A piñata dangled at the center of the pavilion, and a table in the corner already had several wrapped gifts piled on it.

She smiled at Rosa and Garrett as she walked up the steps into the pavilion. They were organizing goodie bags on another table, and a couple of moments later, Sheila walked up, carrying a massive cake.

Rosa came over and gathered Cameron in a huge hug.

“I’m so glad you came. You look beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“Avery isn’t here?” Garrett asked.

“No. He couldn’t get out of work, and I don’t think he’s ready for anything like this anyway.”

“Well,” Rosa said, squeezing her shoulders, “I’m glad you’re here.”

As more members of Stolen Voices and their families arrived, and the crowd of children playing in the grass nearby got bigger, Cameron tried to control her emotions. This was supposed to be a fun gathering. An opportunity for all of them to get together for a communal celebration of the birthdays of everyone they’d lost. It had sounded a little bit strange to her when she first heard about it. And she didn’t know if she actually wanted to come. But the closer it got, the more she realized she needed to get out of the house and spend time with other people. Rosa had been wonderful to her, and the closer she got to the group, the further Avery seemed to pull away from her.

She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel about that. She knew about the statistics. She’d been told over and over already that having a missing child was one of the worst things that could happen to a marriage. Especially one that was already in a shaky spot. But she didn’t want that to happen. If anything, going through this event made her want to get closer to him. She wanted to heal the wounds and hold on to each other through this storm. Maybe that wasn’t the feeling she would have expected, but she didn’t want to let it slip away.

As the party went on, she did her best to mingle with everybody and have fun. There were somber moments. They talked about the people they loved and tried to bring laughter and joy into the memories, but it was impossible not to mention these children who had gone missing or been killed and not feel the pain it brought along. When it came time to do the piñata, Garrett offered her the stick first.

“I feel like maybe this would be good for you,” he said.

Cameron didn’t argue. She wrapped her hand around the handle of the stick and took it from him. Letting Rosa wrap the blindfold around her eyes, she stepped up to the piñata and took a hard swing. She missed at first, then made contact. Everyone cheered, and an unexpected rush of emotion took over. In an instant, she was sobbing.

Sheila came over and took the bandana away from her eyes, then led her over to a quiet table while the children continued to hit the piñata. Cameron sat down and covered her face with her hands, continuing to cry all the tears that she had apparently been holding back for the week and a half that her son had been missing.

She didn’t know how long it took her to calm down. It felt like it could have been hours. But by the time she finally caught her breath and the tears stopped flowing, the children were just scrambling around on the ground to pick up all the candy and tiny toys that had tumbled down from the open piñata. If she was more of a poetic person, maybe she would have made some sort of analogy with that. That she felt like that piñata: cracked open, beaten down until everything she always thought was good came spilling out.

Instead, she just shook the thought away and forced herself to take a breath deep enough to make her lungs ache.

“Are you okay?” Sheila asked.

“No,” Cameron said.

“Good. That’s the right answer. I would be worried about you if you said you were. And you know what, that’s fine. You don’t have to be okay. You shouldn’t be okay. What matters is that you are here with us and that we will be there for you even when you aren’t.”

Aspen suddenly walked in a very sharp, direct line across the pavilion and stood directly in front of Cameron. It almost looked like he was trying to block her with his body.

“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Cameron asked.

“There’s somebody out there taking pictures.”

Cameron looked around Aspen and saw a camera flash. There was somebody a few dozen yards away snapping pictures with a camera equipped with a long zoom that would bring the image into tight focus even at the distance.

“What the hell? Who is that?” Cameron demanded, jumping to her feet.

Rosa came over and took her by the shoulders, trying to sit her back down, but she resisted. She wanted to know who was out there taking pictures of this moment. It didn’t matter that they were in public and that she had been told by the detective that essentially that made them fair game. This wasn’t something that needed to be publicized.

Garrett jumped down from the pavilion and took off running toward the photographer. The man gripped his camera and ran for the parking lot, diving into a truck before Garrett could get to him. He still pounded his hands down on the hood and shouted until the man pulled out of the lot and drove away. When he returned, he walked over to Cameron.

“I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

She pulled away from Rosa’s hands and stepped back from the rest of the group.

“Stop asking me that! Everybody needs to stop asking me that!”

Without looking back, she ran from the pavilion, got in her car, and drove home.

Cameron

Three weeks missing

Suddenly, everything changed.

She didn’t know exactly what had caused it. But overnight her world crashed.

It started the day after the birthday party. Pictures showed up on the news, splashed all over the internet, on every social media platform. Every one of them showed Cameron laughing and playing at the party. They showed her giggling while pretending to box with a balloon. One series heavily emphasized her going after the piñata. And then came picture after picture of her sitting at the picnic table sobbing.

She never should have read the captions. She shouldn’t have ventured into the comments. But she couldn’t resist.

Worried or Relieved?

What Does Cameron Reed Know?

Has She Forgotten Dustin?

A Party When Her Child Is Still Missing?

Suspicious Behavior from Mom of Missing Boy

Who Could Do This?

Putting on a Show for the Cameras, Stoic Cameron Reed Suddenly Hysterical

If she wasn’t already, the glare of people around her from this solidified her as a villain. Nobody wanted to listen to her explanations. Nobody cared when she tried to tell them why she was at the party or what started the unexpected wave of grief. None of them mattered. All they saw was a woman who should have been doing nothing but worry about her missing son going to a birthday party and acting silly right up until the moment when she realized she was being watched. Of course, nobody would believe her when she said she didn’t know that the camera was there when she was crying. What they believed was that she found out that she was being photographed and decided to give them the emotion everyone had been saying that she didn’t have.

She was making it all up. She was pretending to be upset and trying to get attention from people. It was all about her, rather than about Dustin. Where was her husband? Why weren’t they near each other? Did something happen between them?

The questions continued to rain down, and the more they did, the worse everything became.

Online gossip and sources calling themselves news went back to the night of the press conference and focused heavily on her freshly styled hair and manicured hands. Parents from the school started posting images they took of the day of the event, pictures that captured Cameron in the background not realizing she was being photographed. Rather than acknowledging they were just unflattering pictures taken at inopportune times, they were described as showing her looking angry and sullen, like it was the last place she wanted to be.

And then she woke up to the sound of her husband slamming the closet door.

She groaned, opening her eyes to barely there sunlight and the feeling of dread that had taken over every morning. Rolling over, she watched Avery stuff haphazardly folded clothing into his suitcase, then go over to the dresser and yank open his sock drawer. He emptied it into another bag and did the same with the next two drawers.

“What are you doing?” Cameron asked, rubbing her eyes.

“How could you?” Avery asked through gritted teeth.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Were you just going to pretend that it never happened? That you never thought about it? You were just going to cling to me because I’m here and it makes you feel better? Or I take care of you and so you didn’t want to rock the boat? Did you think I was never gonna find out and everything was going to be okay? Or I was going to just put it behind me because of everything with Dustin?”

Confusion made Cameron’s brain feel fuzzy, like she couldn’t quite grasp the thoughts that were trying to form.

“What are you talking about, Avery?” she asked.

He stomped over to the table where she kept her phone plugged into the charger at night. Wrenching it from the charger hard enough for it to pull out of the wall, he threw it onto the bed beside her. She flinched away from it, surprised at the uncharacteristic display of violence from her husband. He had never acted like that before. Even at his angriest, she had never seen him like this.

But as soon as she opened her phone and looked at the overwhelming deluge of notifications, she realized just how much of a hypocrite she really was for thinking that.

“Babe…” she said, crawling to the end of the bed to try to get close to him.

She reached out her hand toward him, and he pulled away from her like she was a flame that had just burned him.

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you ever call me that again.”

“I want to explain.”

He shoved more of his possessions into the bag and let out a bitter scoff.

“You want to explain? You seriously think I’m going to stand here and listen to you rattle off some bullshit nonsense trying to make it okay that you hired a hit man?”.

The words felt like a hand crushing down around her heart.

“I didn’t hire a hitman,” she said.

Avery stopped, an acidic, sarcastic smile on his face. “Oh, that’s right, excuse me. You hired a convicted felon to come and beat the living hell out of me. I’m sorry if I didn’t know the technical term for that,” he said.

“I didn’t actually hire him. No money was ever exchanged.”

“Do you think that makes it acceptable in some way? The fact that you went to your screw-up cousin who’s been in prison for drugs—asked him if he knew anybody looking to make some money and willing to—and I quote, ‘get his hands dirty’—and offered a thousand dollars for him to follow me on my next business trip and jump me is all perfectly all right and totally excusable because you didn’t actually give him the money?” he asked.

“I was angry. I was angry and frustrated, and I did something stupid,” Cameron said.

“Is it that that thought even came into your mind that you consider stupid, or is it that at the time you were barely making any money, so really, you were offering for me to pay somebody to beat me to a pulp?”

Tears were streaming down Cameron’s face. She felt like she was going to throw up. All around her, the world was a swirl of colors, and she didn’t think she could get back onto her feet.

None of this was ever supposed to come to the surface. She couldn’t deny that she’d had that conversation with her cousin. She had even gone and met with the man Darrell picked out for her. But the conversation with him and the graphic descriptions of what he planned to do to Avery were enough to get it out of her system. By the next day, she had totally changed her mind and called it all off. No one was ever supposed to know that it had even been discussed.

Darrell promised her that he had deleted all the conversations that they had and that he had warned his friend not to say anything to anybody. She had tucked it in the back of her mind, shoved it away, saying to herself that she never had to think about it anymore. And now it was right in front of her.

Avery had stripped the bedroom nearly bare of all his possessions and was lugging suitcases and duffel bags out to the front of the house.

“What are you doing?” she asked when he came back into the room to unceremoniously snatch his pillow from the head of the bed.

“I’m staying with Brad for a couple of days until my new apartment is ready to move in.”

“Your new apartment? What are you talking about? You don’t have to go anywhere. Just stay here. Talk to me. We can work through this.”

“You can’t genuinely believe that. You can’t really think that I would find out about this and would be willing to stay with you. I don’t ever want to be in the same room with you again.”

He walked to the door, then turned back and came to the end of the bed.

“I did everything for you. I built this life for you. As much as you want to complain now about not working as much as you want to or not going back to school, that was all your choice. Admit it or not. Recognize it or not. You did that. You chose that. I worked my ass off so that I could take care of you and make sure that you could have everything that you wanted, including every possible moment with your son. I gave you a good life. I loved you with every fiber of my being. Now I don’t even know who you are.”

The door slamming behind him sent a shock wave through her body. She ran to the bathroom to be sick, then sank down to the cold tile and lay there listening to the endless sounds of calls, texts, and emails flooding her phone.

When she finally managed to get up, she tried to call Rosa. There was no answer. The same for Sheila. And Garrett. And Aspen. None of them would answer. None of them had checked in with her. She tried to call, text, email. But it was as if they had all disappeared. When they were needed the most, they weren’t there anymore.

At least that’s what she thought. As it turned out, she didn’t know just how much she was going to need them. And that in that darkest moment, she would see their faces, but it would never be the same.

Cameron

Twenty-five days missing

“Cameron, you need to open your eyes.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to. You have to do this.”

“I can’t,” Cameron sobbed.

Her hands gripped the wooden rail in front of her so hard it felt like the bones were going to break through the skin. But she kept holding on harder. It felt like if she could just grip the wall hard enough, it might keep her on her feet. Maybe then all this would go away. She would wake up and it would be okay. She wouldn’t be standing here. The glass wouldn’t be just inches from her face. And she wouldn’t be listening to the detective beside her, demanding that she open her eyes.

It didn’t work. No matter how hard she gripped, her knees still felt weak. She could still feel the cold around her. She still knew that Joseph was beside her close enough that if she fell, she would collapse into him before hitting the ground.

But that was the thing. From the sound of his voice, she knew that she would hit the ground. He wouldn’t catch her. He wouldn’t reach out, even for a second, to stop her from crumpling at his feet. Something had changed. Everything had changed.

She forced her eyes open.

There he was. After more than three weeks. Twenty-five days. There he was.

“That’s him,” she managed to whisper through a throat so tight and hoarse the words tasted like blood. “That’s Dustin.”

It was all a formality. There was no actual question whether the body, so small and fragile-looking, lying on the sterile steel table on the other side of the glass was her son. But she had to stand there and look at him. She had to be the one to confirm that it was him. They said that it was a legal protocol. It felt like torture.

He looked so perfect. It always seemed like such a cliché when people said that a body looked like the person was sleeping, but in this moment, she knew exactly what they meant. It was all she could think about. It was everything her mind could process.

He couldn’t actually be dead. He was just lying there taking a nap. Maybe he was playing a trick on her. At any second, he was going to sit up and look over at her with a big smile. She could see the gap where he had recently lost his tooth. Maybe he had been in the sunlight long enough that freckles came out for the season. She couldn’t be mad at him.

But he didn’t move. He stayed there with his eyes closed, his arms stretched down beside him. And suddenly, the curtains started closing on either side of the window. She pressed a hand to the glass, trying to reach him.

“No… Wait.”

The curtains hesitated for her to look at him for another moment, but then a woman stepped up to the table and lifted the sheet that was covering him to his chest. She pulled it up over his face. All Cameron could see were his hands. Then the curtains closed.

The detective didn’t say anything to comfort her. He didn’t try to reassure her. He just led her back to the door and out of the medical examiner’s office. There was no quiet beyond the door. As soon as she stepped through it, she was inundated with shouts and jeers. It was enough to make her step back inside. She had to catch her breath.

The glass of the door was smoky, unlike the window she had just been forced to look through. But she could still see beyond it. She could see the faces of Stolen Voices.

They were gathered at the edge of the parking lot, just far enough away that they couldn’t be considered trespassers on the government property. They were holding signs again, but this time there was no tenderness in the words. Every one of them was a condemnation.

What happened to Dustin?

What did you do, Cameron?

He deserves the truth.

When Joseph forced her out of the building, Cameron felt like she couldn’t breathe. All around her, the voices pummeled her like bits of stone. Every one of them was familiar. She could pick them out of the cacophony and identify them by name. These were supposed to be the people who were going to stand beside her and help her through it. They were the people who had dragged her up from what she thought was her darkest moment and brought her into their fold.

And now they had turned their backs on her. As soon as the news of her conversation with the former inmate came to the surface, all that turned off. They wanted nothing to do with her. That was all it took for them to totally change their opinion about her. And it only slipped further, deeper. As hard as she tried to grab on to something, to find a grip that would keep her from falling down into the center of the earth, she just kept falling. Things just kept getting worse.

She didn’t even know how to process the constant barrage of bad news and the seemingly endless stream of questions still bearing down on her. Things that she never would have even given a second thought to were dragged out into the spotlight and took on dark meaning.

Someone unearthed the reservations for their upcoming family vacation and realized that she hadn’t booked the hotel room for two adults and a child. It was only for Avery and her. It didn’t matter that she had bought a plane ticket for Dustin. It didn’t matter that the dining reservations she had made included him. All they saw was the hotel that contained one king bed and was marked only for the parents.

A leak revealed her going to Mill Valley when she told everybody that she hadn’t gone anywhere or done anything that she hadn’t clearly reported. While news of the man she met down by the water stayed buried because there was no proof, there were rumors. They couldn’t come up with a name. They couldn’t say what she was doing or why she was there. All anyone knew or cared about was that she had lied. The day her son disappeared, she went to an obscure spot by an old walking trail and a quiet lake and didn’t tell anyone about it.

But now everyone knew.

Because that was where he was found.

Out across the water, on a tiny island only occupied by trees and snakes, a kayaker taking a break to eat his lunch found Dustin. His little body was sitting up against a tree, almost like he was just looking out over the water. The man who found him said that he half expected to see a fishing pole in his hand. It was just that he was so small and was all alone. He had to get right up next to him before he realized that his lips were blue and he wasn’t moving.

He was gone.

Her son was dead.

And everyone believed that Cameron Reed did it.

Emma

Now

We weren’t separated by glass.

A lot of times when I go into prisons to talk to inmates, I’m ushered into a long, narrow room and told to sit on a round stool or a little plastic chair that reminds me of elementary school. Ahead of me is usually a thick window, and on the other side another stool or little plastic chair. That would be how I can talk to them. Through phones attached to the walls. Reading each other’s lips as much as hearing each other’s voices through the crackling line.

But not this time.

Cameron Reed is sitting directly across from me, just a folding wooden table between us. The visitation room is quiet around us. Only a couple of the other inmates have people visiting them today. Everyone is scattered into the furthest corners of the room they can get to so they can at least pretend that they have some privacy. For the short amount of time that they get to spend with their loved ones, they want to be in their own world. Not a number. Not an inmate. Not breathing the same air and existing in the same space as the other women.

The woman sitting in front of me doesn’t have the same look of happiness and relief as the other inmates in the visitation room. She’s not here to see a friend or a family member. She’s here to tell her story and hope someone will listen.

She’s just finished relating everything that happened from the day that her son Dustin went missing until she ended up convicted of his murder, sentenced to life without parole, and tossed into a cell to be forgotten. She dug deep into those days and gave me every detail that still exists so sharply and almost tangibly in her mind.

“I didn’t do it,” she says. “I didn’t kill my son. I’ve been trying since the day they put me in here to get someone to listen to me and find out what really happened to Dustin.”

“Sheridan Donovan and Posey White have been in contact with you since shortly after you came here, right?” I ask.

“Yes. Maybe six months?”

“Your case went through the courts really quickly.”

Cameron lets out a breath that sounds somewhere between a laugh and a gasp for oxygen.

“That’s what they tell me. They never even looked at anybody else. Not seriously. I was all they wanted to focus on. And they steamrolled me into the ground. My lawyer couldn’t keep up. I had barely even wrapped my head around the idea that anybody could honestly believe that I would kill my own little boy, and then I was standing there listening to a judge say I was going to spend every single moment of the rest of my life in prison. No chance at all of relief. I was thirty years old, and I had someone literally condemning me. Telling me that I was worth nothing and that I could be spending four or five decades, maybe even more, locked in a box for something I didn’t do.”

“Sheridan believes you. She is absolutely convinced of your innocence. That’s why I’m here,” I say.

“I know. The last time I talked to her, she told me that she asked Xavier to speak to you on my behalf. I’ve been hoping so much that he would, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for something like that.”

“You’ve met Xavier?” I ask.

“Only once in person. But I’ve exchanged letters with him. I know his story. Obviously. He knows what this feels like. As close as anybody can. And he thinks you can help me.”

I keep my expression as neutral as I can. I don’t want to give her any sort of false hope. The reality is, I don’t know what I think right now. I listened to her story. I went into it with a completely open mind. The only reason I’m here is because Xavier told me about Cameron, and I compared what I could find about her case to the murder of Charles McGeary, and it was just enough to make me curious. But it’s not enough to convince me. Not yet.

I heard everything she had to say. I absorbed the words and took every bit of the emotion that she offered me. But I’ve been in this industry far too long to simply trust. I’ve seen every type of mask that exists. I’ve heard every type of sweet word that actually turned out to be dipped in poison. I know that there is no person who looks like a killer. There is no human being incapable of savagery. I have to take every story for what it is. Exactly what that person wants me to hear. From there, I peel away the layers. I look behind the curtains and under the stones. I find the truth.

“The recent murder is really what brought me into this. I know that Sheridan and Posey have been advocating for you for a while, but it’s Charles’s murder that made them really push to have me involved.”

“Yes. There are so many similarities. It is like going through the discovery of Dustin’s body all over again. It feels like it has to be the same person,” Cameron says.

“You never expressed any sort of feeling that there was a serial killer involved in your son’s death during your case. That was never a theory that you had or that your lawyer presented as a viable alternative to you being responsible. Why is that? What changed it?” I ask.

“I had no idea what I was supposed to do when my son went missing. That’s not something anybody ever prepares you for. Do you have children, Agent Griffin?”

“No.”

“Even still, I’m sure you’ve heard somebody say that babies aren’t born with handbooks. You don’t get instructions. And it’s true. You can do all the research in the world. You can listen to your doctor. You can talk to every person you’ve ever known who has ever given birth, and you still aren’t going to be really prepared for what it’s like to have a baby placed in your arms and know that you are responsible for their life. Everything you do is going to have an impact on them, and the person that they become is influenced by every choice you make.

