CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bob Montgomery walked the familiar trail through the Bundydale woods, his worn hiking boots crunching over fallen twigs and last autumn’s forgotten leaves.
The late afternoon sun slanted through trees, casting long shadows across his path.
He moved with the ease of someone who had traversed these woods his entire life, from boyhood adventures to these solitary walks that had become his ritual—a way to clear his mind after long days managing the hardware store his father had passed down to him.
Ahead, through a thinning line of trees, he glimpsed the stone walls of an abandoned church that waited for him like an old friend with secrets to share.
He reached the clearing where the old church stood in dignified decay.
Sunlight bathed the crumbling stone walls, giving them a golden glow at odds with their deterioration.
The roof had long since collapsed, leaving the interior open to the elements, as though the building had surrendered to the sky.
Weeds pushed through cracks in the stone floor, nature reclaiming what the human community had abandoned so long ago.
The altar area at the far end remained partially intact, a sign of the craftsmanship that had withstood decades of neglect.
A couple of generations ago, those who lived in the nearby town had given up making repairs out here and moved on to a new church building closer to town. Less impressive perhaps but easier to heat and easier to reach in bad weather.
Bob ducked through what had once been an arched doorway, feeling the familiar transition from sunlight to shadow. The temperature dropped several degrees inside, and the smell of damp stone and wild herbs filled his nostrils.
“Been a while,” he murmured to no one in particular.
His eyes drifted to a relatively flat stone near what had once been the altar, and memory flickered like an old film reel.
He could almost see them again, two identical faces looking up at him from a miniature chess set, their eyes alight with the same mischievous intelligence.
The Bartlett twins—Tony and Jay—had claimed this spot as their unofficial chess arena during the two years, they’d lived in Bundydale.
Bob walked over and touched the stone, half expecting to find the ghost of that miniature chess set still there.
He remembered how they’d brought it wrapped in a velvet cloth, setting up the pieces reverently.
The twins had been seventeen then, the same age as Bob, but worlds apart in intellect.
Where Bob had struggled through algebra, the twins had devoured advanced calculus as if it were simple addition.
“Your move, Montgomery,” Tony—or was it Jay?—had said during their first match. “Though I should warn you, we’ve been playing since we were five.”
Bob had moved his pawn forward with what he thought was strategically smart, only to find himself in checkmate eight moves later.
The twins had laughed, not unkindly, and offered to teach him.
He never got much better, but those games formed the foundation of a friendship that, while brief, had left an indelible mark on Bob’s teenage years.
He settled down on the stone seat now, his joints protesting slightly, and gazed up at the open sky overhead.
Birds flew across his field of vision, tracing patterns that the twins would have probably translated into some mathematical equation.
They had seen the world differently—everything was a puzzle, a system to decode.
“You guys were something else,” Bob said to the empty church.
The twins had been identical in every physical way—same angular face, same intense eyes that seemed to calculate everything they saw, same slight build that belied surprising strength.
But Bob had eventually learned to tell them apart through subtle differences in their mannerisms. Jay spoke with his hands more; Tony had a habit of narrowing his eyes when considering a chess move.
Not that knowing these differences had saved Bob from their favorite prank.
He smiled at the memory of agreeing to meet Jay after school to work on a science project, only to have Tony show up claiming to be Jay.
Bob had talked to him for fifteen minutes before something felt off.
When he’d called the twin on the deception, both brothers had emerged from hiding places, laughing until they couldn’t breathe.
“Got you good that time,” Jay had wheezed, doubling over.
“Your face,” Tony had added, mimicking Bob’s confusion with exaggerated features.
Bob had been irritated but also flattered to be included in their exclusive world.
The Bartlett twins didn’t let many people into their circle.
Their father, Carl, had moved them around Virginia frequently for work—some kind of consulting gig, Bob recalled vaguely—and they’d developed a fortress-like bond that few penetrated.
The chess matches continued throughout their junior year, always here at the church.
Sometimes they brought snacks—cheap chips and warm sodas—and lounged in the graveyard adjacent to the church, where the tombstones dated back to the early 1800s.
The twins had been fascinated by the epitaphs, constructing elaborate stories about the deceased that made Bob both uncomfortable and captivated.
Now Bob stood up and walked toward the far wall of the church, where sunlight streamed through a gap where stained glass had once filtered the light.
