By the Grace of God, Lynn finally began to accept me as her father and relearned everything. If you didn’t know, you’d have thought she had a normal life. I’ve done everything in my power to give her one.
Even when Dr. Martin and others in your profession needed to come and study the woods and the location where all the people have vanished, I was hesitant. I let them come once and only once. I could not risk more. It cost Freda her life having to enter your world of secrets and shadows.
And now, the most important person in my world is in your care. I fear I will not live long enough to explain all this to her, and it’s why I felt better about deceiving her into thinking she was getting a job in the agriculture department. I need you to teach her what you know about the missing, and if I don’t survive, explain to her why she cannot return to our home.
She will fight you on this. This is our land, and Lynn is a homebody. She sees Illinois as a temporary location, but it must become more than that. Dr. Martin believes the devils come back from time to time, and I cannot risk the possibility that she could be taken again.
She will be stubborn. Her husband, Tom, is a good boy, but he too will have difficulty believing all this, so you must start with her. She is deeply rooted in reality, as am I. I wish I could go back to the beliefs I had before this, where the only purpose of the stars was to bring us light in the dark. Now I cannot look too long into the heavens for fear of what I might see.
I read the letter twice. I wanted to find a chair and collapse into it.
It couldn’t be. Not me. That happened to all those other people whose disappearances I’d researched.
Not me.
But it explained the bell. The day he entered the woods with the strangers. Why he could never speak of my mother. His last words to me not to raise my children near the woods. I tried to fold the letter up and place it back in the envelope, but my hands were shaking too hard.
“How could you have kept this from me?”
“Because I was angry. You broke my heart. I realize now that I was a self-involved, self-important jerk. Your father wanted you to know about what happened to you on your own terms. I intended for you to learn it either from him or, in time, from me. And when you left me and I found out you returned home, I assumed your father would tell you, and you would come back to me. When you didn’t, I thought you had made your choice.”
“My choice?” I held up the letter. “My father couldn’t speak when I moved back home. He couldn’t explain this to me. I settled there. I raised my family there. And they were all in danger! You let this happen!”
“I know that.” He took a step towards me. “It’s all my fault. I even tried telling you, so many times. All those years ago, you asked me how we could keep encouraging families, telling them that sometimes the abducted come back. But how do you explain to the woman you love that of all the missing we were researching, she was the only one who ever did?“
“That’s what I was, wasn’t I? A test case,” I said, my eyes narrowing. “The Researchers who constantly peppered me with questions—they just really wanted to ask if I remembered anything about being abducted. You all were studying me. I was a glorified test subject—”
“No. You were never that. We all had fallen in love with you—”
I placed Daddy’s letter in my purse. “I should have never trusted you.”
“It’s why I had to go into hiding. They know that I know.”
“I don’t even care to know who they are.”
“Your husband’s employer.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed between his eyes. “When I first heard that your—our—grandson had vanished, I immediately feared the worst. I knew if I suddenly showed up, after all these years, with a wild story of you being abducted as well, it would have made an already bad situation worse. But I had to do something. I started with downloading the maps of your property, so I could know where to start searching. That was my first mistake. Not two hours later, I was summoned to the office of our esteemed dean, who promptly fired me for using university equipment for personal use. An anonymous tipster, he said, had alerted him. I was escorted out and blocked from all my work. I rushed home to find FBI agents carrying all my belongings out of my house.
“It was no coincidence. I should have known they would be monitoring any outside internet searches. Especially from anyone who worked in astronomy. So I had to run, with only the shirt on my back. And when you’re my age, that’s not easy. I couldn’t contact you or anyone. Even getting cash out of an ATM was out of the question, since they were monitoring that too.”
“Steven, please—“
“It’s vital that you know how far they’ll go, Lynn, because of what I’m about to tell you. If it hadn’t been for the Corcillium, I wouldn’t have been able to even find out about the other missing people from your property.”
“Corcillium—?” I asked, and then stopped. I knew the name. I’d heard it, all those years ago, when that Researcher had tried to convince Steven to take me deep into what he had called the underground.
“Consider them… a board, of sorts, that governs the Researchers’ work. I knew someone was distributing information to us, but I never knew who. I was so destitute that I was living in a homeless shelter when they found me. They not only rescued me, but their resources allowed me to find out about the others abducted from your woods. It took me some time, but once I had the information, I immediately headed for Nashville. When I reached out to Barbara, she told me that you’d come searching for me first. As soon as I heard about William, I wanted to come to you. But you know the danger. There was a time when you came face-to-face with the Suits yourself.”
“I don’t live in that world anymore. I was young and naïve and, frankly, desperate for anything that would have saved me from my marriage at the time. You could have been doing research into chimpanzees and empowered me like you did, and I would have thrown myself into that too.”
“I don’t believe that. It took you a few months to figure out the climate patterns and the commonalities in these cases when it took me years to realize them. You could have done anything with your life.”
“You know nothing about my life.”
“Listen: I think I know where William is.”
“He’s still alive?” I asked, a twinge of hope swelling in my chest.
He nodded. “What I’ve learned from the Corcillium in just the past few months makes me believe we can find him. But Lynn, there are risks—”
“Steven, please. You owe it to my father to tell me. Tell me what you know—”
“We go together, then. I’ll tell you everything when we get in the car,” he responded, looking around the room. “I don’t dare say much more here, as I’ve come to learn they have ways to monitor everything—”
“Tell me now. Right now.”
“I’m not talking about losing a job and having all your property seized by the government. No one has returned alive from where we’re going. But I want to find William too—”
The door suddenly beeped and Barbara pushed through. “Jesus, Steven, they’re here! They’re all wearing FBI jackets, coming up the stairs.”