“But the thing is, even if babies did come with instructions, even if there were some sort of master manual that came along when you gave birth, this wouldn’t be something in that handbook. There would be no section for how you’re supposed to act when your six-year-old disappears from school and then his body is found three weeks later,” she says.

“I understand that. And I am deeply sorry that you’ve had to experience something like that. I’m just trying to understand the full scope of the story. You seem very convinced now that your son is the victim of the same killer who murdered Charles, yet the idea of a predator like that was never something that came up during your case. Why? What happened during that investigation that stopped you and your team from considering the possibility of a stranger as the murderer?”

She takes a steadying breath, and her fingers creep across the surface of the table into a bag of crunchy cheese puffs like she’s trying to sneak them before anybody notices.

“It felt too personal,” she says as if that’s enough of an explanation.

“What do you mean it felt too personal?” I ask.

“He disappeared from school. He didn’t go to a public school where there were tons of people running around all the time and everybody in the surrounding area had access to the kids if they just lingered around long enough. Dustin went to a very exclusive private school that I chose specifically because I thought it would give him the best opportunity to be nurtured and protected. I thought it would keep him safe and encourage him to explore anything he wanted to do in a secure environment.

“It just didn’t seem possible that anybody could have accessed him in that bubble. And we never got any sort of ransom request or anything from a killer saying why they did it. If my ex-husband were a prosecutor, then my first thought would have been that it was somebody whom he had made angry by winning a court case against them. But that’s not what he did.”

“Ransom notes and direct communication from abductors or killers really isn’t anywhere near as common as people think,” I explain. “Most of the time, when children are kidnapped and murdered, there is no prior contact, and the perpetrator does not try to connect with the family in any way. That shouldn’t have been a conclusive indicator of his killer being someone close to you.”

“I know that. But my lawyer kept emphasizing that the vast majority of victims are taken and killed by people they know. It was all I could think about. Who in my world, in my circle, could have done that to my child? I had never heard of another victim that was similar to him. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. But the biggest part was how he was found,” she says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“When Dustin’s body was found, he had been missing for more than three weeks. Twenty-five days. But he looked perfect when I had to identify him. The medical examiner said that he had been dead for maybe twelve hours. Which means that whoever took him kept him for all that time. Yet there were no signs of injury. He hadn’t been sexually assaulted, thank God. There were no bruises or cuts. He didn’t look like he had been tied up. He was wearing different clothing than what he was wearing when he went missing, and he had eaten shortly before he was killed. All that seemed far too personal, too—and it almost makes me physically ill to use this word—loving to be somebody who didn’t know him,” she says.

“I read that,” I tell her. “I did find it really interesting that there were no signs of abuse or captivity even though he had obviously been kept somewhere in those three weeks.”

“That turned into one of the primary points that was brought up against me over and over,” Cameron says. “It made absolutely no sense to me. In one breath, the people who thought I had killed my son described me as a monster and said that I had lashed out against him, killed him, and disposed of him like trash. But then immediately after, they would point out that he was well taken care of and said that he was obviously kept by someone he knew and trusted, as if I had just hidden him away somewhere and nobody noticed. They couldn’t even tell a single story about what they thought I did, yet every one of them believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that I murdered him.”

“Now you seem completely convinced that Dustin was killed by a stranger. And the same stranger who murdered Charles. What changed this for you? Had you already started thinking that there had to be another explanation, or—and I’m sorry in advance for how this is going to sound—are you just looking for anything that could answer that question?”

“Once I was convicted, all that mattered to me was proving my innocence. I can’t even begin to explain what it feels like to sit here in a prison cell and know that everybody around you believes that you murdered your baby. It isn’t just about being in prison. It isn’t just that I am afraid for my life every single day because of the way that child killers are viewed. It’s that people look at me and see a woman who is capable of taking the life of the child she brought into the world. I want people to know that I would never have done anything to hurt Dustin.

“So to answer your question, honestly, I started this whole thing grasping at straws. I would have jumped on board with pretty much any theory that was presented to me if I thought for a second that it could turn into something. And when Sheridan and Posey contacted me, saying they believed my innocence, it was a total rejuvenation. But it didn’t really change what I felt in my gut. That he was killed by somebody close to me. And then they told me about Charles. And I couldn’t ignore the similarities. I couldn’t ignore every one of these details that just kept falling into place. I might finally have some hope. Just get me a new trial. Give me another chance to convince a jury that there is reasonable doubt that I did this.”

The guard standing near the door that leads back into the housing area looks up at the clock and barks out at the inmates.

“Visits are up. Time to go back inside. Keep your goodbyes short.”

Cameron and I stand up. We stay on opposite sides of the table. While the other inmates cling to the hugs that come few and far between, she and I stare at each other.

I see hope in her eyes. I know she is looking at me as her savior, but what she should be looking at is an FBI agent. This case is interesting enough to pull me in and make me want to look deeper, but I’m not aligning myself with Cameron Reed. I want to know the truth, whether that exonerates her or just ensures she can’t manipulate her way into a new trial for a conviction she earned.

It took a little bit of research, but now I finally understand what Xavier was telling me when he first called to ask for my help. I have a large paper calendar on the table in front of me and a piece of butcher paper taped to the wall. I want to get a clearer perspective on the possibility that Dustin was the victim of a serial killer and not his mother or someone in their circle. Sam comes into the room as I am writing another note on the butcher paper.

“Wow. You’ve already reached the butcher paper stage. That usually doesn’t happen for a while,” he says.

“Well, I’m usually not investigating a case backward either.”

“Fair enough. What is all this?”

“When Xavier first called to tell me about Dustin Reed, he said that Sheridan and Posey were convinced that Cameron’s case should be looked at again because Dustin’s body was found on the thirteenth and Charles’s body was found on the sixteenth,” I say.

Sam blinks. “I mean… because… clearly…”

“Essentially my thoughts too. But there is actually something to that. Sheridan sent me some information about other cases that have some similarities to those two murders. One that happened before Dustin’s death and two that happened between him and Charles. The body of Jayden Waller was found six months before Dustin on the twelfth. The year after Dustin’s murder, Brian Kravitz disappeared from a Little League baseball game and was found murdered a month later on the fourteenth. Then about eight months after that, Logan Smith was found two weeks after he went missing, on the fifteenth. Then, of course, Charles,” I say.

“But not in the same month?” Sam asks.

“No, not even in chronological months. It’s just the order of the dates.”

“Which could be random,” he says.

A hint of a smile curls the corner of my lips. “Mayor Johnson, did I just hear you suggest that something is a coincidence?”

“Absolutely not. But I don’t know if I would immediately jump to believing it’s a clear indication of a strategy either.”

“Mmm-hmmm. Anyway, that’s the whole point of the calendar. Over here I’m trying to write down all the different similarities among the cases that could point to a link,” I say.

“Dear lord, I’m glad Xavier wasn’t here to witness that sentence. He’d be trapped in a spiral of his own logic for the rest of the day.”

“Oh, but I am, Sam,” Xavier says, coming down the stairs and pausing halfway like he should be wearing a red, smoking jacket and carrying a candelabra.

I hold up a hand toward him.

“Shit! Where did you come from?” Sam asks.

“Papua New Guinea, originally. The upstairs bedroom, currently.”

“Did he just say he’s from Papua New Guinea?” Sam asks, looking at me as Xavier continues his descent down the stairs. “Is he serious?”

“I have no idea.”

“I checked on your new arrangement of the scary angel horde,” Xavier says when he gets to the bottom of the steps. “They look lovely. Five of them were in the wrong place, and I had to rearrange everything on the dresser, and the big one sitting by the bed needed to be turned.”

“But lovely,” I say.

He nods and sits beside me.

“I’m certainly glad.”

“I’m going to reframe my question here. When did you get here?” Sam asks.

“About an hour before you got home,” Xavier says.

“You’ve been here for the last hour and a half and I didn’t know? More pointedly, you spent an hour and a half in the bedroom rearranging angels?”

“And painting the room yellow,” he says.

My head snaps to him, and he smiles, shaking his head like he was just joking. As soon as I look back at the notes in front of me, he looks at Sam and nods seriously. I’m going to need to check that out as soon as I get the chance.

“Dean has a new case in Black River,” Xavier says, waving his hand over his head to the diagonal I’m sure he believes is in the direction of the town.

I take his hand and guide it over so he’s gesturing the correct way.

“Black River,” he says.

“Cupcake is in Canada on a speaking engagement, and Nicole is throwing a combination retirement-divorce party in Harlan,” I tell Sam.

“A combination retirement-divorce party?” he asks.

“The boss was sleeping with his secretary,” Xavier says.

“Ah.”

“So he’s hanging with us for a few days,” I say.

“All right then. Hamburgers? Pizza?”

“Tiny hamburgers on pizza?” Xavier suggests.

Sam walks out of the room, and Xavier turns his attention to what I’m doing.

“They were both in different clothing than what they were wearing when they disappeared,” he says, then points to the butcher paper.

I write it down.

“I did notice that, and it’s true for at least one of the other victims too. But it made me wonder if it actually had any significance, because they were kept for an extended amount of time between when they disappeared and their deaths. And in the case of both Dustin and Charles—I haven’t looked too in-depth into the other cases yet—it was emphasized how well the boys were taken care of before they were killed. Neither of them had any sign of physical abuse or restraint. No bruising. No cuts or scrapes. And they had been fed well and were clean. It seems like it just makes sense that they would also be wearing clean clothing,” I say.

“Clean and different are not the same thing,” Xavier says. “And just the fact that the replaced clothing fits in with the rest of the notable characteristics of the murders only makes them more notable.”

“Well done,” I say.

“I’ve spent a long time learning at the feet of the master,” he says.

“Matlock?”

“Yes.”

“Yep. Here’s one thing that is different though. They were not killed in the same way. And of the five total victims, there are three different methods of murder. Suffocation, carbon monoxide exposure, and blunt-force trauma,” I say. “That last one in particular stands out to me a lot. It doesn’t fit in with the rest of how these victims were treated between being taken and being found. There was so much care given to feeding them, not tying them up… It’s a strong contrast for one of them to be hit over the head with an object hard enough to kill him.”

“Unless there’s another difference in the circumstances,” Xavier says. “Maybe what changed wasn’t just how the killer acted.”

“But how the victim did,” I say.

He nods, and I sift through the papers to get to the information about Jayden Waller’s death.

“I obviously don’t have the full autopsy report or anything to get all the details, but from what I’ve been able to find, he had a skull fracture that was likely caused by one very severe blow. The only article I read that referenced a weapon being used said that one hadn’t been identified. There’s never been an update.”

I pause and think for a second, then look at him.

“I wonder if there even was a weapon.”

Getting more information about Jayden’s death takes playing a little bit of phone tag and calling in some of my special resources—namely, Eric. He’s able to access the original investigation and send me documents, including a copy of the medical examiner’s report.

“There it is,” I say once I open up the email. “Manner of death is listed as homicide, but with the qualification that the medical examiner came to that conclusion because of the fact that the body was found in a remote area and obviously posed. The cause of death is blunt-force trauma. Look at this note though. ‘Method unresolved. Single impact beneath HBL. Weapon/fall unknown.’”

“‘HBL,’” Xavier says. “What is that?”

“Hat brim line,” I tell him. “It’s a reference point used by medical examiners on head injuries. There’s a really famous case, a couple actually, where women were found at the bottom of the steps. The initial thoughts were that she fell down the stairs and died of her injuries. But in both situations, it turned out that the woman had actually been beaten and then staged at the bottom of the steps to throw off the investigation. One of the killers actually threw her down the steps so there was blood on the walls and everything. There was a lot of controversy surrounding how to determine if an injury likely came from bludgeoning or a fall. A lot of times, the injuries look a lot alike. So a medical examiner will first examine the rest of the body and determine if there are other injuries. Someone who falls from a high distance or down a mountain or anything like that is pretty likely to have a lot of other injuries on different parts of their body.

“But there are circumstances where the injuries are focused solely on the head, or other injuries exist but there is a question as to whether that person was beaten rather than fell. That’s where the hat brim line comes in. It isn’t conclusive, in the vast majority of cases, a fall will result in injuries at or below where the brim of a hat would fall on a person’s forehead and around their head. Somebody who falls down the stairs or trips and falls on the ground is really unlikely to have serious impact wounds to the top of their head. In that circumstance, it is probable that they were actually hit by something. Again, not conclusive. But it’s a good indicator among others.”

“So Jayden only had injuries beneath that indicator line. Which means there’s a question as to whether he was hit or possibly fell,” Xavier says.

“That’s what it sounds like. Which means his situation was actually different. If I had to take a guess, I would say that he is the only one of the five, if we are operating under the belief that they were killed by the same person, who decided to resist and try to escape. At that point, he fell, hit his head, and died. That could be the explanation for why his case is different.”

“Don’t think I didn’t notice that you just said ‘if we are operating under the belief that they were killed by the same person,’” Xavier says.

“We don’t have any actual proof yet. We have circumstances that line up. We have similarities. And yes, a couple of those similarities are distinct and significant. But I am not ready yet to absolutely declare this a serial killer situation. As far as I can tell, none of these victims had any DNA evidence on them, so there isn’t a conclusive way to connect them at this point.”

“Which means you still think there’s a possibility that Cameron Reed killed Dustin.”

There is heaviness in his voice, and I feel like a line has been drawn in the sand.

“I’m not passing any sort of judgment on her. It’s not that I’m specifically looking for a way to prove that she did it. I just want to be sure. When I went to talk to her, I heard her whole story. I also looked into the case as much as I could without getting access to the records. There are definitely elements of it that don’t sit right with me. It looks like a case that wasn’t handled particularly well. But that doesn’t automatically mean it came to the wrong conclusion,” I say. “Reopening a case and asking for a retrial is a massive undertaking and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Before that kind of effort is put into trying to make links that might not exist, and before we get people’s hopes up or muddy existing investigations, I want to make absolutely sure that I feel comfortable stating there was a miscarriage of justice.”

“She’s innocent until proven guilty,” Xavier says.

“Yes. And she was proven guilty,” I point out gently. “I’m prepared to go through it and verify that proof again. But I’m not quite ready to go back to saying she’s innocent.”

“Why?” he asks.

“I’m just not ready yet.”

There are books where the narrator is the backbone of the story. They provide the structure, the bones on which the entirety of the story is draped. You can trust every word that comes out of their mouth, and you know that anything that you read is the truth.

And then there are those where the narrator isn’t so trustworthy. You may think you know what’s happening, or you are lulled into complacency and come to rely on what you’ve been told, only to find out later that it’s been twisted and manipulated into something that they want you to think. Perhaps a perception more than dishonesty. Perhaps an outright lie.

As I sit in front of my notes well into the night, I wonder which kind of story Cameron Reed told me.

I don’t want to be unfeeling. I don’t want to come across as heartless or as if I am bound to the final say of twelve men and women in a box or one robed judge on a pedestal. That’s far from the truth.

I am wary of finality in circumstances where there isn’t enough to support it. But I’m also wary of the wolf that doesn’t wear the sheep’s wool to integrate into the flock, but their blood so they can lure the sheepdog.

I have sympathy, but I also have experience. I can’t sacrifice one for the other in either direction. The longer I study this case, the more questions I have. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that there are serious issues with how this case was handled.

From the extensive media involvement to the management of the investigation to the counsel she was provided, Cameron Reed didn’t seem to have much of a chance. Like Xavier said, she was convicted based on her personality rather than the evidence. But there are still the pieces that do fit together. It’s not like the prosecution was completely devoid of any support for their theory. It’s leaving me in an uncomfortable limbo.

Sam shuffles down the stairs in his light-blue old-man pajamas with a coordinating waffle knit bathrobe loosely tied around his waist. His hair is sticking straight up, and he yawns as he comes toward me.

“I thought you were sleeping,” I say.

“I think I was at one point, but I kept waking up, and you weren’t there.”

“Nope, I’m here. Still.”

“Xavier’s not going to pop out of the kitchen at me or anything, is he?” Sam asks before sitting down.

“No, he went up to his room a little bit after dinner to have a video call with Cupcake, and I haven’t seen him since,” I say.

“What’s going on between the two of you? You barely even spoke during dinner. Neither one of you has commented on the brilliance of me taking Xavier’s suggestion of having tiny hamburgers on a pizza and ordering meatballs,” he says.

“They are fundamentally different foods.”

I run my fingers back through my hair. Dropping back against the couch cushions, I look over at my husband.

“I don’t think that Xavier has ever looked at me this way.”

“What way?”

“Like we’re on different sides. He has taken up so strongly with Cameron and is one-hundred-percent convinced that she had nothing to do with her son’s murder. He says he looked over the circumstances of the case and has gone through the evidence, and he just doesn’t see it. He thinks that I should be just as convinced as he is and should trust his instincts.”

“And you?” he asks.

“I have my own instincts.”

“And what are they saying?”

“That I have to start from the beginning. Cameron’s case was mishandled, but that’s not enough for me. It can be mishandled and still have the correct outcome. Not that I’m saying I’m sure she killed Dustin. Because I’m not. I’m not ready to make a decision either way,” I say.

“And he needs to respect that. He didn’t ask you to do his bidding. He asked you for help. This is all based on the interest of a celebrity influencer who decided to make a difference in the world. Not that it’s a terrible thing. In fact, I’m glad that she uses her platform to speak out and help people. As long as she’s doing it for them and not for herself. But the truth is, she doesn’t have any real investigative or law enforcement experience. She watches TV true crime and spends a lot of time on the internet. She’s learned the art of requesting redacted files and hasn’t fully grasped that those details that have been redacted are extremely important. I’m not saying that she doesn’t know anything. But you don’t have to listen to them and take what they say as gospel,” he says. “There’s a reason they came to you. You know what you’re talking about. You have skill and experience. And you need to take that and do what you know you need to do. Remember, this isn’t just about Cameron. It’s about Dustin and Charles and any other victims. They come first. Xavier can be upset, but this is your job, and you need to do it the way that you know you need to do it.”

I smile. Usually I’m the one giving a speech like that, so hearing it from my husband is a nice treat. “Thank you, that was really good.”

“Sometimes I have my moments. So tell me what you’re thinking.”

“You don’t have to sit up with me while I do this. I know you’re busy tomorrow. You need to get some sleep,” I say.

“I’m busy every day. But I’m also mayor, so they can’t actually run the town without me.”

“I mean, technically, they can,” I say.

“Let me have this, Emma.”

“Okay. If you don’t show up for your meetings, the entire town is on hold.”

“Exactly. Go ahead,” he says.

“I keep going back to the whole idea of Cameron being judged and essentially condemned for her personality. I don’t even think it was actually her personality. It was more her choices. What she did or didn’t do after her son went missing. It’s the same thing over and over. Everybody always says that you don’t know how you’re going to react to something until it happens to you. But then they are just as quick to turn around and tell somebody else that they aren’t reacting to something the right way.

“Nobody actually knows what they’re going to feel or do when they get tragic news they’ve never gotten before. When I was talking to her, Cameron told me that babies don’t come with an instruction manual, and even if they did, it wouldn’t explain how to deal with something like your first-grader going missing. That is absolutely true. How is anybody supposed to prepare for something that is completely unexpected?

“When Dustin went missing, there was a lot of chatter about how unemotional Cameron seemed. She wasn’t crying or inconsolable when she was interviewed or out in public. She seemed to be able to keep it all together and go from day to day without a lot of disruption. People kept pointing that out and saying how strange it was and that she should have been reacting more. And then when everything did build up and she finally had a breakdown, the narrative became that she was faking it all and trying to get attention or playing up to the media,” I say.

“Couldn’t really win either way, could she?” Sam asks.

“No, and here’s the thing. Did anybody say anything about her husband, Avery? Absolutely not. He was right there with her during the press conference and was just about as calm as she was. He might have shed a tear, but he wasn’t outright crying. He didn’t wail or collapse. He did everything he was supposed to do from day to day. He kept going to work. He kept running errands. Yet there was no commentary about his level of reaction or what it implied.”

“Because the father won’t necessarily have the same sort of bond with a child and isn’t expected to be as emotional about it as a mother.”

“Right. Especially a mother who last saw her child right before they apparently disappeared. So, essentially, because she was able to keep herself under control or just wasn’t an overtly emotional person, that automatically put more suspicion on her. Something that really seemed to get to people was that she went and got her hair and nails done before the press conference. People just couldn’t fathom a mother could do something like that for themselves while their child was missing.

