Samuel Tanner measured the streak of light that told him spring was coming. Since the cave had become his permanent home he had dragged inside short branches with soft needles for bedding and more kindling for smokeless fires.
One morning, two weeks earlier, when the hunter-and-prey game had finished with the customary gunshots, he had simply not gone back and had slept through the day curled up on the cave’s floor.
The woman, Alice, had not come back, and he had never felt more alone.
One of the handprints on the wall was Caleb’s, and Samuel would often find himself gazing at it. He roamed the forest and had explored the ruins of the mine. Once, he had snuck back to a spot where he could see the yard and had been glad to see Abigail playing with David. He had even seen Flare in the paddock. The mare’s head had turned and the boy had backed away.
He was a ghost now.
Sometimes the boy went hungry, but not too often: he could trap his food and had even found candy that must have been dropped by summer hikers, the wrapping still intact though a little muddy.
Samuel believed that he was safer in the cave than at the farm, and from there he’d watch over the others, as Cal had watched over him.
A sudden rustle came from the entrance and the boy flattened himself against the wall. His heart raced as he got up to face whoever had found him.
There was no place to go.
Alice Madison stepped inside the wider mouth of the cave and found herself in a stone room. In the half-light she saw a dirt floor and a curved wall. The boy stood in a patch of shadows.
“Samuel,” she said.
He gawked at her.
“Hello,” she said.
He could not speak.
“I’m sorry that it took so long,” she said.
He was grimy and as skinny as ever, but otherwise he seemed all right.
“How . . . how did you find me?”
“Your brother,” she said, and she turned to the tunnel. “Come, let him see you.”
For a moment something thumped in Samuel’s heart, and then Jonah shuffled forward. He glanced at Samuel and then looked away.
“Jonah . . . ,” Samuel said.
“We went to the farm this morning to speak to your father,” Madison said. “He said that you ran away, but after he was gone Jonah told me that he knew where you were.”
“You knew? About the cave?” Samuel said.
Jonah nodded.
“How long have you known?”
“Two years.” Jonah’s voice was barely a whisper.
Samuel thought of all the times that Jonah could have caught him but had let him be. “How did you find out?”
“I followed you once.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“It was your secret.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jonah shrugged. “I didn’t think you wanted anyone else to know.”
Madison turned around in the stone room and her gaze fell on the painted figures. They shifted and danced in the dusty light.
“You did this?” she said to Samuel.
The boy nodded. It was eerie and beautiful.
Things were catching up with Samuel faster than his mind could compute them. “Jonah, was it you who gave me the bread when I was in the lonely place?”
Madison was not sure what the lonely place was, but Jonah nodded and pointed at a candy wrapper on the dirt floor. “I put the candy where I knew you would find it.”
Jonah was almost as big as Luke, but he seemed to take up no space at all. His gaze had looked blank the first time Madison had seen him in the barn, only because Jonah’s light came from a place very far from the surface.
“Where’s Papa gone?” Samuel said to Madison.
“I’m very sorry, Samuel, but your father has been arrested. He lied about your mother running away and the divorce, and we think he hurt her.”
Samuel nodded. It was a surprise, and yet it wasn’t.
“I think he killed Caleb too,” he said.
It took them two days. They succeeded only because of a combination of hints, clues, and scraps of memories from Seth, Joshua, and Jesse, who had seen their father return from a particular place around the time their mother had disappeared. Nobody liked to go there because the clearing was haunted by the spirits of the dead Jackknife miners.
In the soft March soil the officers from the County forensic lab found human remains—one male and one female. They would later be identified as Caleb and Naomi Tanner.
They would never know for sure, but it was possible that Caleb had confronted his father about his mother’s true fate and the man had made sure he wouldn’t tell anyone else.
Slowly the Tanner children had begun to talk, and they had much to say. When they finally believed that their father was not coming back—Madison explained to them that he hadn’t made bail—Seth and Joshua had found two axes in the tool shed and had taken apart a small hut near the barn. Madison didn’t ask them why, but it seemed to please the others.
Samuel and Jonah spent a lot of time doing farm chores together. When the social worker told them that the remains had been found, they guided the others to the cave and showed them Caleb’s handprint.
There had been no crying and no immediate manifestation of grief at the news. But Madison could tell that the pain was there; they had just never been allowed to express it.
“How did you manage to get into Ludlow from here?” Madison said to Jonah one afternoon.
They were sitting on the porch as Samuel walked the little boy, sitting on the mare, around the paddock.
“There’s a shortcut,” Jonah said. “It takes about an hour, if you know the way.”
The Tanner farm looked as austere and spartan as before, and yet there were changes in the air. Through the open doors and windows the tenderness of spring had found its way into the very building.
“Why did you visit the town?” Madison said after a while.
Jonah avoided eye contact, but his answers were always direct. “I wanted to see what the people were like.”
“And your father never found out?”
“Sometimes I sleep in the barn.”
“And what were the people like?”
“They didn’t look like killers and thieves,” Jonah said, and then added, “except for one.”
Madison held up the picture from Ben Taylor’s driver’s license. “Do you know this man?”
Jonah nodded.
“Where do you know him from?”
“He shot the doctor and set fire to his car.”
“I’m sorry you saw that, Jonah.”
“I tried to help.”
“I know.”
It had been Jonah’s blood they had found near the car.
“The doctor came here and he argued with Papa about us.”
“Yes,” Madison said. “You asked him for help, didn’t you?”
Jonah nodded. “And he sent help,” he said. “He sent you.”
Madison had spent a lot of time at the farm in the last few days, but the social workers had suggested that she might need to withdraw before the children became too attached to her.
Madison had agreed.
They would stay in touch through Joyce, but it was time to go.
“I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” Joyce Cartwell said.
“You’ll be fine. They’re eager to meet you,” Brown said.
They had just driven through the gate and had almost reached the clearing.
“They have a lot of catching up to do, you know,” Brown continued.
“I know.”
“A friend of their father faked the homeschooling records.”
Joyce sighed.
“And their knowledge of the wider world is extremely limited. Tanner told them that they shouldn’t trust anybody. It’s miraculous that they’re as sane as they are.”
Leaving Ludlow for the second time was different because Madison didn’t know when she would come back.
Much was still uncertain: Betty Dennen had been told the name of the man who had killed her husband, but not the real reason why. She hadn’t been told that two people in the Witness Protection Program had been pursued from Boston to Ludlow by a son seeking to avenge the betrayal of his father and his own abandonment.
Lee Edwards and Andrew Howell had decided to stay and keep their identities, and Andrew had told Polly the truth—or a version of it. He told her that he had testified against a brutal murderer and that’s why he could never go back to Boston, and Polly had believed him. Madison, on the other hand, had read the court papers and knew that Andrew Howell might very well be the man who had killed the messenger. There was no way to know for sure.
In due time Jeb Tanner would be found guilty of two counts of murder in the first degree, and would be sentenced to life without parole. His defense attorney had tried to get him to accept a murder in the second degree charge and avoid a trial, but he was unsuccessful. The jury took three hours to return a unanimous verdict, and Joyce Cartwell was there to see it.
Robert Dennen had brought them to Ludlow and he had led them to the Tanner children. Madison didn’t want to forget him in the turmoil of the Ben Taylor case: she didn’t want to forget how the doctor’s quick thinking, that night in the clinic, had helped them to discover the truth about those hidden lives.
Jonah, Madison knew, would not forget.