What the Mastiff Was Hiding

I jerked the wheel aside as a delivery van bore down on us, and the SUV’s tires shrieked across the pavement. In the mirror, Mark burst from the alley, staring after his stolen vehicle with pure disbelief. His car, Brutus, and whatever proof lay inside that dog were vanishing together.

“Everybody still breathing?” I shouted above the engine and blasting vents, checking behind us again.

“We are,” Dr. Aris panted from the rear seat. She was wedged against the door, one hand spread protectively over Brutus’s laboring ribs. “But your jaw. You’re bleeding.”

I dragged my knuckles across my chin and came away with red smeared over my skin. “It doesn’t matter. Maya does. He meant to put her in the ground, Doctor. The tarp, lime, shovel—he was trying to erase anything connected to Sarah’s death.”

Dr. Aris looked toward the empty cargo area, terror shaking her words. “Then where did he take her? If she isn’t here, where could Mark have left her?”

My phone began screaming from the cup holder. Officer Davis’s name glowed across the screen.

I grabbed it and switched to speaker. “Davis, we got out through the alley. Mark came after us at the clinic. We took his SUV, and Brutus is with us.”

“I’m aware,” Davis replied, his voice broken by radio chatter and urgency. “My people have entered the clinic. They found the wrecked imaging room, and someone saw a black SUV leave fast. Tell me where you’re going.”

“Mark’s farm.” I forced the SUV onto the county road and pushed it toward open country. “Maya wasn’t in this car. He put her in the back at the park, but she’s disappeared. He bought a shovel and quicklime. We believe he plans to murder her.”

“Hear me,” Davis said sharply. “Do not enter that land by yourself. Two county deputies are already headed there. It’s a huge property, and you have no idea what’s out there or where anything is.”

“His daughter is in danger, Davis! We cannot sit around until someone establishes a perimeter!”

“You’re missing something,” he cut in, his command flattening my panic. “I continued reviewing audio from Brutus’s GPS collar. The clip from two hours ago, when Maya released him in those woods. Our office enhanced the recording to separate the background sounds.”

My hands tightened around the wheel. I slipped past a sedan creeping along ahead of us. “What did you find?”

“Maya told Brutus to run and get help before someone found the hole,” Davis said, lower now. “But the recording proves she was not alone.”

Dr. Aris leaned between the seats, her eyes fixed on the phone. “How can that be? Mark had gone into town for supplies.”

“Mark was in town,” Davis agreed. “Still, beneath Maya’s voice there is tapping. Repeated taps, muffled, like metal hitting something thick and steel. She wasn’t describing an ordinary hole. There’s an underground space on that property, maybe a cellar or an old cistern.”

Ice crawled over the back of my neck. “She found somebody trapped below ground?”

“That’s what it sounds like,” he said. “The pattern is deliberate—an S.O.S. Someone is confined in there. Maya must have discovered them today, which explains Mark’s reaction. The lime isn’t only for the dog. He may intend to cover the entire underground structure.”

The steering wheel felt brittle under my grip. My fingers had gone bloodless against the leather.

“Doctor,” I said, nearly unable to raise my voice, “look through Maya’s backpack. The pink bag on the floor. Maybe she carried something that shows where this place is.”

Dr. Aris crawled across the blue tarp beside Brutus and reached for the small pack, its fabric stained with dirt. She opened its main zipper and overturned it across the back seat.

Dog biscuits bounced over the leather. A smashed crayon box followed, then a partly eaten apple and an old padlock heavy with rust.

“There’s a lock here,” Dr. Aris said, lifting it carefully. “It has been cut. The shackle was severed cleanly. Somebody used serious bolt cutters.”

“Maya is seven,” I said. “She didn’t cut through a lock like that.” My thoughts raced ahead of the speeding SUV.

“Wait.” Dr. Aris unfolded a sheet of notebook paper, crushed and folded into soft creases. “She drew something. It looks like a map.”

She held it forward so I could see. Bright blue crayon had made a large square marked HOUSE, a dirt track, and a patch of trees. Buried among those trees was a round shape, perfectly darkened in.

At its center, Maya had drawn a black door. An arrow pointed downward from it, toward whatever she believed was hidden beneath the woods.

Above the arrow, uneven childlike letters named the place. Dr. Aris made a strangled sound as she read them. Sarah Evans had supposedly walked away three years earlier, abandoning her family and moving out of state. But Maya’s map identified the hidden underground place as “MOMMY’S ROOM.”