“I see it a completely different way. According to her, it was a standing appointment that she went to like clockwork every two weeks. It was just part of her routine and something she would barely even think about doing. Which means that it makes absolute sense for her to have done it at that time. When you’re going through such an intensely emotional situation and are under that degree of stress and pressure, you usually fall back on routines. You do exactly what you always do, going through the motions because you don’t really have to think about it. She went and got her hair and nails done because that’s what she always did at that time. It would actually take more thought for her to skip the appointment. But if you really want to know what they had a field day about, it was a birthday party.”

“A birthday party?” Sam asks. “Whose birthday?”

I tell him about the Stolen Voices organization and the party they’d thrown for their missing loved ones.

“That sounds nice,” Sam says. “Definitely a different approach. I can see where it would be really difficult for her to face something like that while her son was still missing, but it would also be a way to bring some levity and positivity into a really hard time.”

“And that’s the intention. She was invited because they wanted to be there for her and encourage her to still find some fun and happiness. And even though he was still just missing at the time, to honor Dustin and put out the energy that he was still being thought about and searched for. Unfortunately, when people saw that she was at a birthday party laughing and playing games, they immediately interpreted it as her being completely carefree and not having a single thought in the world about her son. When they saw her hitting a piñata, that got twisted into her being violent and reckless. Essentially, it paved the way for her to look supremely guilty.

“She tried to explain the whole thing, but that just backfired as well. It really seemed that no matter what she did, people wanted to see her as guilty. They wanted her to be involved not because of any evidence, but because she wasn’t playing the proper role of a grieving parent.”

“That doesn’t seem like enough,” Sam says. “I can understand people being suspicious that she wasn’t more emotional in her reaction. It’s weird and it’s petty, but it happens all the time. And like I said, the birthday party might not have been a great look, but it was completely innocent and actually had a very meaningful significance. It’s just not enough to make one person look guilty of hiding and murdering their child without there being any red flags or warnings leading up to it.”

“Well, that’s where things start to get interesting…”

Avery Reed is understandably hesitant to talk to me.

When I talked to Sam about the incident that led to the explosive finale of the Reed marriage, I felt like I was talking to Sheriff Johnson again rather than Mayor Johnson. His ears perked up, and he was staring at me with the kind of intensity I used to see when he got his teeth into a particularly challenging case. They don’t happen frequently around Sherwood, which only increases their impact when they do.

This time he was drawn into the intrigue of a seemingly normal, middle-class woman in a marriage that was for all appearances completely ordinary, deciding to conspire with a former felon to ambush her husband and beat him to within an inch of his life. At the end of me recounting the story the way that Cameron described it to me, Sam had only one question, and it was a question I realized I hadn’t even asked her:

Why?

She had given me the basic shell of an explanation when she talked about her frustration and dissatisfaction in her marriage. But I realize now that wasn’t the real reason for her going to that kind of extreme. There had to be something more she wasn’t telling me, an impetus that triggered not only her dark thoughts and compulsion to fantasize about her husband’s suffering, but the actual action that nearly put the plan into motion.

That was the question I had on my mind this morning when I sought out a current phone number for Avery Reed and called him. It actually came as a surprise when he picked up the phone. I’ve gotten very used to people just letting my calls go to voicemail and then calling me back. Or not. If I’m dealing with a younger crowd, I frequently forego the phone call altogether in favor of a text message or direct message on social media.

Reaching out to Avery felt like a bit of a crapshoot. I didn’t know if I would actually get in touch with him or if it would just be a dead end. One I would continue to doggedly pursue, but a temporary delay nonetheless. There was also the knowledge that I don’t really have anything directly to do with the case. In most of these situations, I can introduce myself as an FBI agent who is either heading or cooperating with an investigation that involves them. I can’t say that in this circumstance. When it comes to Cameron, I’m not doing either.

All I could do was introduce myself. I give him my qualifications, then tell him the carefully worded truth. I am looking into his son’s murder and the conviction of his ex-wife and would like to discuss certain details of the case with him.

He isn’t immediately receptive. There’s a long enough pause for me to wonder if the call has dropped before he answers.

“I thought this was all over three years ago.”

“There’s been a recent development that might change things. Nothing official yet, but I am gathering information about the case. I am hoping you are willing to meet with me and talk about what happened,” I say.

This time the silence is punctuated by a heavy sigh.

“All right, I’ll meet with you.”

“Thank you. Where would be a good place?”

“I’m sure you can understand I would rather not talk about this in public. I still have to hear about it enough. You can come to my house, if that works.”

“Absolutely. Just send me the address.”

I’m not familiar enough with the area to know where I’m going as I follow the directions to Avery’s house. When I drive by Willowbrook Elementary School, my stomach sinks a little. If I’m driving past it, that means Avery sees it on probably a daily basis. It’s a constant reminder of his son. By now Dustin would’ve been in the fourth grade, and if Avery is anything like the other parents I’ve known as an adult, his mind would have already skipped over the existence of fifth grade and be firmly planted in worrying about middle school. But he’ll never get that.

He won’t see his only child hit double digits. He’s not going to get the chance to watch Dustin graduate from elementary school and take that step toward growing up. Even with all the worry that comes with those milestones, I know that he would trade anything if he had the chance to experience those things.

It’s not until I pull into the driveway at the house that I realize the street name sounded familiar for a very specific reason. This is not a new home for Avery. It’s the one he was living in with his family before all this happened. I know Cameron told me he moved out as soon as he found out about the plot against him and didn’t return even after Dustin’s body was found. That means that he took his now-ex-wife’s incarceration as an opportunity for him to return to his house and start a new life there.

He opens the door when I knock, and I see just how the past three years have aged him.

“Hi. Emma Griffin,” I say.

He nods. “Avery Reed. Come in.”

I follow him into the house, through the entryway and along a hallway that leads to a living room.

In the research I did about the case, I found some articles with pictures of the family in the house, and I can see that all of the decoration has been completely changed since then. There’s new furniture, different paint on the walls. The only things that I see that are even close to what was captured in those old images are framed photographs sitting on the mantel. In each of them, Dustin is frozen in one of the few precious moments that made up his lifetime.

“Have a seat,” he says.

“Thanks.” I lower myself onto the gray suede couch. “First, I just want to say how sorry I am for your loss and everything you went through. I can’t even imagine. I also want to give full disclosure that I did go to the prison and meet with Cameron so I have her side of what transpired between the two of you. But I am here with a totally open mind and no preconceived notions. I really do want to hear your perspective. Without getting into what she told me, I want you to tell me exactly what happened when you found out about the contract she tried to take out on you.”

“Well, I think you’re giving her too much credit when you say she tried to take it out on me. That makes it sound like she didn’t know what she was doing. The truth is, she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew exactly where to go and what to say to get what she wanted. And it was what she wanted. She might flutter her eyelashes and lie her way into people believing she just got swept up in a moment, but I know her. She was not an impulsive person. Not from the day I met her,” he says. “She wasn’t just on the phone with her cousin one day and spontaneously decided to ask him if he knew anyone willing to beat somebody down for money.

“This was something she thought of thoroughly, envisioned and planned out in her mind, and determined how she was going to follow through with it. It’s not like she and her cousin were especially close. They didn’t talk on the phone regularly or get together to catch up. She called him for this reason and this reason only. The fact that it didn’t happen was a twist of fate more than anything.”

“Why do you say that?” I ask.

“I know she tells people she changed her mind and told her cousin she didn’t want the plan to go through. But that’s not actually what happened. The day she was supposed to meet up with the guy Bruno to pay him and give him a key to the house, he ended up getting himself arrested for solicitation and brandishing a firearm. He ended up getting smacked with a probation violation and landed back in prison, so she never had the opportunity to get the ball rolling again.”

“You know who leaked the story?”

“No. It was published on a really trashy online gossip site first, citing an anonymous source. After that it ended up trickling into the mainstream and caught fire pretty quickly. It said a source was anonymous, but I know it was her cousin. He’s the only one who would not only know about it and have all the details but have a motive for doing it.”

“What motive?” I ask.

“Money. That man would do absolutely anything to line his pockets and keep up his lifestyle without having to get an actual job. Family loyalty wouldn’t mean anything to him. Of course, if you asked him, he would probably say it was the right thing to do and he thought people should know who Cameron really was and what she was really capable of,” Avery says.

“This question might sound kind of prying, so forgive me, but why would she want to do something like that to you? That’s not just a married couple getting into a spat. She didn’t throw your clothes out on the front lawn or eat all your favorite potato chips while deleting the episodes of a TV show you had recorded to binge,” I say.

“That’s oddly specific.”

“I have a petty-ass best friend who only recently discovered the benefits of marriage counseling.”

“Sounds accurate. No, this definitely wasn’t that. She wanted me hurt. Not just a little bit. She wanted serious injury. And the way I see it, if you are willing to contract someone who has spent more than a decade behind bars for a whole host of criminal activity to attack someone, you don’t have any hard limits in mind. You might tell them that you only want a little bit, but you go into it with the understanding that it could very easily go sideways and turn into a good old-fashioned hit,” he says.

“I have to say, I completely agree with you from that point. It’s the same as charging someone who robbed a store at gunpoint and ended up shooting the clerk with premeditated murder. Just the act of bringing a gun means willingness to use it, which means acknowledgment that someone could die. But that brings me back to my question: Why? What was going on in your marriage that would have made her want something that horrible to happen to you? And I guess related to that question, why have you ambushed rather than just filing for divorce? I can’t really imagine someone who would plan something like that to happen to their husband being happy in their marriage.”

“That’s a lot of questions,” he says.

“I have a lot of patience.”

“Okay. But if we’re going to start going down this path, I need a beer. Can I get you one?”

“No, thanks,” I say even though a beer actually sounds amazing right now. But knocking back a cold one with the ex-husband of a convicted murderer doesn’t look great for the FBI agent walking the tightrope between either confirming her guilt or paving the way for a new trial to prove her innocence.

He goes into the kitchen and comes back with a bottle of beer in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. He holds the water out to me, and I accept it. Avery sits down and takes a long swig of the beer, like it’s going to give him the courage and strength to continue the conversation.

“I’m going to start with your related question and then loop back around to the original one. And my answer to it is the same one as when you asked me why her cousin would have leaked this story to begin with. Money. Cameron is ambitious and brilliant. She has always envisioned herself as an entrepreneur and could come up with a dozen ideas for businesses at the drop of a hat. But the reality of her life was that I always made more money than her.

“It was that way from the first day I met her, and it stayed that way. My career has been steady and reliable, and my salary constantly increased, which gave her the opportunity to live a certain lifestyle and pursue what she thought was going to be her own success without ever having to worry about survival.”

“Such a minuscule little detail to concern herself with,” I say.

“Exactly. It’s a lot easier to take all the time in the world pursuing different ideas and only working part-time when you know that you have a solid roof over your head, all your bills are paid, and there will always be food on the table.

“That kind of security wasn’t something she was willing to give up. She claimed offense, she’d argue with me over it, but was perfectly happy with the arrangement. As soon as I told her she didn’t really need to bring in a salary, that I could support the family, she jumped on the opportunity. Then when she said she was going back to work, she never made any effort or big move to go beyond working part-time. That’s why just telling me she wasn’t happy and filing for divorce wasn’t going to be her first choice. I bought the house before we got married, so it was fully in my name. I owned the nicer car. And we had a very clear prenup.”

“How did she feel about you asking her to sign a prenup?” I ask.

“Like what I imagine about half of the people who are asked to feel. That’s my theory. There are two basic ways a woman reacts if her fiancé asks her to sign a prenup. Either she’s going to be completely furious and it could end the relationship altogether because she interprets that as him predicting that their marriage is going to end badly, or she will be so sparkly-eyed and in love that she goes along with it with barely a thought. For Cameron, it was the latter. We were young and head-over-heels in love.”

“So why the prenup?”

“Honestly, it was my father’s idea. He was a lawyer too, and he believed strongly in applying formality to absolutely every possible faction of life. When we were growing up, my siblings and I had formal contracts drawn up regarding our allowances and the expectations of both parties. For him, the idea of getting married without a clear-cut agreement beforehand was just irresponsible.

“When I presented the idea to Cameron, she just laughed it off and said that she figured my father would do something like that. The two of them got along famously, and she knew he would never come up with any kind of terms that were egregiously negative toward her. But it was still firm and fairly unforgiving. It made absolutely sure that if our marriage was to end in divorce, all assets I brought into the marriage, as well as any I acquired through my own personal means during the marriage, continued to belong to me. There would be no expectation of spousal support, and if we had any children, we would automatically have a joint-custody arrangement,” Avery says.

“So essentially, she would get nothing and lose half the time with any children. Which, going back to a potential financial motive, would mean that she was entitled to far less child support as well,” I say.

“Yes. Obviously, that’s not the most appealing arrangement from her perspective. Then there’s the question of why she wouldn’t just want me killed. Have you ever seen the guy on YouTube who talks about crime cases and anytime he mentions life insurance, he dances?”

“I have not,” I say.

“He’s hilarious. Anyway, that’s the first thing that comes to most people’s mind. If I had this prenup—and obviously, I had far more assets than her—I also must have had a considerable amount of life insurance that would be something she would want to get her hands on. That’s true, but there’s a very big caveat. She was not the direct beneficiary of the policy. Legally, everything would go to Dustin. Obviously, if he was under eighteen, she would have control over the funds and the rest of the estate with the expectation that it would be used for his benefit. If there was any evidence of infidelity, however, everything would immediately be put into a trust for Dustin that would be overseen by my attorney until he came of age.

“Cameron would have absolutely no access to any of it. That includes the house. The choice would be for them to move out of the house and have it maintained through the trust until he was an adult and could decide what to do with it, or for the house to be sold and all proceeds to be put into the trust for him. Which, I guess, brings me to answering your original question too. I think she did it because she was already having an affair. She wanted to get out of the terms.”

Avery wasn’t able to tell me who Cameron was having an affair with; he just knew that it had happened. He said it started with a gut feeling. Just an intuition that husbands have about their wives. He couldn’t explain it or really give it a definition, but he said he knew she had changed. There was just something different about her. There wasn’t a massive shift in her behavior; they didn’t start arguing all the time. There was something that he could feel when he was near her that told him she was keeping something from him.

He didn’t want to say anything to her at first. He loved her so much, and he felt like if she wasn’t saying anything, if nothing about their relationship had really changed, then maybe he could live with it. He could tell himself that it was a onetime thing and she had made a mistake. That it was impulsive.

Except she wasn’t an impulsive person. He had already told me that. And there was nothing he could do to totally convince himself.

That was when the gut feeling turned into suspicion and then an undeniable need to have the truth. He never saw them together. He never heard her say his name. As much as he thought he wanted to know all the details, when it came down to it, he realized he didn’t actually want to know. The day the allergic reaction to the other man’s cologne appeared on her neck and the telltale metallic corner of a condom wrapper clogged the vacuum when he was cleaning the car, Avery got all the confirmation he could stomach.

But he still loved her. More than he even thought he did. Far more than he should have. He was going to hang on to her until she made it clear she wanted to let go of him.

And then it stopped. Just as much as he knew the day she came home after sleeping with the other man for the first time, he knew when she’d ended it. The same switch clicked back.

The story itself was gut-wrenching, but the worst part was the look in Avery’s eyes when he was talking about Cameron back in those early days before everything happened. There was a haze in his eyes that you can only ever imagine if you’ve seen it. It’s like dried roses. What was once lush, velvety love now faded and papery. It still has the reminiscence of beauty and sweetness, but it’s really just because you know what once was.

He doesn’t long for her. Right before I left the house, moments after seeing what had been Dustin’s bedroom—which was kept exactly as it was that morning—I met Avery’s new wife. When he looked at her, everything was fresh and glittering in his eyes again. His face lit up, and his body posture changed. He is purely comfortable and happy with her. He doesn’t wish for his time with Cameron; he’s just very aware of everything that he lost.

“That’s seriously sadistic,” Sam says through the speakerphone as I drive away from Avery’s house. “She was planning on hiring someone to come beat up her husband literally because she wanted to punish him. She couldn’t stand being married to him but couldn’t divorce him because of the prenup. And she didn’t want him dead because everything would go to Dustin, and she would have nothing because he knew she cheated on him.”

“He said leading up to that, they were going through the roughest patch in their marriage because neither one of them was really happy with the life they were living. Both of them thought they were going to get something else out of the other one. Both of them wanted something more out of life, and both of them felt like they’d woken up one morning and found themselves living someone else’s life and couldn’t stand it. She started drinking heavily, and he was staying away from home for work longer and longer hours.

“Of course, that didn’t help anything. It just made her mad because she felt like he was abandoning her and neglecting their son. And he didn’t want to be away from Dustin and felt like he was having to compromise being a father and give up what was most precious to him just because he didn’t want to have to deal with her all the time. Things really started going downhill when Cameron came up with yet another business idea that she wanted to invest in, but Avery refused to give her the money for it,” I say.

“Give her the money?” Sam asks. “Didn’t she have access to it?”

“Not all of it. Remember, his father put together a prenup for them to make sure that everything that was Avery’s when they went into the marriage stayed his, and everything he earned or acquired throughout the marriage also stayed his. That included the money he was earning. They had separate bank accounts. There was one that was set up to manage all the household expenses like bills and groceries. Then Cameron had one of her own where he deposited a specific amount of money each month and where her own earnings were deposited when she was working. Then he had his own account where everything else went.

“Her name wasn’t on his account, and she didn’t have any access to it. If there was something she wanted or needed beyond the money in her account, she had to ask him for it. Usually, he obliged, but this time he turned off the faucet. She’d spent a huge amount of money in a short time, which left him scrambling to get everything straight again.”

“Actually scrambling or did he just feel like he was?” Sam asks.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Scrambling? He was a big-time lawyer making the big bucks, even then. Was she really spending so much money that it depleted his savings and they couldn’t afford the mortgage, or was it just that she spent more than he’d budgeted and he had to rearrange things so it didn’t throw everything off too much?”

“Does it really matter?” I ask. “He had his finances set up in a certain way, and they weren’t working out the way they were supposed to, which caused him a lot of stress. It isn’t really significant if they were genuinely struggling financially when she was overspending or if it was just that he didn’t have as much in savings as he wanted to. The point is, he had been giving her money whenever she wanted, and she just kept spending it, so he felt like he needed to draw a line somewhere. So he told her that he wasn’t going to fund, and I quote, ‘another failure’, and that he wasn’t going to be giving her endless amounts of money anymore. That was what really pushed her over the edge. In her eyes, he was living it up, going where he wanted to go and staying away as long as he wanted to, while neglecting and mistreating her.

“He saw someone who had lost control over her life and was lashing out at the people around her. He was worried about the way she acted when she was alone with Dustin. She was drinking so much and being so irresponsible that he really worried that something was going to happen because she wasn’t able to properly care for him when she was in one of these phases. Her spending more time at home and him not handing over the money was his solution for that.”

“And this was after she stopped her affair?” Sam asks.

“Yes. But now I want you to think about her trying to hire that guy again. According to Avery, the only reason she didn’t go through with the plan was because Bruno ended up getting arrested and sent back to prison. Then things seemed to get better between them for a little while, but…”

“But Dustin’s disappearance broke things open.”

I nod. “I asked him if he regretted leaving Cameron the way he did right when they were going through the hell of their child being missing just because he found out that she’d planned that attack years before. I wondered if maybe he felt like he was acting rashly. He said no. It wasn’t just because he was angry with her or because he didn’t feel like he could be married to someone who would do something like that. He left her because Dustin was gone. Right up until that moment, he still carried hope that his son was alive and he would get him back home soon. When he saw those notifications, though, and realized what she almost had done to him, he knew that his son was dead. The first thing that came into his mind was the clause in his life insurance policy. If he was to die, everything would go to Dustin. If she had cheated on him, everything would go into a trust she had no control over, and she would have to leave the house. Things were getting rough between them. She was unhappy with her life. Then suddenly, Dustin was gone.”

“He believes she killed him,” Sam says.

“And that she was going to make sure the same happened to him. She was just biding her time until it wouldn’t look suspicious anymore,” I say. “With Dustin gone, the clause in the life insurance policy would be void, and she would get everything she could want. The house, the cars, the money, and the attention of being a widow. He left her to save his own life.”

