Anna stared at it.
“My mother used to draw that symbol.”
Noah looked at her.
“Where?”
“On boxes.”
“What boxes?”
“Anything she didn’t want thrown away.”
The woods suddenly felt different.
Not haunted.
Not dangerous because of some unseen attacker.
Dangerous because somebody had been there recently.
Somebody who understood Ruth Mercer’s private markings.
Colter looked at the fresh blue paint.
“When did your mother die?”
Anna answered quietly.
“Six months ago.”
Noah stepped toward the cellar.
The deputy blocked him.
“Nobody goes down tonight.”
Noah nodded.
But he kept staring at the symbol.
Anna did too.
Then Noah said something that made every person around the cabin fall silent.
“My father wasn’t the last person who knew what happened to Thomas Mercer.”
Anna looked at him.
“How do you know?”
Noah pointed toward the fresh paint.
“Because that mark is on the envelope my father left me.”
He removed the envelope.
A blue circle.
One vertical line.
Exactly the same.
Anna’s face went pale.
“Who drew it?”
Noah turned the envelope over.
On the back, in faded handwriting, were four words.
Ruth Mercer knows why.
Anna stared at her dead mother’s name.
And somewhere beneath their feet, hidden behind old earth, rotting timber, and twenty-seven years of silence, waited a room that both of their parents had apparently spent the rest of their lives trying to keep hidden.
By the following morning, Cedar Hollow no longer looked like an ordinary patch of Kentucky woodland.
Yellow safety tape stretched between trees.
County vehicles lined the dirt road.
A mine engineer named Harriet Sloan stood beside the ruined cabin studying old maps while two inspectors prepared equipment.
Yet to Anna Mercer, none of those changes mattered as much as four handwritten words.
Ruth Mercer knows why.
She sat beneath a canvas shelter with her injured ankle elevated, her father’s brass tag resting in her palm.
Lily sat beside her eating crackers Tess had brought.
Colter stood a few yards away with Noah Reed.