Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 89572 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 448(@200wpm)___ 358(@250wpm)___ 299(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89572 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 448(@200wpm)___ 358(@250wpm)___ 299(@300wpm)
“No.” Her eyebrows draw down. “She was headed to the library.”
Blood thunders through my veins in a steady, excited rhythm. She’s still here.
She’s still in danger.
Her frown deepens. “Says she’s doing research on the town for her YouTube channel.”
“I’m aware.”
“Baxter will keep her busy,” she says.
“I’m sure he will.” Nosy bugger’s been preserving archives on the founding families and the Hollow for decades.
“She’s a curious one.” Mrs. Applewood folds her arms. “And you know what curiosity does.”
“It gets people hurt.”
Her gaze sharpens, peering straight through my gruff demeanor, right down to my raw fear. “Then you’d best use that Sterling charm to keep her occupied.”
I grunt a non-answer. “She’s as persistent as she is curious.”
“I have faith in you, Declan.” She reaches up and pats my shoulder. “I always have.”
It’s too early to be so damn weary. But the curse I carry rarely gives me a break. If Emery wants to dig through the town’s bones, she won’t be doing it alone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Emery
Libraries have always been my safe haven—hushed with old paper, lemon polish, and the low murmur of voices. Even in a place as unsettling as Crowsbridge Hollow, the Baxter Free Library doesn’t disappoint.
The town’s Creepy Christmas theme has left its mark here too. Garlands of pine and dried berries wind around the banisters, skull-shaped snowflakes dangle from the windows, and a Christmas tree is tucked beside the reference desk. The ornaments are…unusual, though. Skeleton keys, tiny iron bells, and black ribbons that look less festive the longer I stare at them.
Tucked safe inside the town’s quirky library, last night’s cemetery oddities seem miles away now. The sweet comfort of my second maple apple crumb muffin doesn’t hurt either.
This is the sensory reset I needed after last night’s chills, thrills, and swoons.
Mr. Baxter, the archivist—and a descendant of the library’s founder, if the nameplate out front is any indication—is a delightful older gentleman with spectacles perched on the end of his nose and a passion for local history that borders on obsessive. He nearly burst with excitement when I introduced myself as a “researcher,” especially after I swore I knew what microfilm was and promised I wouldn’t touch anything without supervision.
I’m in my happy place, surrounded by leather-bound ledgers and stacks of old newspapers. First, I start with obituaries, then cross-reference with old police blotters. Slow, methodical work. The kind I’ve always been able to get lost in for hours. They also store an impressive collection of historical death, birth, and marriage certificates. It’ll certainly make my job easier if I don’t have to tangle with New York State’s Vital Records Department.
Mason isn’t the first person to disappear in Crowsbridge Hollow.
At first, it looks like the usual grab bag of small-town tragedy. A teenager lost to the river in the sixties. A car wreck on the ridge in the eighties. A runaway case in the nineties that no one followed up on. A scattering of drownings, falls, vanishing hikers. All the kinds of accidents a skeptical brain like mine can easily categorize.
A girl in the eighties disappeared after a dare—friends admitted she was last seen climbing the hill toward the Widow at midnight. In the sixties, another girl, bright smile in her yearbook photo, was last spotted near the covered bridge. A line in a gossip column from the forties makes my pulse stutter. “Local youth continue the tradition of testing their courage by whispering in the Weeping Widow’s ear.” The twenties—another teenager gone, her mother begging the sheriff to listen, the brief police report dismissing her with a chilling line: “No evidence of foul play found despite family’s claims of unusual circumstances.”
A pattern emerges from the brittle pages.
Every twenty years or so, a girl or woman between sixteen and thirty disappears under circumstances tied, at least in rumor, to the Hollow’s legends. Each story is different, yet eerily the same. Last seen near the Widow or the bridge. Families whispering. Police dismissing. A neat gap, then it happens again.
I lean back, frowning at my notebook and press my hand against the pendant at my throat. Cold iron against warm skin. My professional brain scrambles for rational explanations—optical illusions, mass hysteria, anxiety-inducing infrasound noises, photo manipulation, or irrational fear that warps memories. None of that applies here.
The girls who’ve disappeared…the dates line up too neatly to ignore.
Dates.
I check the names again.
My pen stops when I land on the early 2000s.
Lena Sterling.
I blink, sure I’m misreading the faded type. But there it is again in the police blotter. “Sterling, Lena. Reported missing. Last seen at cemetery. No evidence of foul play. Investigation closed.”
Sterling.
Declan Sterling.
The dates…ages. Lena must have been his sister.
The muffins in my stomach turn to lead.
The pieces of the puzzle click together in an uncomfortable way. Declan’s silence, his annoyance with my questions, the panicked way he dragged me out of the cemetery. He’s not a grumpy tattoo artist trying to brush off a nosy YouTube pest.