“Damn,” Sam says. “I don’t know how the dude survived something like that.”

“Neither do I,” I say.

“Does that change anything for you? Do you think he’s right?” Sam asks.

“I don’t know. It definitely doesn’t look good for Cameron. But I’m still sorting through it all. I’ve actually got to go. I have to get to a meeting,” I say. “I’ll call you later.” I pause then say, “How’s Xavier?”

“He came out of his room for a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch this morning a little bit after you left.”

“A normal bowl?” I ask.

“The one you mix the dough in when you make cinnamon rolls,” he says.

“That’s progress.”

“He’ll come around.”

“Or he’ll stay like this until Dean comes and they go back to the farm,” I say.

“That would be fine too. He’s fine, Emma. One way or another, however this works out, all of it, he’s fine.”

“Okay, thank you. I love you.”

“Love you.”

I end the call and drop my phone into my bag before sliding my sunglasses down over my eyes.

I’m in the lot of a small park, and ahead of me, I see a picnic pavilion at the edge of an open field. There’s a woman sitting on top of one of the tables, her feet on the bench, looking out over the grass. On the bench by her feet facing the other direction is a man. Another woman and man, almost mirror images of the first pair, are on the other side of the table.

Seeing them sitting that way makes me a bit uneasy as I walk toward the pavilion. But as I get closer, the first woman I noticed turns her head in my direction and smiles broadly. She swings around so her feet dangle off the end of the table, hopping down so she can come out of the pavilion and meet me.

“Rosa Swindell,” she says. “I’m the one who emailed you.”

I shake her hand. “Emma Griffin. Thanks for meeting with me.”

The email was waiting for me when I left Avery’s house. It started with Rosa introducing herself and giving a brief explanation of who she was before saying that Sheridan Donovan gave her my contact information. It wasn’t until then that I realized the influencer had reached out to Stolen Voices as well.

“Of course. Let me introduce you to the others. I wasn’t able to get everybody on such short notice, but this is Sheila, Garrett, and Aspen.”

Each of them turns and greets me. I wave in return and glanced around the pavilion. On one hand, it’s a perfectly logical place for her to suggest that we meet. It’s centralized and easy to find. On the other, it feels a little bit strange to be standing at the place Cameron described to me when talking about the birthday party and I’ve seen in the photographs that hastened her public decline. Combined with being at the house where she lived, it feels like I’m on a tour of her footsteps.

I’m very aware that all this only happened three years ago. For her sitting in a prison cell, it feels unbearably long, but in the greater scheme of things, it is still very recent.

“This is where Cameron Reed was photographed at the birthday party with your group,” I say.

It’s an acknowledgment that I recognize where we are and a lead-in for them to start talking. Rosa is the one who reached out to me. There’s a reason that she wanted to meet. I’m giving her the space and opportunity to tell me that rather than diving right into my own list of questions.

“It is,” she says. “We use this place for meetings and events pretty often. I guess probably not as much anymore now as we did back then. It’s getting better now, but ever since everything happened, we’ve had people who have shown up at our meetings or just come by during events wanting to take pictures or hang out with us, as they put it. They aren’t there for any legitimate reason. It’s purely for the morbid fascination and entertainment value. The whole thing has just devalued what we do and put a shadow over what our group really is.”

“I’m sure that’s frustrating. I’ve read about your mission and the things that you do as a group, and I commend you for it. You fill a need that people don’t especially want to acknowledge exists. It’s a lot easier to think of each of these incidents as isolated and having limited impact. But that isn’t how it works. People who have suffered the kinds of losses or traumas that you have deserve to be heard,” I tell her.

She gives a slight smile. “That’s how we got our name.”

I walk into the picnic pavilion and sit down at the table beside where the other three members of the group are perched.

“So what can I do for you?” I ask.

“We’ve been in contact with Sheridan Donovan for about a year now. We know that she chose Cameron’s case to focus on and has been working to find any kind of evidence that might get her a new trial. She called me to tell me about your involvement, and we wanted to talk to you about the developing situation,” Rosa says.

“Obviously, this has meaning to us from a couple of different angles. Our experience with Cameron impacted us pretty deeply, and we’re still feeling it tremendously. It’s left us with some complicated feelings about her and her case. But we are especially interested in hearing about Charles. We haven’t reached out to his family yet. We were hoping that you could give us some insights into his case and how it might connect to Dustin and Cameron.”

“Full disclosure, I don’t have any inside information about the Charles McGeary case. I’m not involved with it and haven’t been in contact with the investigators. I intend to reach out to them if I get to the point where I think it would be beneficial, but I haven’t gotten there yet. Right now I am focused on Dustin. Any research I’ve done into potential other cases and their connections have been purely for the purpose of determining if this is something that I’m interested in pursuing,” I say.

“That means she doesn’t have any idea,” Aspen says with a note of bitterness in his voice.

“Hey, come on,” Sheila says. “You don’t need to be like that. I know how you feel about all this, but you didn’t have to come here if you didn’t want to talk to her or hear what she had to say. Remember, this is for Dustin.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “All of this is a really hard situation. I acknowledge that. And you know what, he’s right. I don’t know. There’s enough there that it made me want to look further. That’s really all I can confirm to you right now. Like you said, I’m sure that considering the circumstances, there are some pretty complicated feelings about looking into this case at all. But I want to assure you, I am thinking about Dustin too. And Charles.”

“Can I ask, what was it about the cases that got Sheridan’s attention?” Garrett asks. “She didn’t really give us a lot of information.”

“The reason she made contact with me and asked that I look into this is obviously because Charles’s murder could be linked to Dustin’s and that would prove that Cameron didn’t kill him. Getting a new trial in a murder case is not an easy thing. You have to be able to prove that there is compelling new evidence that has a significant chance of altering the outcome of the case. If there was enough evidence that pointed to the possibility of a serial killer, Cameron’s lawyer could use that to petition the court to reopen her case and further investigate Dustin’s murder,” I say. “There are some specific similarities between the two murders and, at the very least, tangential connections to other deaths. As of right now, it’s not enough for her to get a new trial. But that’s why I’m doing this. I looked at her case, and just from my own professional perspective, I feel that it was not handled as well as it could have been.”

“What do you mean?” Sheila asks.

“I think that there were details that were overlooked and other ones that were given too much emphasis. The investigation didn’t delve deeply enough into some aspects of her life and the murder itself while applying excessive meaning to other parts. I don’t personally believe that there was enough clear and verifiable evidence that she should have been convicted. Clearly, there was circumstantial evidence and more than enough innuendo to go around, but that should not be what grants the court the ability to take away someone’s life. There needs to be a lot more than gut feelings and guesses.

“That being said, I’m not fully convinced she’s not guilty, either. That circumstantial evidence does matter. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be admissible in court. I am truly looking at this from both sides and trying to get to the truth,” I tell them.

“One of the biggest reasons that our group exists and we call ourselves Stolen Voices is because of how many unsolved cases there are involving children,” Garrett says. “I know you’re in the FBI, so I don’t have to tell you about the statistics or anything like that, but from a personal perspective, this hits all of us really hard. I don’t want to speak for any of the others, but the fact that my neighbor’s murder was never solved is something that has really affected me since then.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“Fourteen,” he tells me.

“I was seven when my sister was kidnapped,” Sheila says. “I was supposed to be her big sister and protect her. I know now that I was just a baby myself and there was nothing I could do, but the fact that she was taken right in front of me and I couldn’t stop it will haunt me for the rest of my life. I had to wait almost twenty years before DNA connected her case to another girl and the man was convicted. But at that point, any happiness I had about getting that answer was tempered by the reality that it took another tiny child being brutally victimized for my sister to finally be heard.”

Aspen gets up from the table and walks away toward a car in the parking lot. The abrupt departure surprises me, and I watch him get to the car and lean against the trunk. He reached into his pocket for a vape pen and took a long draw of it, blowing out the vapor in a long, slow stream as he stared across the paved expanse.

“You’ll have to forgive Aspen,” Rosa says. “This has hit him really hard.”

“Why?” I ask.

“The anniversary of his kidnapping was a little more than a week ago. The birthday party we hold every year is a communal celebration for everyone, but we also make an effort to mark each of the individual anniversaries as well. Every year he really struggles for a few weeks around this time,” she says.

“Was his case ever solved?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

“This whole situation coming up so close to his anniversary made it even harder for him,” Garrett says. “It’s like what Sheila said. Every year passing by with his case still unsolved, it’s a chance that someone else is experiencing the same thing. He was really adamant about Cameron being guilty when it all unfolded. Of all of us, I think he was the one who was most convinced the earliest and pushed the hardest for her to be convicted. Now the thought that she might not have done it and this other kid died while she was sitting in jail is getting to him pretty badly.”

“What do you all think? I know that she got close to the group during the time that Dustin was still missing. That’s why she was here at that birthday party. All of you were really supportive of her, and then it seemed to change very quickly. At least that’s her perspective. I’ve seen articles and news clips of the protests that you held outside her hearings and statements that you made about her guilt. How do you feel about it now?”

They exchange glances. It doesn’t look like any of them want to be the one to answer. The reality of what’s happening is hitting each of them.

“She wasn’t who we thought she was,” Sheila finally says. “It was a huge shock when we found out about the threat against her husband and then that she had been lying about being at the lake. Being a part of a community like this is a delicate situation in a lot of ways. You’re constantly dealing with people at their most vulnerable, and the only way it can work is with honesty. We approached her. We stood by her and tried to show her the kind of support and encouragement she wasn’t getting from the media or seemingly even law enforcement.

“She knew from the very beginning how important it was to us that she be straight up. About everything. None of us is perfect, and we didn’t expect her to be. That’s not the point. We are just very aware of our reputation and the impact that every member makes. Associating with her and throwing our support behind her was sticking our necks out, so to speak. Making sure she was honest with us was our way of validating taking that risk. When we found out that she hadn’t told us the truth and was keeping things that important from us, it totally altered how we saw her and the details of her case. Suddenly, things looked very different.”

“I don’t want to think we were wrong about her,” Rosa says. “But if there is even the slightest possibility that she didn’t do this, all of us deserve to know.”

I have to cut my meeting with the group short when I realize how late it has gotten. I leave the park and head for Dustin’s former elementary school. I contacted the principal and asked if I could come speak with her and his teachers. She’s given me the opportunity to look around the school and talk to everybody so I can get more of an idea of what happened the day that he disappeared.

Because I don’t have an access code, security is waiting for me just outside the door to the school. I show him my credentials, and he lets me inside, directing me to the front office. A woman in a royal-blue pencil skirt and jacket is leaning over the secretary’s desk, staring at the computer, when I walk into the office. She straightens when she notices me and walks toward me with a smile.

“I’m Mary,” she says.

“Emma. Thank you for letting me come here.”

“Absolutely. Dustin is still very much present in our hearts and a part of our school. Anything that we can do for him and his case, I am more than happy to offer my help,” she says.

“Can you show me around? I’ve seen pictures of the school and a couple of maps that supposedly showed where he was last seen with his mother and then after she left, but it would be really helpful if I could actually get the visual of it,” I say.

“Sure. Come with me.”

We leave the office, and I wait until we are several yards away before I speak again.

“Is that the same secretary who was working here when Dustin disappeared?” I ask.

Her expression hardens a little. “No. Considering everything that came out about the failures in safety protocols and all the questions that were left unanswered, Wendy was let go very shortly after the disappearance. Everybody else here that day is still here though. You can talk to Dustin’s teachers, and two of the parent volunteers who were working that day are actually here today as well.”

She shows me around the school, and I identify the locations Cameron told me about. The building is even smaller than I originally thought. Even seeing it from the outside when I drove by on my way to Avery’s house didn’t give me the full perspective of just how compact and yet complicated the interior of the school really is. Despite its small size, the school is a honeycomb of classrooms, stairwells, and common areas. It looks like it was designed to be something else, but I can’t quite put my finger on what.

Seeing it gives more context to the confusion of the day Dustin went missing. The statements of several witnesses including Dustin’s teacher confirm that he was in class after the special programming that morning. The building was no longer crowded with guests, but there still had to be a certain degree of disruption.

Hundreds of extra people filling this space would have been overwhelming for anybody, students and adults alike. It provides a little more insight into why the adults in charge may not have realized something was wrong. That doesn’t excuse the failures and obvious mistakes that contributed to the challenges facing the investigation from the very beginning, but it does offer more insight into the human element.

Mary talks about the camera system that Cameron described to me and the guilt she carries for it being broken on that one day.

“If the cameras were working, we would know so much more. I don’t know what I could have done, but I feel like there had to have been something,” she says.

The situation with the cameras is something that has bothered me from the first time I heard about it. It’s simply too convenient. I ask about the workers who were trying to fix the system on the day that Dustin went missing.

“All of them were cleared. They were seen by so many people and were in constant contact with each other and with the main office. None of them were unaccounted for at any point.”

“And they were the only outsiders here that day? I understand that there were a lot of parents and other family members who came for the festivities, but did anyone else come to the school or onto the grounds who was not a part of the celebration?” I ask.

“Not that I know of. We do have security that monitors the grounds, but without the cameras, they don’t have as much coverage. I can tell you that no one saw anybody suspicious. Everybody who was invited to come to the celebrations was inside the building at the events and then had left before the last time Dustin was seen. He was absolutely in class after the event ended.”

She brings me to a classroom. When she knocks on the partially opened door, a very young woman looks up from the work she’s doing at her desk and smiles brightly.

“Hi, Mary,” she says.

“Sabrina, this is Agent Emma Griffin. She’s the FBI agent I was telling you about. Emma, this is Sabrina Applewhite. She was Dustin’s teacher.”

A nostalgic, faintly pained expression flickers across Sabrina’s pretty face.

“It’s good to meet you,” I say.

“I need to get back to the office, but I’m there if there’s anything else I can do for you,” Mary says.

“Thank you again.”

She leaves, and Sabrina gestures at the small chairs at tables arranged around the room.

“Please come in. You’re welcome to have a seat, but I’m not sure how comfortable it would be.”

I laugh. “That’s okay. I can stand. I don’t want to take up too much of your time, and I know that this is a really difficult topic for you to talk about. I am just trying to find out as much as I possibly can about the day that Dustin went missing, but also anything else you can tell me about him.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. I never had the opportunity to meet him, and I’ve spoken to his mother once. I want to know as much as I can about both of them so I can better understand how this all happened. I don’t know how much Mary told you, but I’m looking into this with the possibility of reopening Cameron’s case.”

“Does this have to do with Charles McGeary?” she asks.

I am a little bit taken aback by the question. Even though Charles’s murder has been prevalently featured in the news cycle even as far away as Sherwood, it technically happened in a different town, and we made no public acknowledgment of any possible connection, so it surprises me to hear her ask so confidently.

“His death is what brought my attention to the situation,” I confirm. “Why would you ask though? He wasn’t a student here, was he?”

“No. But I do know his teacher. We have a small circle of teachers in the area, and when things happen, well… I’m not particularly close to Becky, his teacher, but we know each other well enough that after this happened, we connected to talk about our very unfortunately shared experience. Something that really stood out to me was when she talked about how much Charles was struggling with bullies.”

“Did Dustin have a problem with bullying?” I ask.

This is not something I read about in the case files, and no one has mentioned it so far.

“Yeah. Pretty badly, unfortunately. I came here right out of college, and I was so excited to teach in this kind of environment because I thought it was going to be so different from the public schools where I was a student teacher and where I went to school. I had this dream that issues like bullying and clique behavior weren’t going to be a problem here. I guess that was painfully naive of me. I told the investigators about it back then,” Sabrina says.

“Because I am not officially connected to the case, I don’t have access to the original investigation beyond what is publicly available. Certain details are kept out of public circulation, and it seems for whatever reason, this is one of them. What can you tell me about what he went through? He was so young that it’s hard to imagine him facing the same kind of severe bullying as we see with the older kids,” I say.

“He was such a baby. I thought that the longer I taught, the more used to the kids I would get and they wouldn’t seem so young anymore, but it’s just the opposite. Every year I’m amazed at these babies coming into my classroom. It’s a massive responsibility, but it’s also hard to see what they’re having to face at such a young age. I don’t remember going through half the kinds of things that they do when I was in school.”

“Neither do I,” I say.

“What you were asking though. I never saw any really severe violence when it came to Dustin’s bullying. I know a couple of times he was pushed down during recess or chased by some of the bigger kids. What he went through was more taunting and threatening. I think it was always in the back of his mind that things could get much worse very quickly, and he was desperate to avoid it. He had taken to hiding from the other students.”

“Hiding?” I ask.

“Yeah. There were a couple of times when I couldn’t find him during recess or he didn’t come back from lunch, and we had to search for him. A couple of times we found him in unused classrooms, and once he went outside to get away from them and ended up locked out because he didn’t know the access code.”

“He left the school?” I ask.

“Yes. Fortunately, a security guard noticed him on the camera pretty quickly, and he wasn’t outside for long.”

“I’d like to speak with his other teachers. Would you come with me?”

Sabrina checks the time. “Actually, they should be in the lounge right now. You could talk to them all at the same time.”

“How many teachers did he have?”

“Technically, five. I was his primary teacher. I taught most of his academic classes. Patsy Mason taught his science class. Then there are three enrichment teachers the students cycle through. They teach music, art, and physical education. He only saw each of them once a week,” she tells me.

We head to the teacher lounge and find it full of teachers finishing up their day. It only takes a brief conversation for me to find out that all of them witnessed some bullying against Dustin. All but one, the physical education teacher, confirmed having incidents with him trying to avoid being in class or hiding from other students.

“I know that kids can find any number of reasons to pick on each other, and sometimes they don’t need a reason at all, but can you think of anything specific that they targeted Dustin for?” I ask.

“All the normal things,” Patsy says. “He was small. His hair was always a little crazy. He had freckles. He probably needed glasses, so he squinted a lot.”

I’m starting to get a clearer picture of what his time in school was really like by the time I walk out of the lounge. I’ve forgotten that Mary mentioned parent volunteers being at the school until I’m walking between his former science classroom and each of the exits of the school and see the principal coming down the hallway toward me with two other women. She introduces them to me as Lola and Gracie.

We walk out of the school and sit down at one of the picnic tables in a small courtyard used by the teachers. For a few minutes, we just talk about Dustin and their experiences with him. Because they were parent volunteers rather than teachers, instead of focusing on Dustin, I turned their attention to Cameron.

“I actually didn’t know her very well,” Gracie says.

“I don’t think any of us really did,” Lola says, shaking her head. “Both of our girls were in the same class as Dustin, but I can’t remember ever having a real conversation with Cameron. We exchanged a few words, but she didn’t make an effort to be a part of the rest of us.”

“They really focus on parent involvement here. Every student’s family is expected to participate in school activities throughout the year. For a lot of us, that means volunteering in the classroom as well as other special events. But Cameron just wasn’t a part of it. She took a couple of shifts in the reading corner as far as I remember. Maybe there was something else, but I know that she wasn’t around very much,” Gracie says.

“Maybe that was to be expected,” Lola says.

It almost sounds like something she didn’t actually intend on saying out loud. Gracie’s eyes cut over to her.

“Why would you say that?” I ask.

Both women seem slightly uncomfortable, but we’ve already started down this path. We are committed at this point, and I want to know what she meant.

“There were rumors about Cameron, especially after what happened.”

“What kind of rumors?”

They look at each other again.

“Supposedly, she had a very close relationship with one of the fathers. He was considered one of the most desirable divorcees at the school, so there was definitely some cattiness about the possibility that his attention was going to a married woman.”

“Who was this?” I ask.

“Graham Parker. His son, Elliot, was in the fourth grade at the time. He had actually just started here that year. After Dustin’s murder, Elliot transferred out of the school.”

For a brief moment, when Cameron first sees me, she looks happy, but then she processes the expression on my face, and her smile disappears. Rather than going to the regular visitation room, this time I got special permission to meet with her in an interview room so that we have more privacy.

“What’s going on?” Cameron asks, sitting down on the chair across from me.

“Who is Graham Parker?” I ask.

She looks hesitant, and I hold up a hand.

“Before you even start, I’m giving you an opportunity to be honest with me and tell me what I need to know. I have already had conversations with several people, so I am pretty damn informed. This is your chance to give me the truth.”

