Chapter 4 - The Quiet Boy
The boy vanished from the window before officers reached the chapel.
Every room was searched again.
No child was found.
The only new discovery was a narrow ventilation opening behind the altar. It was too small for an adult but large enough for a thin child to crawl through.
Daniel knelt beside it.
“Luke isn’t alone.”
Cole shone her flashlight into the darkness. The shaft sloped downward before turning sharply out of sight.
“We need building plans,” she said.
“There won’t be accurate plans,” Daniel replied.
He had remembered something from Rebecca’s notebook.
He returned to his truck and opened the locked box beneath the passenger seat. Inside were copies of Rebecca’s journals, photographs and handwritten maps.
For four years, Daniel had kept them close.
Some people had told him this was unhealthy. Evelyn had accused him of raising Luke inside a museum of grief.
Daniel no longer cared what anyone thought.
He found the page marked with the black pine symbol.
Rebecca had drawn the chapel, dining hall and administration building. Beneath them, she had sketched a series of tunnels.
At the edge of the page, she had written:
ORIGINAL STORM SHELTER EXPANDED AFTER 1989.
SECOND ENTRANCE NEAR WATER TOWER.
ASK JAMIE BELL.
Daniel showed the page to Cole.
“Who is Jamie Bell?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Cole radioed the name to the station.
Minutes later, the response came back.
Jamie Bell had attended Black Pine Camp twelve years earlier.
He had disappeared at age seven.
His mother was told he had been placed with relatives after she entered a treatment program. Those relatives later denied receiving him.
If the boy in the window was Jamie, he had not aged.
“That’s impossible,” Reed said.
Daniel looked at the abandoned shoe marked J.B.
“Maybe the initials don’t belong to the boy we saw.”
The smoke near the administration building thickened. Firefighters had arrived, but the flames were spreading through the roof.
Evelyn sat inside a patrol vehicle, watching the camp burn.
Cole approached her.
“Who is Jamie Bell?”
Evelyn’s expression remained blank.
“Should I know that name?”
“Rebecca wrote it in her investigation.”
“My daughter wrote many things during an emotionally difficult period.”
“Jamie disappeared after attending this camp.”
“Children are moved by social services all the time.”
Cole leaned toward the window.
“That answer suggests you know more than you claim.”
Evelyn turned away.
Daniel returned to the chapel with Reed.
They removed the vent cover. Reed sent a small camera into the shaft.
The video showed an empty passage, damp walls and a child’s handprint in the dust.
Then the camera reached the turn.
Someone was waiting on the other side.
A boy’s face filled the screen.
He whispered, “Luke says hurry.”
The camera image shook.
“Where is he?” Daniel asked.
The boy looked toward something behind him.
“He’s hiding from the gray lady.”
“Is the gray lady Evelyn?”
The boy did not answer.
“Are you Jamie?”
His face changed.
Not surprise.
Fear.
“Jamie isn’t my name.”
“What is your name?”
The boy leaned closer to the camera.
“She tells everyone they’re Jamie.”
A hand grabbed him from behind.
The camera fell.
Daniel heard a short cry, followed by the sound of someone dragging the device along the stone floor.
The image went dark.
Then a woman’s voice came through the camera.
“Daniel, you were warned to stop searching.”
It was not Evelyn’s voice.
Daniel had never heard it before.
The feed ended.
Reed pulled the camera cable back.
The device was gone.
Only the severed wire remained.
A new message appeared on Daniel’s phone.
It came from Rebecca’s old number.
May you like
YOU HAVE 20 MINUTES TO LEAVE THE CAMP.
OR LUKE LEARNS WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS MOTHER.
