“Possibly.”
“How many?”
Harriet looked from Noah to Anna.
“Two sets.”
Anna stopped breathing.
“Two?”
Harriet nodded.
“One adult-sized.”
She pointed at the sketch.
“The other appears smaller.”
Anna stared at the black opening beneath Cedar Hollow.
Then she remembered the missing man everyone believed Thomas had gone back to save.
Eli Reed.
Twenty-two years old.
Young.
Thin.
Small enough to crawl through passages other men could not.
Anna looked at Noah.
“If they reached another way out…”
Noah finished the thought.
“Then someone may have survived.”
Harriet reached into a document sleeve.
“There’s one more item.”
She held up a strip of metal.
A name had been scratched into it.
Not Thomas Mercer.
Not Caleb Reed.
ELI.
Beneath the name was a date.
Not 1999.
Two years after everyone believed Eli Reed had vanished beneath Cedar Hollow.
The date carved beneath Eli Reed’s name changed everything.
Until that moment, Cedar Hollow had been a story about one terrible morning in 1999.
Now the woods held proof that somebody had returned two years later—or had never truly left.
For Anna, that possibility was almost harder to bear than certainty.
Hope could be cruel when it arrived without explanation.
Noah stared at the strip of metal.
“Two thousand one.”
Harriet nodded.
“You’re certain?”
“The engraving is clear.”
“My uncle would have been twenty-four.”
“Yes.”
“If he survived, why didn’t he come home?”
“Noah.”
Anna’s voice was gentle.
“We don’t know that he made the mark.”
He looked at her.
“But somebody did.”
“That’s true.”
“And they knew his name.”
“That’s true too.”
Lily sat beneath the canvas shelter holding George the rabbit.
For once she had no questions.
Children often understood more about silence than adults assumed.
Over the next two days, engineers widened and stabilized the eastern passage.
Anna stayed in a motel near Cedar Hollow with Lily.
Noah took the room beside them.
Colter and Tess remained nearby after rearranging the charity ride schedule.