“I had an affair with him,” she admits. “I broke it off, and it got pretty ugly.”

“And his son started going to school at the same place yours did.”

“Yes.”

I let out an exasperated sound. “How could you not tell me any of this?”

“I was told that it wasn’t relevant to my case and that I couldn’t bring it up,” she says.

“Why would you be told that?” I ask.

“Because I talked about him to my lawyer from the very beginning. But there was no evidence, and he said that if I talked about him and brought all of that into the open, it would just make me look worse and could be considered slander against Graham. He said he was scrambling to keep my reputation intact as much as humanly possible, and even talking about a relationship from years before would just look like I was trying to drag this man through the mud and shift blame away from me.”

“That’s all well and good, Cameron, but that was the investigation three years ago. This is not that investigation. I am here to try to save your life,” I say.

“No, you aren’t,” she says bitterly. “You’re here because Xavier asked you to be. You don’t believe me. Or at the very least, you’re still waiting for me to prove it to you.”

“Then prove it to me,” I say. “I need you to tell me the truth. I need you to be honest with me about all this, or there’s absolutely no point in me being here. Because I’m telling you, you look really bad right now. I already went and talked to Avery. He told me that you had had an affair and that it almost ended your marriage.”

“He knew?”

“Yes. From the very first day. According to him, he never knew who it was, just that you were cheating on him. And he is absolutely convinced that the reason you planned on having him attacked was so that you could punish him for a rough patch in your marriage without resorting to divorce because of your prenup. And the reason that Dustin was murdered was to ensure your place as his beneficiary because of the infidelity clause in his life insurance.”

Cameron looks like I slapped her. For a second, she tries to catch her breath.

“He said that? He genuinely believes I would kill my own son and then, what, have him murdered too so I could get to his money?”

“Exactly.”

She sits back, shaking her head. Finally, she sits forward again, locking eyes with me. It seems like she’s trying to prove she’s telling the truth, but it might just be her trying too hard.

“I did not kill my son. I shouldn’t have had an affair. I shouldn’t have even thought about having my husband attacked. But I am not some mastermind conspiring to get my husband’s money. I ended my relationship with Graham because I loved my son and I wanted to save my marriage.”

“If you are having an affair around the same time you got pregnant with Dustin, how do you know that Avery is even his father?” I ask.

“Because Graham couldn’t have any more children. He had his son from his previous marriage, but he had a vasectomy. That was the root of everything that happened between us. It’s why I was terrified when I saw him at Dustin’s school that day.”

“Why?”

“Graham didn’t want our relationship to end. I don’t want to say that I led him on or that he had any expectations of our future together that I contributed to, but I know that he feels differently about that. He thought we would be together and that I was just trying to figure out when it was going to be best for me to tell Avery and get a divorce. If I’m being really honest, as much as I didn’t actively plan that kind of future with him, I also didn’t bluntly tell him it wasn’t going to happen. Because I wasn’t really sure what I wanted.

“At the time, I really enjoyed having both of them. Things were still good with Avery, and I got even more validation and attention from Graham. I didn’t want to give that up. But it was starting to get obvious that he wasn’t going to just keep going the way we were. I don’t blame him for that. Not now anyway. At the time, I was frustrated and didn’t understand why he couldn’t just keep enjoying a good thing.

“Now I realize I was making decisions for him I didn’t have the right to make. What I saw as fun and frivolous, he structured in his mind as a real relationship. But that doesn’t give him the right to react the way he did to me pulling back from him. I was already thinking that I needed to make a final decision, and because things were going well with Avery, I was leaning heavily toward staying in my marriage.

“Then I found out I was pregnant, and that made the decision for me. I obviously knew right away that Avery was the father of the baby, and I took it as a sign that I was really making the right decision. Avery always wanted children, and we had been trying, but nothing had ever happened. Now I was finally pregnant, and I knew that meant I needed to end things with Graham and really commit to my family. Graham did not take it well. He was furious. He said I had lied to him and led him on. That he had wasted all that time with me and I’d ruined his life.

“But the worst part was, he blamed Dustin. He said if it wasn’t for him, we would be together. I cut off all contact with him, but it didn’t stop him. Over the years, he kept trying to reach out to me or get my attention. It went from just somebody being hurt at a breakup and their misguided attempts at reconnecting to me genuinely feeling like I was being stalked.”

“Did you ever contact the police?” I ask.

“No. I didn’t think Avery knew about my affair, and I didn’t want him to find out. I thought I could handle it on my own, and getting the police involved was just going to make it worse. I finally talked to him and made it very clear that I wasn’t interested and he needed to leave me alone. He said the same things that he had been saying about Dustin, and we went our separate ways.

“But then the morning he disappeared, I saw Graham at the school. That’s how I found out that he had enrolled his child. It was horrifying. The way he looked at me sent a chill right through me. It was like I was an animal who had been running from him but had finally been caught in his trap.”

Graham Parker isn’t as easy to find as Avery was. Like the women at the school told me, he moved out of the area soon after Dustin disappeared. I finally managed to track him down and set up a video call with him. When he appears on the screen, everything behind him makes it look like he is sitting in a public library. I don’t love the idea of having this conversation somewhere other people can hear it, but I am rapidly losing my patience and don’t have the time to try to arrange something else.

“I never stalked her,” he protests vehemently when I tell him what Cameron said about him. “I tried to get in touch with her. I wanted her to know that I still thought about her and how much it hurt to not have her in my life. But that was it. It’s not like I showed up at her house and threw pebbles at her window.”

“Did you call her multiple times a day? Send her text messages when she asked you not to? Follow her and spontaneously show up at places where she was in town?”

“I mean… sometimes. I guess you could say that.”

“That’s stalking. And then you just happened to enroll your child in the same school where Dustin went. A child you blamed for the end of your relationship. Then right after that child disappeared, you suddenly withdrew your son from the school and moved away. Tell me none of that looks suspicious,” I say.

“Look, I get it. It looks bad. But I didn’t do anything to that kid. I wouldn’t hurt a child.”

“Dustin wasn’t hurt. He was murdered,” I counter.

“I would never do something like that. I would not kill a little boy to get a woman’s attention. I might be guilty of sleeping with another man’s wife and falling in love with her, but I would never try to get her back in my life by killing her child. I didn’t want her to have him. I’m not going to pretend that’s not how I felt. There’s a reason I got a vasectomy. I didn’t want any more children. And beyond that, I knew that she stayed with her husband because of her son. If she hadn’t had him, we would be together.

“But the bitter reality of it, which she doesn’t want you to know about, is that she talked just as much about not wanting to have a child. I bet she never told you that. She would say all the time that Avery wanted babies and she was relieved every month when she didn’t get pregnant. Right up until she told me she was pregnant with Dustin, she talked about never wanting to become a mother. And I guarantee you, that didn’t just change when he was born,” he says.

“Does that mean you think that she killed him?” I ask.

“No, I don’t think she would have done that. Even though I honestly believe she would rather have not had him, she did love him and did her best to protect him. One of the few times we talked after he was born, he was probably three or four at the time, I remember her saying I needed to leave her alone because one man staring at them all the time was enough. She was really defensive about anybody getting too close to him.”

I frown. “One man staring at them all the time? Was she talking about Avery?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t remember ever saying that to him,” Cameron tells me over the phone later.

Her lawyer isn’t thrilled about the fact that I have now spoken to her twice without him, but Cameron has made it very clear that she has every intention of continuing to cooperate with me whether he likes it or not. When he realized that my involvement had the potential of dramatically increasing the possibility of her getting another trial, he backed down on his resistance and helped to facilitate a phone call. It’s much easier than going through all the protocols and steps necessary to actually visit her at the prison.

“But why would he say that if you didn’t say it to him? Who could you have been talking about?” I ask.

“I really don’t know…” Her voice trails off, and I can almost hear her thinking. “Mr. Gleason.”

“Who?”

“Albert Gleason. He lived across the street from our house. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. He always gave me the most uncomfortable feeling. He liked to watch everybody through the curtains on his front window. He wouldn’t come outside and talk to anybody or even wave if he happened to be at the mailbox. But he was constantly standing at that window, just peeking through the curtains. Avery apparently met him before we got married and I moved into the house. He said that he was perfectly nice. Just withdrawn and a little eccentric. He liked to keep to himself,” she said.

“Did you ever feel like he was threatening you or Dustin?”

“No. He was a little creepy, but I wasn’t afraid of him. I think I saw him outside his house three times,” she says.

“Did you tell police about him during the investigation?”

“I didn’t tell them about him specifically. They interviewed all our neighbors, and I’m pretty sure I mentioned to them that I was uneasy about him and that he looked through the windows all the time, but like I said, I wasn’t afraid of him. It wasn’t enough that I felt like I needed to report it to the police. They talked to everybody in the houses around us, and no one, including him, brought up any suspicion,” she says.

As soon as I’m off the phone with Cameron, I start researching Albert Gleason. Nothing comes up. He’s never been arrested for anything. His name doesn’t show up on any of the local forums or neighborhood websites where people share tips or give warnings to each other. That is the exact type of place I would expect to see a mention of him if he had ever done anything threatening or overtly disturbing. There’s not even a mention of him looking through his curtains. I don’t doubt that it’s something he did, but it clearly wasn’t enough of a disruption for anybody to take notice.

I’m about to consider him another dead end when a final scan through the search results for his name brings up a caption on an article. It’s about Dustin’s murder and contains several images from his funeral and graveside service. The caption is on a picture of his grave after the service. The chairs are still lined up next to the grave, and the man sits in one of them, leaning forward with his head in his hands, appearing to be sobbing.

I know the loss of a young child has a dramatic impact on everybody around him, including across his entire community, but this seems like an extreme reaction to the murder of a child he only knew by looking through his living room curtains.

I check the time. It’s too late today to go talk to Albert Gleason. I’m supposed to be at a town hall meeting where members of Stolen Voices are planning to speak about the increasing violence against children in the community.

Putting aside my notes, I get ready. I arrive at the community center where the meeting is being held a few minutes before it is set to start. Sheila spots me across the room before the others. She waves, and I walk over to her.

“We saved you a seat,” she says, pointing across the aisle. “This section is just for people who are speaking, but we wanted to make sure you were as close as possible.”

“Thank you.”

I take my seat, and the meeting gets underway. After a few opening remarks, the floor is turned over to the group. As soon as they are introduced, everyone in the section stands up. It is far more people than I met at the park and even more than seemed to be in the pictures of the birthday party. They’re wearing matching shirts proclaiming “Stolen Voices” and holding framed pictures of children’s faces.

One by one they step forward and talk about the child in the frame. Rosa is first. She holds up a picture of a smiling little girl.

“This is my daughter, Juliet. When she was ten years old, she had her first sleepover with her best friend and four other little girls. She was so excited, and we spent the entire day before she went getting her ready. I brought her shopping for a new pair of pajamas and a game to bring along with her. We went out to lunch and had the most wonderful time. That evening I brought her over to her best friend’s house. I hugged and kissed her goodbye and told her to have fun. She jumped out of the car and ran inside. Five hours later, I got a phone call that she was missing.

“The girls had gone out to play flashlight tag, and Juliet disappeared. Her best friend’s parents called me because they thought that maybe the girls had gotten into an argument and she had come home, but she hadn’t. The next morning they found her flashlight broken on the side of the road less than two blocks from the house. That is the only trace of her that has ever been found.”

A hush has fallen over the room as she sits down and Aspen gets up. He’s holding a picture of himself. He looks agitated and shaky, but also determined to do this.

“When I was nine years old, I was kidnapped. I was in an indoor play park and went to the bathroom. There was a man inside who grabbed me, put his hand over my mouth, and dragged me out of the bathroom. The back door to the building was ten feet from the bathroom door. He had me out of there and inside the trunk of his car in less than five minutes from the time I left my group. He held me captive at his house for nearly two months. While I was there, I was kept in a cage and taken out every night to be assaulted by him.

“I escaped one night when he was sick and hadn’t latched the cage all the way. He took medication that put him to sleep, and I was able to escape and get out of the house. I tried to direct the police back to the house, but I couldn’t figure it out. It took going out three times over the next two days for me to finally find it, but by the time we did, he was already gone. That’s when I found out the house was actually an abandoned property, so there was no record of who he was. To this day, it hasn’t been solved.”

Garrett follows. For a few seconds, he stands in front of the crowd, looking down at the picture in his hands. He finally turns it around and shows us a girl with big, brown eyes and a giant, bright-pink scrunchy in her hair.

“This is Melinda. She was my neighbor and one of my best friends. We were the only two kids in the neighborhood anywhere near our age, so we sort of bonded by default. We spent a lot of time together just hanging out. She really liked to read, and she would tell me all the stories. Then she disappeared. I will never forget that I was outside playing when they found her. My life changed forever that day. Melinda was gone, and no one knew why. Even now there are no answers. Just stories I will never hear again.”

The members of the group keep getting up and sharing their stories. A stream of sadness and grief. The occasional brief moment of joy from finding out that a few of the victims survived is tempered by the reality of everything that they went through. The incredibly somber meeting ends with Rosa making an impassioned speech, calling on the community to do better. Protect the children. Put more time and resources into finding the missing and bringing the culpable to justice.

Several of the members are in tears, holding each other up when I approach them after the meeting. I thank them for sharing their stories and listen to the ones who wish to say more. I planned on getting a hotel tonight so I didn’t have to take the hour-long drive back home so late after the meeting. But after hearing all these stories and dealing with the memories and distant shreds of knowledge I keep in the back of my mind, I don’t want to be away from home or Sam.

The house is dark and quiet when I get back. I climb upstairs to my room, put on my pajamas, and crawl into bed. Until I finally fall asleep, my mind replays all the framed pictures and the brief stories they’ve become.

I’m not able to get in touch with Albert Gleason the next morning. His phone has been disconnected, and I don’t have any other means of contacting him. On a whim, I call Avery. He confirms that Gleason still lives across the street and that he just saw him pulling the trash can up from the curb. I decide that rather than trying to talk to him over the phone, I’m just going to go to his house.

I expected him not to answer the door, but after my first knock, it swings open, and a man looks out at me. He doesn’t look as old as I expected him to be. The way Cameron talked about him made him sound elderly. She even said she wasn’t sure he was still alive at this point.

But the man who opens the door doesn’t look frail or ill. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe him as vibrant or robust, but I’m not concerned he’s going to collapse at any moment.

He’s standing defensively behind the half-open door looking out at me. He removed the chain lock before opening the door, but he has his foot firmly braced to prevent the door from opening any further than he wants it. Not that he can actually stop me if I want to get inside, but it makes him feel better.

“Yes?” he asks.

“Mr. Gleason?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“My name is Emma Griffin. I’m an FBI agent. Would you have a few minutes to talk to me?”

“FBI?” he asks. “What’s happening?”

He leans his head slightly out of the door, and his eyes flicker up and down the street like he’s looking for a SWAT team or an arrest in progress. When he sees nothing but the neighbor next door watering her flowers and a man walking a puppy, he sinks back into his house.

“I just have a few questions. It’s about Cameron Reed.”

“Cameron?” he asks. “Well, it’s been a while since I’ve heard that name. Did she do something else while she was serving her time?”

“If I could come inside, it would be much easier to talk,” I tell him.

This seems to remind him that he’s still holding the door most of the way closed and I’m standing outside in the wind that’s determined to usher back the frigid temperatures just finally fading out over the last couple of days. He steps back and opens the door the rest of the way.

“Come in,” he says. “Sorry, I get a lot of unwanted visitors around here. Seems like everybody either wants to sell me something or help me find Jesus. Personally, I wasn’t aware he was missing, and if he is, I don’t know why they would think I would be interested in being a part of the search party.”

“Sounds like having an FBI agent show up at your door is a breath of fresh air,” I say.

The layout of the house is different from the Reed house. This home looks a bit older and is smaller. It was likely built in an early phase of the community, and the larger, more modern houses like the Reeds’ were added later as the need for family homes expanded and the desires of those families became more skewed toward impressive luxury than just comfort. Rather than leading into a soaring entryway like Avery welcomed me into, the front door to Albert’s house opens directly into a cozy living room.

I look around at worn but clean, well-maintained furniture and little decorative touches that are surprising in contrast with the man I’ve just met. On the mantel at the far end of the room, I see a bronzed shoe next to several framed photographs. It’s much larger than the baby shoes that are usually given this treatment, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen older children commemorated the same way. Even from this distance, though, I can see that the pictures aren’t portraits. In fact, I don’t see a person in any of them. Instead, they look like just images of locations, including a stream and a clearing in the woods.

Albert walks around me and gestures to the sofa. He chuckles. “Good way to make yourself feel better. Anyway, what can I do for you?”

“Like I said, I wanted to talk to you about Cameron Reed. I’ve been asked to take a closer look at her case, and while I was researching, a mention of you came up.”

His face screws up, and he pulls back slightly. “Me? I barely knew the woman. I don’t think I ever even had a conversation with her. She couldn’t be bothered to say hello even if I was outside.”

“According to her, you never came outside, and the only times she ever saw you was when you were watching her and her son through your front curtains,” I say.

“That’s what she said?” he asks. “The police didn’t tell me that when they came over here to talk to me after that little boy went missing.”

“I don’t know if she even mentioned it to them,” I say. “Did you make a habit of watching them through your front window?”

“I look through my window a lot,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t go outside very much. I don’t like the weather.”

“In general?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “I like to be inside. I don’t garden. I’ve been on disability for thirty years, so I don’t go to work or take long walks around the neighborhood. But I still want to know what’s happening around me. So I watch through the window.”

“Cameron made it sound like you took particular interest in Dustin,” I tell him.

I’m not going to beat around the bush with this man. Even though the police already talked to him during the initial investigation and didn’t find him suspicious in any way, the fact that Cameron needed to mention his behavior to Graham and me means it must’ve been very noticeable. It had an effect on her that lasted for years. There has to be a reason why.

He’s not smiling anymore.

“I was worried,” he finally says.

“Worried? About Cameron?”

“No, the little boy,” he says. “Dustin.”

“Why were you worried about Dustin? Did you think his parents were mistreating him?”

“No, there was nothing wrong with his parents. Like I said, I didn’t know his mother well. But I’d talked to his father a few times, and he seemed like a good man. It wasn’t his parents that concerned me.”

“Then what?”

“The world. We live in a really scary world, Agent. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. Horrible things can happen in even the most peaceful-looking places. I learned that young. Not as young as Dustin, but young enough that it changed me. A murder victim was found in the woods just outside my neighborhood. Up until then, it seemed like such a quiet and unassuming place. Maybe not friendly. People for the most part kept to themselves. But there was never any violence. Never anything that made me afraid.

“But that day police showed up on the street, and I didn’t know what was happening. I thought maybe one of my neighbors had gotten into a dispute with someone, or some teenagers had come through looking for mischief. That happened from time to time, but it was never anything more than garage doors being opened or pumpkins being smashed. At the very worst, they might find an unlocked house and enter to raid the fridge and put a woman’s panties out on the bed. But there weren’t any teenagers living on the street at the time, and it was the middle of the afternoon.

“Later I saw them carrying out a body bag, but it was so small. Only one officer needed to carry it. I found out later it was because they had only found bones. I was only a kid, but it really affected me. After that I started paying better attention to the world around me. I watched the news more. I kept my doors locked. As far as I know, that body was never identified, but I know it was a child. Later on I started hearing about more children going missing and turning up dead. Maybe not all in the same area, but close enough. So I’d watch.”

An uncomfortable feeling prickles at the back of my neck, and the tips of my fingers tingle as a stinging sensation starts up the insides of my arms. That’s a feeling I’ve come to recognize when my thoughts start to churn and my instincts kick in.

The house no longer feels as cozy and welcoming. There’s something eerie about it. That feeling like going somewhere you’ve never been before and feeling like you know it well enough that you could navigate around it, like you’ve seen it all before.

“Did you ever notice anything going on around Dustin or his house that made you more worried? Did you ever see anybody who came back to mind when you heard that he had gone missing?” I ask, wanting to keep him talking until I know where the feeling is coming from.

“Never anything specific. They didn’t have a lot of people come over to their house. I saw a man go over there a couple of times, but never near Dustin. He always looked happy when I saw him.”

“Do you mind if I peek out the window? See what you see?” I ask.

