“Who told you that?” Lana asked gently.
Nora looked out the window, then back. “We never made it to Morning Lake.”
The next days were a blur of investigation and revelation. Forensics found no remains in the bus, but unearthed a photo wedged behind a panel: a group of children standing in front of a boarded-up building, their faces blank. In the shadows behind them, a tall, bearded man.
Nora, still fragile but lucid, recalled fragments: the bus driver wasn’t their usual one. There was a man waiting at a fork in the road. “He said the lake wasn’t ready for us yet. That we’d have to wait.” She remembered waking in a barn with covered windows and clocks that always said Tuesday, even when it wasn’t. They were given new names. “Some of the others forgot about home,” she said. “But I didn’t. I never did.”
Lana followed the clues to an abandoned barn on County Line Road, once owned by a man named Avery. There, she found a child’s bracelet in the weeds—Kimmy Leong, another of the missing. Inside, the walls were carved with children’s names, some scratched shallow, others deep and angry. In a metal box, she found Polaroids of the children, not posed but candid—sleeping, crying, eating. Each had a new name on the back: Dove. Glory. Silence.
That night, Lana sat with Nora and showed her the photo from the bus. “This was after the first winter,” Nora said softly. “We were made to pose once a season to show progress. That building—it’s where they kept us the longest.”
