The Secret Beneath the 1994 Well

Six girls were already accounted for.

My Sarah’s pendant made the count seven.

Mark had not purchased this farm to bury his father’s sins. He had chosen it because a burial place was already waiting here. The voice rising from the well did not belong only to Sarah Miller.

The ruined cover had not collapsed when someone went down. Something trapped below had driven it upward, splintering the boards in an effort to get out and stop him.

Then the bathroom faucet went silent.

I stayed on my knees amid the papers, unable to move. In the hall, the bathroom door groaned on its hinges.

Measured footsteps came toward the bedroom.

Each one landed slowly, heavily, as if whoever made them had all the time in the world.

There was no chance to hide the evidence or flee. I left the lockets in their plastic bag amid the box’s spilled contents, newspaper pages scattered around them, and pushed myself upright as Mark filled the doorway.

His eyes went first to the broken green box near my feet. Then he read the dates printed across the clippings.

The performance disappeared from him. The sorrowful son, the wet eyes, the shaken little-boy guilt vanished as though he had removed a mask. In fourteen years beside him, I had never seen that blankness on his face.

He was not furious. That would have been easier to understand. He looked bored, coldly and horribly bored.

“I told you to stay out of this,” Mark said. His voice had become steady. “I said the police could deal with the well.”

“Your father died in 1998.” My throat burned around the words. “Emily Davis disappeared in 2004. Amber Reynolds vanished in 2011. He did not take those girls, Mark. You did.”

He rested against the frame, blocking the hall with his body, and folded his arms over his flannel shirt.

“My father was a cruel drunk,” he said, with the calm of someone discussing a repair on the farm. “He drove home from the tavern and struck Sarah Miller with his truck. He panicked and made me help carry her to the old well.”

His gaze drifted to the floor. “When we let her fall into that darkness, he was terrified. But I wasn’t. For the first time in my whole miserable childhood, my mind went quiet.”

I backed away until the wall pressed against my spine. My fingers found the dresser and clenched its edge.

“Buying this place six years ago made everything simple,” he went on. “I kept their lockets. I respected them. You were never meant to find any of it. We could have gone on living normally.”

“Seven minutes,” I said.

The realization struck so hard that I could barely breathe. The sunlight had run backward for seven minutes that morning.

Mark raised his eyes, and his dark stare fixed on mine.

“One minute was Sarah Miller,” I whispered. “Five were for the girls whose lockets are in that box. The last minute was for our daughter.” My chest rose and fell too fast. “Sarah was supposed to be number seven.”

“She was becoming a problem,” he answered, tightening his jaw. “Always asking questions. Looking too much like the others.”

He unfolded his arms and entered the room.

I did not plead with him. I did not stop to think. I seized the rusted lid from the dresser and threw it at him with everything fear had left in me.

The metal edge slashed across his cheekbone. He cried out, bringing both hands to his face as he reeled into the hallway.

I drove my shoulder into him and shoved past. My boots skidded across the linoleum while I rounded the corner for the living room.

“Sarah!” I screamed.

The couch was bare.

The back door I had locked stood open, and August heat rolled through the kitchen.

“Sarah!” I tore across the porch, searching the yard.

Near the patrol cars, Sheriff Miller and three State Troopers were bent over a map spread across an SUV hood, arguing over it. None of them faced the pasture.

A hundred yards away, yellow birthday-dress fabric moved through the high grass. My little girl was walking steadily toward the broken stone ring of the well.

“Sheriff!” I shouted, leaping from the porch and racing over the gravel. “It’s Mark! He has the lockets! He took them!”

Miller looked up sharply. The Troopers abandoned the map.

Behind me, the back door slammed open. Boots thundered down the porch steps. Mark was not heading for the road or trying to outrun the police. He was running through the pasture after that flicker of yellow. He knew he was finished, and he meant to drag his final girl into the dark with him.

“Stop!” a Trooper bellowed, pulling his sidearm.

But Mark was ahead of us, only twenty yards from Sarah, his face twisted with desperate violence.

With Mark closing on Sarah at the well, the whole farm suddenly came alive.