“That’s fine. I’m not doing anything wrong, you know. I’m in my own house. I’m not peeping in windows or watching anyone changing clothes. I just watch while they’re outside and sometimes if other neighbors walk down the street. If I had a ‘Neighborhood Watch’ sign in my front yard, no one would think anything of it,” Albert says.

“That’s probably true,” I agree, getting up from the couch and walking toward the window.

I make it a point to not cross the room directly but to curve my path so that it brings me close to the flight of steps that goes up the wall to the left of the front door. There are more framed pictures hanging along the staircase and a shadow box at the top. Once again the photographs aren’t of people, but places. They don’t look like artist prints. There’s nothing especially compelling or beautiful about any of the images. They are just photos snapped of places, like a field and the doorway to an old, abandoned tree house.

I know that one. Seeing it makes my blood run cold, but I don’t show it. Walking up to the window, I move the curtain aside just enough to look out and peer through the glass at the Reed house.

The vantage point also lets me look out to most of the way up the street. I tilt my head to look as far along the row of houses as I can. As I do this, I can also better see the shadow box hanging from the wall near the top of the stairs. I’m not close enough or at the right angle to clearly see everything inside, but I can tell there is a small baseball hat and a flattened red-and-white striped popcorn box.

“I know how scary it can be to feel like people around you are in danger and there’s nothing you can do about it,” I say as I walk back to the couch. “I don’t have any children, but I have a godchild. It’s hard to believe how big she’s getting, and every time I hear about something happening at a school or a playground, my first thought is her. I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to her. I imagine it would be even scarier for a parent or grandparent. Do you have grandchildren?”

“No,” he tells me. “I never got the privilege.”

His eyes move over to the shoe on the mantel for a fraction of a second, but his expression doesn’t change, and he doesn’t say anything about it. I cross my arm over my face and cough heavily into my elbow a couple of times.

“Sorry, the allergies have been really bad this year.”

It’s still very early in the season for any kind of allergies to be hitting. But anyone who has spent more than a passing afternoon in Virginia knows that winter dies a lingering death but spring clamps you in its teeth like a mountain lion. Everything is all well and good, and you’re just starting to think you might be able to pack away your slipper socks, then the world suddenly explodes in pollen, and no one can breathe. The miracle of a new beginning.

My coughs are convincing enough, though, because Albert gets to his feet.

“Let me get you a glass of water,” he says.

I nod gratefully, continuing to force out coughs. He walks out of the room, and I get to my feet.

“Would you want it warm?” he calls from the back of the house. “Maybe with some honey?”

“Sure,” I yell back, realizing my voice sounds just fine when I talk to him.

Theater has never been my strongest point. I cross the room in a couple of long strides to get to the hanging picture of the tree house. Taking out my phone, I snap a picture of it and run it through my photo-recognition app. The processing takes longer than I want it to, and I fill the time by bounding up the stairs by twos until I’m near the top and in front of the shadow box. Inside I see the hat and the popcorn box against a backdrop of a field of grass. It would look like a sweet tribute to a young baseball player for a parent or grandparent to have, but I know Albert is neither.

I also know that Brian Kravitz was at a Little League game when he went missing, and when his body was found, his hat was missing.

“I added a squirt of lemon juice,” Albert says.

His voice is coming closer, and I start back down the stairs. He comes in just as I’m at the landing. Stopping, he gives me a questioning look.

“Restroom?” I ask.

He turns and points behind him at a short hallway leading off the dining room beyond the living room.

“First door on your right.”

“Thank you,” I say, rushing past him with my phone screen turned and pressed against my thigh.

I go down the hallway into the bathroom and lock the door. Looking down at my phone, I check the results of the photo recognition. There are a few images that are similar, but not exact matches. I scan down the results and land on the one I was expecting. I forward the picture to Marsha Lawson, a detective I encountered briefly during a prior case. With the picture sent, I call her.

“Marsha, this is Emma Griffin,” I say when she answers.

“This is a surprise, Agent. How are things in Sherwood? I hear your husband has hung up his sheriff’s spurs.”

“He has,” I tell her quickly. “I’m calling because I am currently in Cherry Hill. I just sent you a picture. I am at the home of Albert Gleason, 142 Oak Grove Court. I need backup.”

“Is everything all right?” she asks, her tone suddenly serious.

“Right now I am safe, but I believe there’s reason to bring Mr. Gleason into custody and conduct a thorough search of his house.”

“What’s this about?” the detective asks.

“Possible serial murder.”

I end the call and turn on the sink, splashing in the water for a couple of seconds for good measure. Usually, I don’t resort to games like this, but it’s uncommon for me to walk into something as unexpected as the disturbing memorabilia adorning Albert Gleason’s home. He thought being open about his odd behavior and attaching it to a tearjerker story would deflect any suspicion from him. And it almost worked. He willingly let me into the house and talked to me without any effort to conceal the bizarre photographs on the mantel and the wall.

He didn’t expect that the shoe would draw my attention so much or that I would immediately recognize the picture of the tree house. Now that I have, I need to know what else he has squirreled away in the house.

But I can’t let him know my suspicions. As an FBI agent, my authority to make arrests is limited and specific. Though the pictures and objects I’ve seen do give me reasonable grounds to believe Albert Gleason is guilty of a felony offense, it’s rarely a good idea for any agent or officer to attempt any type of arrest or seizure alone. Even though Gleason is at least a couple of decades older than me, the trigger of a gun doesn’t care about age.

Mine is in its harness on my hip where it always is. I can rely on it being there if I need it. But that’s the point. If I need it. I hope I won’t. I always hope I won’t. I once said that no agent goes into a situation looking forward to the opportunity to use their firearm, and if they do, it should be the last day they are on the job.

I’m about to open the bathroom door when I hear something on the other side. It’s a low sound—a soft scraping, something that would be easy to miss.

My muscles tighten, and my spine straightens. I look down and see a shadow move across the space beneath the door. Albert is on the other side trying not to make any noise. He doesn’t want me to know he’s there. I am positive he’s not just standing there. He’s planning something.

Glancing behind me, I see the window. It’s fairly high off the ground, but it’s large enough that I should have no problem slipping through. I carefully ease the window open and plant one boot on the lid of the toilet to give me leverage to get up over the sill. I don’t hear Albert making any sounds or trying to get into the room, so I guess he didn’t hear the window opening. I drop down to the grass beneath the window and run to the corner of the house.

Resting my hand over my gun, I carefully look around the corner. I don’t see anyone, but I do notice an open window. Albert locked the front door after letting me in, so this is my only way of getting back into the house. I could just wait here for Marsha to send her team, but I’m not particularly a patient person in moments like these.

It’s harder to climb up into the window than it was to get out, but fortunately, it’s not high off the ground, and I’m able to easily slip through. A dresser right on the other side provides a platform for me to slide over. I land on my feet on a thick rug. Looking around the room, my stomach turns. The photographs and bronzed shoe in the living room were mild compared to the shrine I’m now standing in.

All around me are pieces of memorabilia from various murders. I don’t recognize all of them or know the significance of all the pieces, but I know what I’m looking at. There are pieces of clothing, many still bloodstained and featuring the rips and gouges of the weapons that claimed the victims, and personal items. There’s a pendant displayed against a piece of black velvet, and there’s a teddy bear sitting on a small table with a tag around its wrist. Stacks of scrapbooks sit on several surfaces, and I flip one open to find it full of newspaper clippings, crime scene and autopsy photographs, and copies of reports. Many of the photographs are not professionally taken. These are not the official images kept in the files of the crimes. They were taken by someone who was at the scene.

“Agent Griffin?” Albert calls out.

His voice sounds like he is still just outside the bathroom door, and the sound of him knocking confirms it. I take my gun from my holster and walk to the door of the room. Grasping the knob, I throw the door open quickly and direct my gun at him.

Albert turns, his own weapon held tightly in one hand. I see the look of shock and fear on his face. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous. Someone who is afraid in the face of law enforcement is often like a caged dog. They are even more reactive and have the potential for tremendous risk.

“Put the gun down,” I command.

“How did you get in there?” he asks.

“Put the gun down,” I say louder. “Put it on the ground, and step away from it.”

“You shouldn’t be in there, Agent Griffin.”

“Now!”

He starts to lift the gun toward me, and I crack the back of my hand across his cheek. It knocks him off balance, and the gun falls from his hand. I kick it to the side and meet him on the floor. I was trying to handle this a different way, but he didn’t give me a choice. My knee pressed into his back, I hold on to his wrists so he can’t move.

“You really shouldn’t put furniture under a window,” I tell him. “It’s just asking for someone to sneak inside.”

“You can’t do this!” he says, thrashing against my weight in the small of his back. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

It’s the universal response of someone finding themselves facedown with a federal agent on their back, and in this situation, it is simply laughable.

“Then explain to me how you have pictures of the places where at least four murder victims were found,” I ask him. “I’m assuming the other pictures have a similar significance. I’m just not familiar with them. That doesn’t matter though. It’s easy to find. And what about the shadowbox hanging on your wall that has Brian Kravitz’s hat in it? He was wearing that hat before he disappeared, and when he was found murdered, the hat was gone. Now it’s on your wall.”

“I didn’t kill him,” he insists. “I didn’t kill any of them.”

“That shoe on your mantel—who does it belong to?” I ask.

“It’s just a decoration,” he mutters into the floor.

“This is not the time for you to try to be cute,” I tell him. “Who does it belong to?”

“Kelsey Forrester,” he says.

The name doesn’t sound familiar. From the front of the house, I hear heavy knocking on the door.

“This is Special Agent Emma Griffin. The front door is locked!” I shout, hopefully loud enough for the officers on the other side of the door to hear me. “Go around to the side of the house, and enter through the open window. I am in the hallway just outside the room.”

Albert thrashes against me again, and I push harder into him. A few moments later, three officers scramble into the room ahead of us and enter from the hallway. They help me get Albert to his feet, and one puts handcuffs on his wrists.

“There’s a firearm right there,” I say. “He threatened me with it.”

One of the officers goes to the living room and unlocks the door.

“Agent Griffin?”

I hear Marsha’s voice and go out to the living room.

“What in the living hell is going on here?” she asks.

Albert looks older and more disheveled now that he’s been changed into an orange jumpsuit. One ankle is chained to the leg of a table screwed to the tile floor in the interrogation room. I walk in and close the door behind me.

“Can you tell them to take this thing off?” he asks, shaking his leg to make the chain rattle.

“It’s a safety protocol,” I tell him.

“Are you scared of me, Agent Griffin?” he asks.

“Not at all,” I answer without hesitation. “But you did threaten to shoot me.”

His head hangs for a second before he lifts his watery-green eyes back to me.

“When am I going to get out of here?”

“I have a feeling it’s going to be a while,” I tell him. “You haven’t secured counsel yet according to the detective, and I highly doubt the magistrate is going to look kindly on what I found in your house. I don’t think you’re going to be getting bail.”

“Because of some pictures and a couple of pieces of clothing?” he asks.

“Seriously? That’s how you’re going to sum up your disturbing little collection?”

He doesn’t say anything, and I sit down hard in the chair across from him, setting a folder down on the table. It has pictures of many of the items I saw in his house.

“You have pictures of the exact places where multiple murder victims were discovered. In some cases, you have pictures of the actual victim. Plus autopsy reports, news articles, toxicology.” I flip through the pages in the folder. “Then we get to the personal objects. While you were changing into your fetching new outfit and taking some time to cool off in here, I was doing some research. I looked up Kelsey Forrester. He was murdered ten years ago, and then his family’s house was robbed. A lot of his things went missing, including a pair of shoes he was wearing at the time of his death. Much like the hat Brian Kravitz was wearing when he died but wasn’t found with his body. There’s a team going through every nook and cranny of your house right now, and I’m sure they are finding all kinds of gruesome goodies that you surely can’t wait to explain to a judge. But do you know which one I’m most interested in?”

He glares at me like he’s trying to burn a hole through the back of my head with his tired eyes.

“What?” he finally asks.

“A blue comb.”

I wait for his reaction, but Albert doesn’t flinch.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Translucent blue plastic. The kind you fit in your pocket. It has initials on it. D. R. Do you know who that is?”

He still doesn’t say anything, and I sigh.

“Wow. You are seriously bad at guessing games. D. R. would be Dustin Reed. That comb was a gift from his mother in his Christmas stocking that last year. Apparently, he loved to try to style his hair, and it never turned out well. But he kept that comb in his pocket and would give himself touch-ups in the bathroom mirror. He had it before he went to school the morning he disappeared. But when his body was found, his comb wasn’t with him. And that’s because it’s in an acrylic box sitting on a desk in your guest room from hell.”

“I didn’t do anything to any of those people,” Albert says.

“Why do you have those things in your house?” I ask.

“They fascinate me,” he says. “Everybody collects something. Some people like baseball cards, other people have thousands of porcelain cats. There’s a fandom for everything.”

I’m baffled that I’m hearing this. Not just because of how off-putting it sounds to hear a man of Albert’s age and disconnect from society say something like “fandom,” but just how mind-bogglingly ridiculous it is.

“Murder is not a fucking fandom,” I snap. “The deaths of children aren’t collectibles.”

“They are if you know where to look,” Albert says.

As soon as it’s out of his mouth, he looks like he regrets saying it. My heart feels like a stone in my chest.

“Where do I look?” I ask slowly.

“Get me my laptop, and I’ll show you. It’s at my house, under my bed.”

“I can get you a department computer to use,” I tell him.

“It has to be mine. The ones here won’t work for this. If you want to see, you have to get mine.”

It takes half an hour to secure the laptop, but when I get it to him, Albert immediately starts typing commands into it. I stand directly behind him with an officer at my side holding a camera focused on the computer. I want to make absolutely sure that he’s not going to delete anything that could be considered evidence.

Finally, he ventures beyond the conventional internet and into the kind of grimy, dark corner few can fathom. The website he brings up is nothing short of vile. If I hadn’t actually seen the items in his house, I would have trouble believing this was real.

“It’s an online marketplace,” he says. “It specializes in all forms of the macabre, including verified murder investigation documents and memorabilia.”

I take a second to wrap my head around what he’s showing me. Apart from the cringey black-and-red color scheme that looks straight out of an early 2000s high school computer programming course, the site looks like any other online marketplace. Items are advertised in listings that have pictures, titles, descriptions, and asking prices.

“Personal objects, especially ones that were a part of the murder scene, are especially popular. Sometimes they even come with documents of authenticity. That might be a picture that shows the object with the body, a police report mentioning it in an inventory, that kind of thing. Just like ordering something from eBay, you choose what you want, agree to the price, and put in your payment information, then it’s shipped to you.”

I can’t believe what I’m seeing, but at the same time, I can. “People go on this site to buy shreds of bloody clothing that were on dead bodies and just go ahead and put in their credit card information?”.

I know a few cyber forensics agents who would jump at the opportunity to wade through this monstrosity and sift out all the names and pieces of identifying information they could find.

And Xavier.

I don’t want to know what he could do with a site like this after hacking into it. Actually, yes, I do.

“I don’t know about everybody who uses it, but I don’t use my regular credit card. I buy gift cards made by the credit card companies. Even something like a money order can be traced.”

“I need to know who is behind this,” I say.

“I don’t know,” Albert tells me.

“Protecting them isn’t going to do you any favors,” I say.

“I’m not protecting anyone,” he insists. “I don’t know. Nothing comes with a return address. Different deliveries come with postmarks from different places. There are no receipts. No returns. I don’t know who any of the sellers are or how they get their hands on this stuff to start with. They don’t ask any questions, so neither do I.”

I look at the officer standing beside me. “Seize the computer, and put him back in his cell.”

I start for the door, and Albert’s chains clang against the table as he lurches toward me.

“Wait! You’re keeping me here?”

I turn back around to look at him. “No, we’re keeping you in the jail.”

“You’re going to charge me?”

“Are you serious?”

“For what? I just showed you I bought those things. I didn’t have anything to do with the people being killed.”

“You trafficked in stolen merchandise and withheld evidence from criminal investigations. And I’m sure the prosecutor could sprinkle in some obstruction charges as well for not reporting this to authorities.”

I walk back toward him and lean in close so I’m only a few inches from his face.

“There was a little boy named Dustin Reed you used to watch constantly from your window. You say it was because you were worried about him and to protect him, but the truth is, you were so obsessed with him you couldn’t keep yourself away. And then you felt like you needed to buy a blue plastic comb that is just now sitting in evidence after three years instead of making sure it got to authorities.”

“Why would it matter? They already got his killer,” Albert says.

“When was the comb posted for sale?” I ask.

“I bought it as soon as it was posted. The middle of May.”

“Cameron Reed was arrested at the end of April.”

His mouth falls open. “But… that doesn’t mean…”

“That comb was in Dustin’s pocket when he left for school the morning he disappeared. Not only did he always have it, but one of the clips of video that was used in a tribute to him was taken right after the event that day. He takes the comb out of his pocket, uses it, and puts it back in. When his body was found, he was wearing different clothing than he was last seen in and didn’t have the comb. Which means it was taken from him after he disappeared. Whoever sold you that comb either killed Dustin or was there during his captivity, and by the time it was put on the market, his mother was already in jail, being held without bond.”

“Oh god. She didn’t kill him,” Albert murmurs under his breath, his eyes dropping to the table in front of him and widening like he’s trying to force the reality through his head until it processes.

“No,” I say, “she didn’t. But she got dragged through the court system, railroaded, and has been sitting in prison for it. And you could have helped stop it. But you didn’t. So now I’ll make sure the prosecutor finds every possible charge she can stick you with, and I’ll go to every single day of your trial to make sure that you get what’s coming to you.”

I go back to the door.

“Hey! But I helped you now, didn’t I? I’ve got to get something for that.”

I turn around. “You’re right.” I give a sarcastic curtsy. “Thank you.” I stand and look at the officer. “Get him out of here.”

I bring Albert’s computer back to Sherwood with me, and when Sam gets home from work, he finds me scouring the hellish website. He glances at the screen briefly as he walks by but doesn’t realize what he’s seen until he comes back in the room with one of the sandwiches I made and left on the kitchen table.

“What are you looking at?” he asks.

There’s some levity in his voice. It’s something he adopted after we got married. It’s that little bit of hope that he’s holding on to that what he thinks is going on actually isn’t. That little bit of reassurance to himself that I’m going to explain it to him and he’s going to have a good laugh about it. In truth, that very rarely happens for him. And it certainly isn't going to today.

I explain what happened with Albert and show him the website.

“That is seriously sick,” Sam says.

“Yes, it is. Unfortunately, it won’t be accessible for much longer. I’ve already forwarded the information to Eric, and he is creating a task force to dismantle it. It looks like a piece of trash school project, but I have a feeling a lot of that is smoke and mirrors. This is just a modern interpretation of trafficking in grave goods. Whoever built this thing, and is operating it, knows their audience. The demographic interested in taking a sightseeing cruise down the River Styx and bringing home a framed tattoo cut off a murder victim’s back as a souvenir doesn’t want a website that looks like it could be run by the government. The lower quality and seedier it looks, the more they’re going to trust it.”

“Why are you still looking at it?” he asks. “It’s only going to make you angry.”

“Yes, it will,” I say, skimming by an advertisement for a woman’s braid that gives interested shoppers the option to make an offer rather than just accept the posted price. “But there’s more to it than just the postings themselves.”

“Like what?” he asks.

I point along the sidebars of the site. “You see all these? It’s just like any other website. These are ads.”

“Why do I feel like we’re not going to find a pop-up for a time-share opportunity?” he asks.

“Well, we might. Just not anywhere we’d want to go, and I’m going to take the leap in saying their entertainment and activity schedule doesn’t include pickleball.”

“Damn pickleball,” Xavier mutters under his breath as he walks through the living room to the front door and outside.

Sam and I look at each other.

He holds up his hands. “I knew he was here this time. If you didn’t, that’s on you.”

I get up and jog out to catch up with him.

“X!”

He’s already halfway down the block toward my grandparents’ house. For someone who finished his first 5K right about the time when people were starting to take apart the balloon arch over the finish line, Xavier is surprisingly speedy. I wonder how much of that I can contribute to Cupcake’s incessant hydration reminders and him now spending large amounts of time each day running after his colony of cats.

He stops and turns around. “You’re in your pajamas, Emma.”

I look down and remember I changed when I got home. I didn’t even choose a pair of decent black leggings and a sweatshirt. I went for my pink satin.

