Be down in a minute. But he didn’t go down. He stood there in the suffocating heat, surrounded by hundreds of bags, each one a mystery his mother had kept from him his entire life. Each one a secret she’d died without explaining. He looked around at the sheer volume of it all. And one question pushed itself to the front of his mind, demanding an answer. What did you know, Mom? And why didn’t you tell anyone? Toby didn’t sleep that night.
He lay beside Emma in his old bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about those bags. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw them hanging there like evidence at a crime scene. Every time he started to drift off, he’d jerk awake with his mother’s handwriting flashing in his mind. 1967, March 1981, July 1989, December. What had she been doing up there all those years? what had driven her to collect and preserve all those articles, to label them so carefully, to hide them away where no one would find them.
When the first gray light of dawn crept through the window, Tob gave up on sleep. He slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Emma, and climbed back up to the attic. In the daylight, what little filtered through the small, grimy window, the space looked even more overwhelming. The bags stretched from one end to the other, organized with a precision that made Tob’s chest tight. This wasn’t the random hoarding of a disturbed mind. This was deliberate, systematic.
He started at the beginning with the oldest dates he could find. The bags from the 1960s were yellowed plastic, the kind that would crinkle loudly when touched. He worked through them methodically, opening each one, reading the contents, trying to find a pattern. Sarah Mitchum, 1967, 17 years old, disappeared after school. David Chen, 1973, 22 years old, vanished after work. Rebecca Marshall, 1978, 19 years old, never came home from a date. On and on. Different names, different years, but always the same basic story.
Young people, mostly teenagers or in their early 20s. They disappeared without a trace. Searches were conducted. Investigations were opened. And then after weeks or months, everything went quiet. The cases went cold. Life moved on. But his mother hadn’t moved on. She’d kept every article, every update, every deadend lead. Toby found a bag labeled 1981 July and opened it. The clippings inside were about a girl named Jennifer Hol, 16 years old. There were the usual news articles, but there was also something else.
