CHAPTER 40
Starved Rock, Illinois, November 5, 2019
SHE APPROACHED FROM THE REAR. THE WINDOWS OF THE CABIN WERE dark, the sort of darkness that made Rory think she was looking into a black hole. Rory slowly navigated her way from the edge of the forest and across the long stretch of grass behind the cabin. She crept without the aid of her flashlight. The grass beneath her boots felt level and her steps were unchallenged. But as she came to within fifty yards of the cabin, she took a step but found no earth beneath her. She stumbled forward, falling a full three feet until her feet finally hit the ground. By then, it was too late to right herself. She crashed face-first onto the ground, the damp odor of soil heavy in her nostrils.
She lay still for a moment, attempting to gain her bearings. She felt for her phone, which was thrown from her hand on impact. When she found it, she turned on the flashlight. As she looked around, it was clear that she was in a freshly dug hole. Above her, a mound of dirt sat in the dark. Climbing to her knees, Rory slowly stood from the pit, the top of which was up to her waist. Her breathing was labored when she looked back to the cabin. It remained dark and quiet.
She climbed from the hole, shut off her cell phone, and started off again toward the cabin. When she came to the gravel drive that encircled the cottage, she remembered bending her car around its curves two mornings before. She followed it again now to the front of the cabin and reached into the pocket of her coat to feel for the only weapon she thought to bring—the Swiss Army knife Kip had given her.
She peeled open the blade as she crossed the gravel, her combat boots crunching over the rocks and the red clay that covered the ground. Her first stride onto the stairs caused the porch to creak under her weight. In the dead of night, it may have been a cannon shot. After a moment of pause, Rory continued to the next step, and then the next, until she was standing at the front door of the cabin. To pause now would be to lose her nerve. She grasped the handle and twisted. The door opened without protest, the hinges squeaking softly as the handle floated from her grip. She waited thirty seconds, felt a tremor rattling her fingers. Darkness welcomed her as she stepped inside.
Her mind pulled up the blueprint of the floor plan from her only other time in the cabin, back when she came here with the social worker and parole officer. Despite the darkness, she knew there were three rooms on the first floor—front room, kitchen, and a porch at the back of the house. The stairs to the left of the front door led to two bedrooms and a hall bath. He would be upstairs. He would be sleeping. Just like Greta had likely been when he entered her room.
She started up the stairs, the blade vibrating in her grip.
* * *
The bedrooms were empty. The beds were bare, absent of sheets or blankets. Rory descended the stairs, clicked on her phone’s flashlight, and splayed it across the front room. On the coffee table were papers scattered in a cluttered mess. She lifted one of the pages and saw his meticulous block penmanship chronicling his years-long search for his wife. An eerie stimulus simmered just below her sternum. Unable to help herself, Rory sat on the couch, placed the Swiss Army knife on the table, and flipped through the pages. It would have been easy for her to become lost in the words, to surrender to the call to reconstruct his path over the years and see how far his research had taken him. And she might have succumbed to this temptation had she not come across the handwritten map.
Written in his distinct block lettering, the inverted V’s jumped out at her everywhere they appeared. She tried to understand what she was reading. It looked to be a plat of survey for the cabin and the land on which it sat. Architectural renderings of the property and its boundaries. On the formal diagram, rectangular boxes had been drawn by hand. They were organized in a grid formation and covered the open area behind the cabin. In each of the boxes, a name was written. Rory immediately recognized the names as the women who had gone missing in 1979. She dropped the survey to the ground when she realized she was holding a map of a makeshift graveyard, and that she had likely just pulled herself from a freshly dug grave.