“Damn it,” I say with a flail. I look around. None of my neighbors are outside. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever. I wanted to tell you, Cameron didn’t kill Dustin.”

“I know that. I already told you that.”

“I know you did, but I had to look into it, Xavier. You have to understand that.”

“I told you I knew she didn’t do it,” he emphasizes.

“Yes, I know. But I had my instincts too. I knew there was something about her, and I was right. She didn’t kill her son, X, but there are still things she did do. She tried to have her husband beaten. She had at least one affair. She—”

“Emma.”

“What?”

“I said she didn’t kill Dustin. I didn’t say she’s a good person. They can both be true.”

“Yes, they can,” I say, feeling tension run out of me. “Are you going to the other house? Is Dean back?”

“Not yet. I have to check in on some of the sourdough babies and get some discard for bread to have with dinner. I decided they were getting old enough that I didn’t need to have them at your house while I was visiting. They’re at camp,” he tells me.

“Who is in charge?”

“Glutenous Maximus.”

“Emma?” Sam is calling me from the front door.

Xavier cranes his neck to look over me.

“The porch lights aren’t even on!”

I hug Xavier and jog back toward the house. A whistle that I’m going to tell myself was about something completely unrelated to my shiny, shorty pajamas emanates from down the street somewhere. Sam is back inside when I get to the house, and I lock the door behind me.

“Xavier is making buns,” I say.

“Good. We’ll have actual hamburgers tonight. I needed to show you this.”

He’s in front of Albert’s computer and seems to have gotten drawn into the same horrific whirlpool effect I did. His eyes don’t blink as he looks over a list of offerings that include documents I know could have only come from a medical examiner or someone in their office.

“What is it?”

“The same seller who sold Dustin’s comb has other active listings,” he says. “I wanted to see if I could get any more information about what Albert has been doing here. Unsurprisingly, you need an account, but it doesn’t have any verifiable personal information on it. It’s not like people are using pictures of their faces as their avatars. I looked at Albert’s account, but it is really sparse. They don’t even keep track of what’s been purchased. I guess they’re trying to protect their privacy.”

“A lot more likely is that the company is trying to limit their liability. If all the profiles on the website had listings of everything that they had purchased, not only would it connect the buyer to all those illegal items and the seller to the act of acquiring and selling the items, but it would be an ongoing chronicle of what was bought and sold on the website, which would immediately come down on the individual or organization behind it. They’re trying to cover their asses. Just in case the hammer does come down, at the very least, the number and scope of items offered is going to look a lot less,” I say.

“That’s also true. But remember what you said about the type of person that this design would appeal to. Somebody who doesn’t want to feel like they are interacting with a shell made by the government because it looks too polished and professional. But you also have to think about age. What looks interesting and compelling to one age bracket is totally different from another. And it’s usually skewed older for things meant to look younger.”

“So essentially, this would appeal to people who were young to mid-adults about thirty years ago. Like Albert.”

“Yes. Now, thinking about his age group, consider their organizational patterns, especially when it comes to their finances. They were taught to keep track of everything. I remember my father having a giant file cabinet in his office, and he kept absolutely everything that had to do with spending money on something or what he owed. After he died, I cleaned that thing out and found folders with ten years’ worth of paper electric bills organized and notated as to when he paid, exactly how much he paid, and how he paid.

“He tried to teach me the fine art of how to keep your finances organized in a world before computers, but I am a calculator-and-online-spreadsheet kind of guy. One thing I did inherit from him, though, is a particular affinity for something you could find a million of in the home and office of every person around this age and older…” That pause in his voice was the verbal equivalent of a drumroll for him.

“Receipts?”

He clicks dramatically on a tab at the bottom of the screen, and a single-page document pops up.

“Receipts!” he says. “I figured it was really likely, especially since the website itself doesn’t actually keep any of those records, that Albert would either have requested receipts from the seller or, more likely, made them himself for his own records. I poked around a bit and here we go.”

“You really worked on your buildup for that one,” I tell him. “But this is fantastic.”

“Hey, I don’t get to be the one to have a meaningful idea in a case before you very often. I wanted to milk it,” he says.

“And it’s great,” I tell him. “You did a good job.” He still looks a little disappointed. “Do you want to milk it some more?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” I ask. “Because you can.”

“No, I’m good.”

“All right.” I lean around him and go through the commands to send the receipt to the wireless printer in my office. “Now show me these other listings.”

He points out the name of the seller on the receipt.

“‘Her_Guardian.’”

“No other information than that?” he asks.

“No. I looked up the account under that name, and there isn’t any information there either. It just has the specifications of how long this person has had an account, a couple of personal statements, bits of really dramatic poetry, and a list of everything they have up for sale at the moment. It looks like this guy is having a bit of a fire sale.”

He brings up the profile, and I look at a long list of items posted for sale. Most of them are fairly generic—if that’s a word that can be applied in this kind of situation. Anybody who knows how to make the correct request could access the body camera footage used to isolate stills of bodies and the aftermath of murder.

It’s not something I would necessarily think of as universal knowledge, but anybody who spends any time online knows that video-sharing sites are overflowing with channels dedicated to true crime. Most of them feature pictures and often videos of crime scenes and investigations. Accessing that information just requires knowing who to reach out to. There are laws in place that protect the right of the public to view and even acquire this footage and information, and as long as it is being presented in what’s considered fair use, it’s completely legal to present and comment on.

While a lot of the footage that comes from these types of channels are redacted or strategically obscured, that isn’t always the case. Particularly in older footage, everything is fully visible down to the last detail, which makes it perfect for somebody looking to isolate a grisly still to sell to a morbid collector. The way that this seller presents the items makes it seem like they have some sort of insider access or even that they might have taken the images themselves, but I can readily recognize the way the footage is taken and how the images are captured.

As I scan further, though, I notice offerings with sickeningly familiar names in the titles. One by one, posts appear listing items related to the deaths of Brian Kravitz, Jayden Waller, Logan Smith, and Dustin Reed. The screen moves lower, and it’s there. Charles McGeary.

“All these posts are offering articles of clothing or personal belongings. Jayden’s socks, still dirty from walking through the yard. Logan’s undershirt, stained with juice. Dustin’s backpack. Charles’s keychain,” I say.

“Some of those things would be really easy to fake though. There were a lot of pictures of Dustin with his backpack on all over the place. It was just a red backpack. All somebody would have to do is get the same brand and add his name on it in black marker,” Sam says.

“That’s true. Things like the key chain would also just be a matter of buying it. It’s not like whoever orders it is going to bring it to his parents for verification. But I’m more interested in the fact that there are articles of clothing being offered. The fact that Dustin and Charles were both found in different clothing than what they were wearing when they disappeared was made public. That detail wasn’t in the media for Logan, yet his clothing is being offered. And the ones who were found in different clothing and the media released it, the reports didn’t give a breakdown of what they were wearing when they went missing. Yet they are very specific in offering items like an undershirt. That tells me this is more than likely legitimate.”

I get to the bottom of the description of offerings and see a contact form.

“This is a place where you can make requests,” I say. “Like somebody trying to find a specific figurine in a series.” I shake my head and close the computer sharply. “I can’t look at that anymore right now.”

I get my own computer and set it on the table. The butcher paper from when I made my first notes of the investigation is still taped up to the wall, and I get the paper calendar out from under the coffee table where I stashed it so it wouldn’t be in the way.

“Babe, it’s late,” Sam says.

“I have to do this,” I tell him. “Up until now, I’ve just been looking into Dustin’s case to see if I thought there was any merit to trying to get a new trial for Cameron. From the very beginning, I’ve said that the investigation was mishandled. Now I think it was so mishandled they completely missed a serial killer right in front of them. This could happen again. Easily. This guy is operating right now, and no one has even noticed. Each of the victims has been seen as an isolated incident despite all the similarities. Which means there could be more.” I look at the calendar. “Eleven more.”

“Do you think this guy’s trying to get to a certain number?” Sam asks.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t look like the numbers have any particular significance beyond just them being in numerical order. I’ll have to look deeper to make sure, but it doesn’t seem like those numbers have anything to do with the victims. There’s no special meaning to those numbers in the lives of the boys. Like Brian Kravitz was a baseball player, but that wasn’t his jersey number. I haven’t seen anything that suggests a purpose beyond just chronology.

“But in a way, that just makes it more challenging. Think about the case that brought me back to Sherwood. When you called me to help with the missing children. Every one of those victims had initials that were the same for first and last names. So the killer went in alphabetical order, but he only chose victims with double initials. Knowing that helped to narrow down which victim might come next. I don’t think there’s any sort of rhyme or reason here.

“Tomorrow morning I need to get in touch with the lead investigators for all these cases and get as much information as they will possibly give me. These murders happened in different places, years apart, but there are common threads, and if we can find all those threads, we can find who did this.”

“And for now?” Sam asks.

“For now I’m going to go through the inventory of everything in Albert’s disgusting collection and see if I can make any other connections. He has items from at least three of these victims. I don’t know if that’s because he has a type or if he knows they’re connected. But it’s a start.”

The first thing I do is search through the inventory list looking for the names of the victims associated with the individual items. Not everything in Albert’s collection was attributed to a specific victim. Instead, he also had more general items, including weapons with human blood on them and photographs of crime scenes that didn’t include historical details but I’m assuming were just bought for the visual impact.

For the ones that do have names attached to them, I sift out any that are total outliers. Those that happened far too many years ago or in such far-flung locations that it is illogical. Victims in later adulthood. Well-known victims of crimes that have already been conclusively solved.

It leaves me with victims that fit the same demographic. Young males who disappeared from familiar, public places, were missing for between two and six weeks, and then were found dead. I look specifically for cases with victims who were obviously kept alive for nearly all the time they were missing, being killed less than twenty-four hours prior to being found. When I find one who fits those specifications, I check the date he was found and note it on the calendar.

There’s one victim that seems to check all the boxes, but his body was found on the twenty-ninth, two years before Dustin. Making sure that the number of the date they were found on also corresponds to the chronological order of the years in which they were found makes the search more tangled, but it cuts down the possibilities until I’ve filled in four more potential cases.

As the list whittles down, I come upon the picture of the tree house again. I first saw it during a workshop I attended years ago focused on seemingly impossible-to-solve cold crimes and how they should be approached. It has shown up a few more times in my investigations of cold crimes and missing children. It is, by far, not the first image of its type. I have several pictures or names that seem to cycle through my sphere of awareness on a regular basis. They pop up as I search for possible connections in other cases or research certain areas.

This picture of the tree house is just one of those images. It struck me the first time I saw it. It’s not a particularly impressive tree house in any way. It isn’t big or elaborate. It looks essentially like a box made of individual slats of wood with a slightly sloped roof built up in the branches of a large tree.

The tree house is built around the trunk itself for more stability, with the floor area jutting out so it looks almost like it’s floating. Rather than be amazed by the architectural prowess or any significant artistic merit to the image, I was affected by the simplicity and eerie nostalgia of that location.

The picture of the tree house doesn’t have anything else in it but the tree house itself and a section of woods around it. It makes the structure look totally isolated, like it has always been there, just a part of the woods itself. It’s obvious in the picture that it was not in regular use at the moment that the picture was taken. Nobody is running out into the woods to scramble up into that house. And yet it also doesn’t look like it has been completely abandoned. It isn’t falling apart or succumbing to the weather. It looks worn and used, but still very much like someone could, in fact, at any moment scramble up inside it.

That’s what made the story of it so uncomfortable. Despite having seen the picture so many times, I’ve never stopped to thoroughly research it and get all the specifics. All I have to go on is the basic, trimmed-down version of the story that was shared with us at the workshop.

According to that story, nobody really remembers who built that tree house. It was just there. It was hidden so far back in the woods at the back of a neighborhood that a lot of people didn’t know it existed at all. If you knew where to look, though, it was the perfect retreat.

Since that community had once been all private land, there was a theory for a while that the tree house was built in the woods when it was still just someone’s backyard. Then they were driven off by the community being built, and the tree house was left there. It didn’t sound like there was much historical record to give that story validity. Besides, the structure didn’t look anywhere near old enough to have outdated the first houses put in that neighborhood.

The reason for the interest surrounding the tree house, though, happened a few decades ago. Just like in most neighborhoods, the number of children ebbed and flowed. Sometimes a dozen or more children were jumping on trampolines and running off into the woods to play imaginative games. And other times, only one or two.

The fact that the neighborhood went through a long stretch without many children was probably how it was possible for a skeletal body to be found at the tree house.

Suddenly reminded of the story of the picture, I start researching. I run it through the picture-recognition app again to find the image online, then look for articles that will give me the full story. It happened so long ago that the murder has gone through changes and embellishments, ending up on countdown lists of the creepiest places where people died or even ghost story sites that insist people know the tree house is haunted. I’m not interested in any of that. I want to know the facts, the truth about the tree house.

It’s much more difficult to find verifiable, reliable news sources for murders that happened thirty or more years ago than it is for more contemporary cases. There was no internet, no home computers. There were newspapers and evening broadcasts, which means unless those were effectively archived, it’s challenging to find any firsthand information.

Finally, I track down the earliest instance of that picture that I can find and read the news clip attached to it. When I’m done, I feel breathless. I go back through what Albert told me when I interviewed him about his seeming obsession with Dustin, his constant staring through the window.

I pull up property records and trace moves, career changes, even library book fines. All tiny little fragmentary breadcrumbs of a person’s life that can be easily found online if you know how to search hard enough and that can let you track their entire lives.

When Sam wakes up the next morning, I am in the kitchen making breakfast. I passed out for an hour or two on the couch, but I haven’t been able to sleep any more than that. My mind is racing.

“I’ve already reached out to the detectives and the investigators. I couldn’t get all of them, but the ones I did were willing to work with me. We are creating a network where we can utilize all our resources to compare the cases that I’ve identified and confirm if they are connected,” I tell him.

“That’s fantastic,” Sam says. “Do you think you’ve found all the cases?”

“There are a couple of gaps. But I found something else.”

I show him the picture of the tree house.

“This was one of the things that was in Albert’s house. It was actually what got my attention the most because I had already seen this picture. It’s from a case that I studied during a workshop years ago. I immediately recognized it as a crime scene. That gave context to the other pictures around the room. None of them had people in them. It was all just these strange little bits of land. Now I realize that one of them is where Brian Kravitz was found. One of them is a hunting ground where at least six bodies were found lined up head to toe, and no one has been able to solve it. Two others were of other victims on the calendar, including Dustin.

“What I found particularly interesting about it the more I thought about it was that the other pictures all had connections to other parts of his collection. The photograph of the island in the middle of the lake where Dustin was found connects to his comb. He had the picture of where Brian was found and then his hat. It was like he had chosen his favorite items and then wanted to have a picture of where they were.

“When I questioned him about having all that stuff, he talked about it like any other collection. He even referred to it as a fandom. So that’s how I tried to look at it. It would be like somebody who had a favorite baseball team. They would have a baseball card of their favorite player, a replica of their jersey, and also a still image from a game that they performed particularly well in.

“These collectibles build on each other and take on greater value the more items connect together. So I went through the inventory and made all those connections, but there was nothing that I could connect to the picture of the tree house. It was the only picture that didn’t have several other items from the same crime.”

“Maybe he just hadn’t gotten around to collecting anything from it… yet,” Sam says.

“No, it’s because he didn’t need anything else. He was there.”

Sam’s eyes widen. “Albert killed somebody in the tree house?”

“No, but he was there when the body was found. He told me that the primary reason he looked out his window all the time and watched Dustin was that he witnessed a body being found near his house when he was young. And that’s what he said—when he was young. So I interpreted that as he was a child. But this case happened when he was in his early thirties. Comparatively speaking, that’s young.

“He was living in North Carolina. A neighbor across the street was walking his dog, and the dog found an arm bone in the woods. The man didn’t know where it came from and wasn’t about to go to try to find out. Instead, he went home and called the police. They searched the woods and ended up finding the rest of the skeletal remains in and around the old tree house. Apparently, there were a few bones on the ground and others actually located inside the tree house itself.

“At first there was some question as to whether the woman might have been hanging from the tree or the tree house and over time the bones just scattered naturally, but later it was concluded that she had been murdered inside the tree house and left there. Eventually, animals started to pull her body out, and the dog found that arm bone,” I say.

“And Albert was there to see that?” Sam asks.

“Yes. He acted like it traumatized him so much that he had to start watching people through his window and staying inside because it was the only thing that made him feel safe. I think it’s the total opposite. It fascinated him. He couldn’t get over the idea of this body being in the woods and then the police not knowing who she was or how she died.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with Dustin or the other victims,” Sam says.

“I think I do.”

“I tried not to baby Dustin when he told me that he was being bullied,” Cameron tells me. “It wasn’t that I didn’t have any sympathy or that I didn’t want him to feel better. I was trying to help him feel strong. I didn’t want him to feel like this was a really big deal or that he should be scared. I knew that it was really bothering him. I knew that he was struggling with it. But he was such a happy kid for the most part. Even when those children were picking on him, he could still have a great rest of his day. He could still come home and tell me how upset he was about what they were doing but then tell me what a fantastic painting he made in art class or the funny story that was told during circle time.

“I didn’t want to take that away from him. I didn’t want him to feel like if he was being targeted, that meant there was something wrong with him or that this was what his life was going to be like forever. I tried to downplay it as much as I could and just focus on the good things that were happening in his life.”

“But the teachers did tell you that he was still experiencing conflicts with these particular students and that it was resulting in him leaving school,” I say.

“They never told me that he left school. I got a couple of messages from the principal and from his teacher who said that he had left class or that when he asked to go to the restroom, he didn’t come back in a normal amount of time and they found him in a different classroom. They made it seem much more like they were mad at him for going somewhere he wasn’t supposed to go than they were concerned about why it was happening.

“I talked to Dustin about it, but now I realize I should have said more. I should have emphasized to him that if he really was having trouble with these kids, that he needed to talk to his teacher, talk to his principal, talk to me. That we were there to protect him and try to make things better for him. That we would find a way to stop it from happening. I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I feel like I drove him to hide it even more. He didn’t want to disappoint me or make me feel like there was something wrong with him.”

“But you never knew that he actually left the school building?” I ask.

“No, they didn’t tell me that. If I had known that, it would have been a very serious conversation with him and with the school. There’s no excuse for a school environment to exist where a six-year-old could walk out of a building without anybody noticing until he got himself locked out,” she says.

“I agree. Unfortunately, that was still going on right up until the day he disappeared. I spoke with his teacher and the principal, and they both told me that on that day, he did have a confrontation with a couple of his bullies. I don’t know all the details. It doesn’t really matter at this point what they were bullying him about. What I believe happened is that he experienced another run-in with these kids and decided that it was just too much and he needed to get away.

“The entire school had been outfitted with different activities and displays for the parent event, so none of the usual classrooms where he would go to hide were available to him. So he left the school that day. He walked out of the building, and from there, it’s still a gap. We don’t have any way of proving exactly where he went, only that he did leave the school building itself and likely the property. I went to your old house. I know that it was not very far away from the school. There is a strong possibility he was trying to walk home,” I say.

“He just never made it.”

“Yes,” I say.

“I need to know who did this to him. And anybody else he hurt.”

“You will. I promise you that.” I stand up to walk out of the visitation room. “Cameron, what was Dustin’s favorite food?”

“His favorite food?”

“Yes. If you told him that the two of you were going to go out and get dinner together and he could choose, what would he pick?” I ask.

“Macaroni and cheese. He would eat his weight in that. There are not many restaurants that have it, but when he found one, he latched right on.”

I smile. “Thank you.”

“Have you gone through everything?” I ask Marsha when I leave the interrogation room.

She has agreed to cooperate with the larger investigation into all of what I believe are the connected victims of this serial killer. Rather than leaving me to go through all the reports and records on my own, she has several officers helping. It’s saving me a tremendous amount of time and getting us closer by the moment to stopping this man.

“Just about. There are a couple more that we are getting last-minute details about. But you’re right. Another consistency across the board is that all these victims seem to have been extremely well taken care of while they were in captivity. None of them show any sign of restraint or being beaten. They were all clean, and they had all been fed fairly large meals within a very short time of their deaths,” she says.

“And you have stomach content reports?” I ask.

“Craig is compiling them for you.”

“Perfect.”

As soon as I have the report listing the stomach contents found in each of the victims, I print out maps of the area around the location where each of the victims was found. Spreading them out across the table, I start marking the exact location of each of the bodies and then identifying fast-food and takeout restaurants in the area.

It doesn’t take long for me to see the pattern. There’s no consistency across the board of the stomach contents for the victims. A couple of them do overlap, but there is a broad range of what these boys were fed just before they died. Hamburgers, pizza, noodles, cheesecake, macaroni and cheese. Each of the children was fed something specific, probably their favorite food, just before they died.

Detailed forensic examination of the contents of one of the victims who had eaten a hamburger just before death was able to state that that burger did come from a specific fast-food establishment. I’m able to take that and mark it on the map. It gives me a general radius I can apply to the other maps so I know where to look for the right restaurants.

When I feel confident about a few of the victims, I go back to Albert’s computer and the grave-goods marketplace. Bringing up the account for Her_Guardian, I select the contact form and put in a request.

Do you have access to receipts from these boys’ last meals? I’m looking for a truly unique addition to my collection, and I think that would be perfect.

I close the computer and sit back, letting out a breath.

“And now I wait.”

“Melanie. Thirteen years old.”

“Jade. Five years old.”

“Aspen. Nine years old.”

“Juliet. Ten years old.”

I stand at the back of another town hall meeting. News of other victims being connected to the death of Charles McGeary and the public announcement that Cameron Reed will be seeking a new trial on the grounds that Dustin is a victim of this same killer has rocked the community. This meeting is even more packed than the first.

Concerned parents fill chairs set as close as they possibly can in the event room as members of the local government look over them from a table set up on the far side of the room. They look more worried in this meeting. It’s obvious the pressure is pushing down on them.

It’s one of the pitfalls of being a part of the government of a small town. Everything becomes your responsibility. When something goes wrong, it’s your fault even if you had nothing to do with it. Every person in this room is looking at those men and women, the ones sworn to protect them and create a safe and prosperous community for everyone in it, and condemning them for leaving their children vulnerable.

They might not even know about the other victims. The ones that don’t come from the fifty-mile radius these people keep quoting. But I’ll make sure they know.

The members of Stolen Voices have created a line across the front of the room, reciting the name and age of each of the victims that they advocate for personally. Avery is a new face in the line, holding a picture of Dustin, silent tears sliding down his cheeks. He was the first call I made after talking to Cameron’s attorney. I wanted to make sure he knew what was going on before it became public.

I can’t imagine what he’s going through right now. How much of a struggle this is. He thought there had been some resolution. There could never really be closure for the loss of a child. There’s never a point in your life where you just accept it and are able to move on. Every single day is a new cut. Every event, every holiday. Everything that you should be sharing with that child is a reminder that they aren’t there anymore. But knowing what happened to them and holding somebody responsible can provide some sense of comfort and justice.

Now Avery knows it wasn’t true. He has to experience it all over again. And he also has to cope with the emotional impact of knowing he has spent these past years blaming his ex-wife for his child’s murder and conjuring up all kinds of horrific ideas of what she wanted to do to him, only to discover that, for all her faults, Cameron is not a murderer.

As they finish the names, I walk down the center aisle toward the front of the room.

Rosa looks startled, and the words she was saying started to jumble and disappear on her tongue. I reach into the inside pocket of my jacket and pull out a picture. It’s of a beautiful blonde teenage girl. Rather than turning around and showing it to the rest of the people in attendance, I make sure that every person standing in that line sees her.

“Holland. Seventeen.”

There are a lot of confused expressions and people exchanging glances, but my eyes are locked on the one face that hasn’t changed. The one expression that isn’t twisted as the person tries to figure out who I’m talking about.

“A little more than thirty years ago, in a quiet neighborhood in North Carolina, a man named Jeremy took his dog Piper for a walk. What started as a comfortable stroll through one of their favorite places turned into horror when Piper found a human bone. Police later uncovered the rest of the remains in and around a tree house. When they carried the remains out of the woods, Jeremy was standing in his front yard, and so were some of his neighbors.

“Diagonally to his left was Albert Gleason, a bachelor struggling with the effects of a physical disability that kept him inside and away from other people most of the time. Directly across from Jeremy was a man named Josh and his young son. It had been raining on and off throughout the afternoon, but that little boy wanted to play, so he went outside with his father and watched the police officers show up to talk to Jeremy. His father told him to go inside, but he stayed at the door and watched. Later, when his father went inside and made him come with him, he stood at the window. He had to know what was happening.

“He was there to witness a young woman’s bones being brought out of the trees. No one knew her. No one knew how she got out there. And she wasn’t identified. Until now.

“Her name was Holland Finley. She was seventeen years old. And she babysat that little boy up until three years before, when she disappeared. But no one ever knew that.” I meet intense eyes. “Except for you.”

Garrett’s lips flicker into a slight smile.

“And my father. How did you know? After all these years of it coming out and it’s never been figured out. How did you know?”

“So many little things, Garrett. When you were talking about Melanie, you said you would never forget that you were playing in the front yard when they found her. I knew it sounded strange to me at the time, but I didn’t put much thought into it. Later I realized it was because you had told me that you were fourteen when Melanie went missing. I understand that fourteen-year-olds do things like play basketball, but we rarely hear one of them described as ‘playing in the yard.’

“It was a slip. But not one that you made because you were lying. It was because you were combining two different memories. They mixed in your head, and you just accidentally talked about the one you were never supposed to mention. Because what you were talking about was playing in the yard when the police discovered the body of your father’s victim, Holland. You knew all along where she was. You protected her, didn’t you?”

He scoffs. “You don’t protect the dead. I guarded her. I kept her just where she was supposed to be and didn’t let anyone find her. She had taken care of me. So I took care of her.”

“You were six years old,” I say. “And that became your preferred age. You know, when you had those boys, you did take good care of them. You made sure they had everything they needed. Except for their families. Except for their lives. But you did what you could right up until the very end. And you didn’t think anyone would ever know because you know everything there is about investigations, right? You watched your father figure out how to cover up what he had done. Not once, but twice.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. He didn’t kill Melanie. Look at your calendar, Agent Griffin. I know you’ve been putting them together. You’re smart enough. You have all the other ones, right? But you know which one you don’t have?”

He holds up a single finger to indicate the first, then brings it to his smiling lips.

“Shhhhh.”

It’s been a month since Garrett was arrested at the town hall. Bits and pieces of his long killing career are still coming together, but we have more than enough to make sure there’s no question. Just the night before the meeting, he finally came through with the receipts I knew he would have. I had him mail them to Albert’s house. Since they had already done so much business together, it didn’t seem strange.

All it took was us looking at those receipts and finding out what time he purchased the last meal for each of the victims. I wasn’t able to get security footage for all the locations, but three restaurants still had archived footage that clearly showed Garrett walking into the restaurants at those specific times, buying the exact food that would show up as the stomach contents of his victims, and leaving. Every time he ordered other food as well, which means he sat down and ate dinner with his victims before killing them.

Albert didn’t know how much of an impact he made on Garrett when he was just a child.

As a little boy, he knew Albert was different. He watched him stare through the window. At that time, watching through the window was just his way of connecting to a world he couldn’t be a part of. His mind and his body kept him away from it. And it made Garrett wonder.

As Albert’s fascination grew, so did Garrett’s. He always stayed at enough of a distance that Albert didn’t realize he was being followed every time he moved, every time he settled into somewhere new, and it seemed the murders started up again. He didn’t feel Garrett right behind him.

Cameron will get her new trial. It’s a formality at this point. They will release her, but she’s going back into a life that doesn’t exist anymore. Her marriage is over, and her husband is married to someone else. Her only child is gone. She will have to figure out who she is in a totally different world and try to move forward.

And I will continue to do what I have always done.

Give people back their voices.

This time when I go to the hospital, I meet Doe out in the courtyard. She doesn’t want to be in her room any more than she absolutely has to, and I don’t blame her. Her body has healed well, and she isn’t dealing with the pain from her injuries anymore. Every day she feels better. At least physically. Her mind is still trapped.

“I feel like I’m never going to get out of here,” she says. “Every morning when I wake up, I lie there with my eyes closed, trying to think of anything. I do what you suggested and just let everything around me come into my mind and see if it triggers anything at all. I listened to the sounds of the people that were going up and down the hallways. I listen to the machines. I smell the food. I do everything that I possibly can to try to reach out and take hold of something, and it’s never there.

“The doctors keep telling me that there’s hope. They keep saying that because I didn’t suffer a traumatic brain injury and I’m able to function in all other ways, there’s still a very strong possibility that I’m going to get my memories back. They keep telling me this. They keep saying that I should watch TV. Go online. Read books. Do all these things that are going to expose me to ideas and things so maybe one of them will seem familiar. Even though they keep saying that, every time it comes out a little bit less reliable. A little bit less enthusiastic. I know they’re losing hope,” she says.

“They aren’t losing hope. Nobody’s giving up on you. You can’t let yourself think that. I’m not giving up on you, and you can’t give up on yourself either.”

“I’m not giving up on myself. I’m not even sure I would know what that would be. If I didn’t lay down and die right there in the woods, I’m not going to give up. I don’t know where I came from. I don’t know why I ran. But I did. And I lived. But for what? What did I keep going for? So that I could be chased for the rest of my life? So that I wouldn’t know who I am?” she asks.

“You ran because you wanted to survive. I believe that when you left whatever it was that you left behind, you absolutely knew who you were. And it was strong enough for you to want to save her. Think about her. Think about everything that she went through. Everything that she survived. I saw the injuries that you were dealing with when you first came into the hospital. I read your medical reports. Somebody was sure as hell trying to kill you, and you didn’t let them.

“I get that you hate being here. I can’t even imagine being stuck in a place and not knowing when I’m ever going to get out. I have only experienced very small doses of that, and it is absolute hell. I know that you don’t want to think that the rest of your life is just going to be this empty void and you’re going to be in these four walls forever. But I’m here to tell you that you’re not going to be.

“There will come a time when you’ll go out into that world and live your life. Now is not the time for you to feel sorry for yourself. You have to decide who you’re gonna be when you walk out of this place. Whether that means you get back every single second that you’ve already lived or you start thinking about the ones ahead of you.”

Doe stares at me for an intense moment. Up until this point, everyone has been as gentle with her as possible. Everybody has danced around the realities of her situation and tried to provide nothing but encouragement and a soft place to land. That’s important. She needs that. But she also needs reality. The truth is, it is a very strong possibility that she’s going to get all her memories back. And it’s also a strong possibility that she won’t get any of them back. But they’re not going to just spontaneously pop back into her mind. She has to try. And if she continues to feel bad for herself and let herself go down that dark path, nothing is ever going to come of it.

I don’t know who she is, but I already know that she is a powerful force. Just the fact that she is still alive speaks volumes. It reminds me of Aviva James, an FBI agent I once mentored. I will carry admiration for her forever after learning about everything that she went through. I want to know who this woman in front of me is. I want to know who did this to her so that I can stop them from ever doing anything even close to it again.

But more than that, I want her to know herself. I want her to wake up in the morning and want to open her eyes first. She deserves that.

Her expression doesn’t change, but Doe sits up straighter and looks me directly in the eye.

“When can I do the DNA test?”

Four minutes in between classes never felt like enough time.

Jasmine was always rushing. From the second the bell rang, she was trying to run to make sure that she could get to her next classroom before that next bell. It was always chasing her. Too often, it won.

It felt like that was going to happen again that morning.

It was just four minutes. Only four minutes to get from her English class to her history class. And in there she had to stop by her locker to get her textbook out and make sure that she had her homework.

Four minutes to stop by the library and look through the windows to see if she could see Kent. Usually, he was studying during his open, and she could get his attention.

Four minutes to dart through the cafeteria and say hello to all the friends she wasn’t able to see during the day. The schedule for this semester sucked. She wasn’t sharing her classes with any of her closest friends. And all of them had an opposite lunch schedule than she did. Who the hell ate lunch at 10:30 in the morning? It didn’t make sense. She was still thinking about bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuits and wishing for a third cup of coffee at that time.

Just four minutes.

She ran down the hallway and got to her locker in record time. She buzzed through her combination and yanked the door open. Her heart sank when she realized that her history textbook wasn’t there. She must have left it at home.

She thought that she had it in her backpack the day before and put it in her locker so it would be ready for her to study for the upcoming quiz. But now that she thought about it, she realized that she had left it on her desk in the family room. She had retreated there because her brother insisted on practicing his stupid drums.

She was down to three minutes.

Three minutes until her teacher bit her head off for not being prepared. And that was if she got to class on time.

The library was just ahead of her. She got to one of the massive windows and looked around to see if Kent was at his usual table. She didn’t see him. She moved down to the next window, wondering if maybe he was in the stacks or at one of the computers.

Two minutes now.

She was about to give up when the air around her shattered with the sound of an explosion.

Everything around her swirled into chaos. Jasmine heard screaming and realized it was coming from her. There was another explosion, and someone hit the ground. All she could do was run. She ran into the library and dropped to the floor, scrambling across the brown industrial carpet fast enough for it to burn the palms of her hands. As she curled into a corner, another blast sent glass scattering across the floor. She forced herself to be quiet. Reaching into her bag, she fought against the shaking of her hands to pull out her phone.

Gunshots came from every direction. She couldn’t figure out where they were or how close. Tears dripped onto the screen of her phone, blurring the words she typed to Kent.

Where are you?

I love you.

Dear Reader,

Thank you so much for reading The Girl and the Hidden Truth! I’ve been putting these Emma books out at lightning speed lately, and from what I’ve seen, you’re matching that pace like champions. It’s like a friendly race between us. Me trying to write them as fast as Emma can crack a case, and you blowing through the pages even faster. Honestly, I’m not sure who’s winning, but I love that we’re in this together, racing from one twisty case to the next, fueled by coffee, snacks, and maybe a questionable amount of lost sleep.

And if you’re already wondering what’s next, Emma is about to dive into one of her most charged cases yet in The Girl in the Field. A local election is turning neighbors into enemies, and Emma steps into a community boiling over with tension, secrets, and suspicion as she investigates an attack that leaves several dead and many injured. With red herrings everywhere and a masked figure lurking just out of sight, Emma is determined to uncover who is using chaos as a cover for murder. It will take everything she has to stop the violence before it erupts even further.

If you’re looking for a change of pace without losing the thrill of a good mystery, let me take you to a town I think you’ll love: Juniper Springs. This series brings you into a small town where secrets hide behind warm smiles, each book introducing a new couple whose lives get tangled in danger, old mysteries, and romance. PI Avery Hart is always close by, helping to unravel the truth one case at a time. Readers have been devouring these stories, and it’s been amazing to see so many of you fall in love with the world of Juniper Springs. If you haven’t visited yet, I’d love for you to come see what the buzz is about!

Thank you for being part of this journey. I’m eager to hear what you thought of The Girl and the Hidden Truth, so if you have a quick moment, please consider leaving a review. Your feedback and enthusiasm have been instrumental in shaping the direction of this series, and I’m incredibly grateful for your continued support.

If you ever want to chat theories, swap favorite moments, or just hang out with fellow mystery lovers, come join me in my reader group, Coffee and Cases with A.J. Rivers. It’s one of my favorite corners of the internet, and I’m so thankful for every post, message, and bit of excitement you share there. Thank you for spending your time with Emma, with me, and with these stories. It truly means the world.

Yours,

A.J. Rivers

P.S. If for some reason you didn’t like this book or found typos or other errors, please let me know personally. I do my best to read and respond to every email at mailto:aj@riversthrillers.com

P.P.S. If you would like to stay up-to-date with me and my latest releases I invite you to visit my Linktree page at www.linktr.ee/a.j.rivers to subscribe to my newsletter and receive a free copy of my book, Edge of the Woods. You can also follow me on my social media accounts for behind-the-scenes glimpses and sneak peeks of my upcoming projects, or even sign up for text notifications. I can't wait to connect with you!

Emma Griffin FBI Mysteries

Season One

Book One—The Girl in Cabin 13*

Book Two—The Girl Who Vanished*

Book Three—The Girl in the Manor*

Book Four—The Girl Next Door*

Book Five—The Girl and the Deadly Express*

Book Six—The Girl and the Hunt*

Book Seven—The Girl and the Deadly End*

Season Two

Book Eight—The Girl in Dangerous Waters*

Book Nine—The Girl and Secret Society*

Book Ten—The Girl and the Field of Bones*

Book Eleven—The Girl and the Black Christmas*

Book Twelve—The Girl and the Cursed Lake*

Book Thirteen—The Girl and The Unlucky 13*

Book Fourteen—The Girl and the Dragon’s Island*

Season Three

Book Fifteen—The Girl in the Woods*

Book Sixteen —The Girl and the Midnight Murder*

Book Seventeen— The Girl and the Silent Night*

Book Eighteen — The Girl and the Last Sleepover*

Book Nineteen — The Girl and the 7 Deadly Sins*

Book Twenty — The Girl in Apartment 9*

Book Twenty-One — The Girl and the Twisted End*

Emma Griffin FBI Mysteries Retro - Limited Series

(Read as standalone or before Emma Griffin book 22)

Book One—The Girl in the Mist*

Book Two—The Girl on Hallow's Eve*

Book Three—The Girl and the Christmas Past*

Book Four— The Girl and the Winter Bones*

Book Five—The Girl on the Retreat*

Season Four

Book Twenty-Two — The Girl and the Deadly Secrets*

Book Twenty-Three — The Girl on the Road*

Book Twenty-Four — The Girl and the Unexpected Gifts*

Book Twenty-Five — The Girl and the Secret Passage*

Book Twenty-Six — The Girl and the Bride*

Book Twenty-Seven — The Girl in Her Cabin*

Book Twenty-Eight — The Girl Who Remembers*

Season Five

Book Twenty-Nine — The Girl in the Dark*

Book Thirty — The Girl and the Lies*

Book Thirty-One — The Girl and the Inmate*

Book Thirty-Two — The Girl and the Garden of Bones*

Book Thirty-Three — The Girl on the Run

Book Thirty-Four — The Girl and the Last Scene

Book Thirty-Five — The Girl and the Last Game

Season Six

Book Thirty-Six — The Girl Who Disappeared

Book Thirty-Seven — The Girl and the Hidden Truth

Ava James FBI Mysteries

Book One—The Woman at the Masked Gala*

Book Two—Ava James and the Forgotten Bones*

Book Three —The Couple Next Door*

Book Four — The Cabin on Willow Lake*

Book Five — The Lake House*

Book Six — The Ghost of Christmas*

Book Seven — The Rescue*

Book Eight — Murder in the Moonlight*

Book Nine — Behind the Mask*

Book Ten — The Invitation*

Book Eleven — The Girl in Hawaii*

Book Twelve — The Woman in the Window*

Book Thirteen — The Good Doctor*

Book Fourteen — The Housewife Killer*

Book Fifteen — The Librarian*

Book Sixteen — The Art of Murder*

Book Seventeen — Secrets in the Acadia

Book Eighteen — The Forgotten Girls

Book Nineteen — The Hidden Vendetta

Dean Steele FBI Mysteries

Book One— The Woman in the Woods*

Book Two —The Last Survivors

Book Three — No Escape

Book Four — The Garden of Secrets

Book Five — The Killer Among Us

Book Six — The Convict

Book Seven — The Last Promise

Book Eight — Death at Midnight

Book Nine — The Woman in the Attic

Book Ten — Playing with Fire

Book Eleven — Murder in Twilight Cove

Book Twelve — Under the Mask

Book Thirteen — Hidden Intentions

Book Fourteen — The Great Betrayal

A Detective Riley Quinn Pine Brooke Mystery

Book One —The Girls in Pine Brooke

Book Two — Murder in the Pines

Book Three — Strangers in the Pines

Book Four — Shadows in the Pines

Book Five — Letters in the Pines

Book Six — Watched in the Pines

A Juniper Springs Mystery

Book One —The Girl in Juniper Springs

Book Two —The New Girl

Book Three —The Search

Book Four —The Surprise

Book Five —The Secret

Book Six —The Chase

Book Seven —The Last Girl

Bella Walker FBI Mystery Series

Book One—The Girl in Paradise*

Book Two—Murder on the Sea*

Book Three—The Last Aloha*

Other Standalone Novels

Gone Woman

* Also available in audio