He traced his fingers along the rough surface, remembering how the twins had once used chalk to scrawl complex equations here, arguing intensely about some theory that went miles above Bob’s head.
The memories shifted to their daredevil exploits.
The twins hadn’t just been chess prodigies—they’d sought physical challenges with the same intensity they approached mental ones.
Bob recalled the day they’d climbed the exterior wall of the ruined church steeple, using only small crevices in the stone as handholds, racing to see who could reach the top.
Bob had watched from below, his stomach clenched with anxiety.
“Come on, Montgomery! Your turn!” Tony had called down after reaching the top in record time.
Bob had shaken his head. “No thanks. I choose life.”
“Life without risk isn’t living,” Jay had responded, in that philosophical tone that made everything sound profound.
Another time, they’d discovered an old well behind the church, the water barely visible far below.
The twins had taken turns jumping in, using a rope they’d brought to stop just short of the water and climb back out.
Bob had been designated as the “safety officer,” ready to run for help if something went wrong.
Nothing ever did—the twins seemed blessed with both intelligence and luck.
Until they weren’t.
Bob had been twenty-two, working full-time at his father’s hardware store, when he’d overheard two customers talking about “those Bartlett boys” and how one had died in a climbing accident.
Bob hadn’t even known which twin had perished until weeks later, when a former classmate mentioned hearing it was Jay.
The news had struck Bob harder than expected.
He hadn’t seen the twins since they’d moved away just before senior year, but the thought of one existing without the other seemed fundamentally wrong.
Bob left the roofless church, stepping into the adjacent graveyard where tilted headstones poked through tall grass like crooked teeth.
Many had surrendered their engravings to time and weather, the names and dates worn into illegibility.
He made his way to a familiar stone—a wide, flat marker that they’d used as a picnic table of sorts.
Someone had cleared away some of the weeds around it recently; Bob wondered if other teenagers had discovered this spot.
He leaned against the stone, feeling its cool solidity through his light jacket. A breeze rustled the trees surrounding the small cemetery, bringing with it the earthy scent of approaching evening. In the distance, a crow called, its harsh cry piercing the tranquility.
“I wonder what you’d be doing now,” Bob murmured, thinking of the twins. Would they have gone to MIT or CalTech as they’d planned? Would they have invented something world-changing? Or would they have continued their nomadic existence, forever moving from one challenge to the next?
Bob pushed himself off the tombstone, deciding it was time to head back before darkness fell. His wife, Karen, would be expecting him for dinner, and his son had a baseball game tomorrow that he needed to prepare for—being the coach meant arriving early to set up practice drills.
As he turned to leave, something caught his eye at the far edge of the graveyard. A different texture in the earth, a slight mound that seemed out of place among the settled graves and natural contours of the land. Curious, Bob walked toward it, his pace slowing as understanding dawned.
The rectangular patch of earth was approximately six feet long and three feet wide. The soil was freshly turned, darker than the surrounding ground.
A grave. A new one.
His heart rate accelerated as he stood at the edge of the mound. This wasn’t part of the cemetery proper; it was just beyond, where the trees began to thicken again. No marker, no flowers, nothing to indicate a proper burial. Just disturbed earth that couldn’t be more than a day or two old.
Bob’s mind raced to the news he’d heard at the store yesterday.
Cable Morris had gone missing two days ago.
A delivery driver for FleetRush Logistics, his truck had been found abandoned on a rural road not five miles from here, keys still in the ignition and his phone left behind.
Cable was young—27, if Bob remembered correctly—and well-liked in the community.
His disappearance had sent ripples of concern through Bundydale, where such things simply didn’t happen.
“My God,” Bob whispered, taking an involuntary step back from the grave. “No, no, no.”
Could Cable be buried here? The timing matched up. The location was isolated enough. Who would think to look in an abandoned church graveyard for a fresh body?
Bob’s first instinct was to leave, to pretend he’d never seen the disturbed earth. This wasn’t his business, wasn’t his problem. But even as the thought formed, he knew he couldn’t walk away. If Cable was buried here—if someone had murdered him and hidden his body—Bob couldn’t ignore it.
For a brief, irrational moment, he considered digging into the loose soil with his hands to confirm his suspicions. The impulse passed quickly, replaced by clearer thinking. This was evidence of a potential crime—a murder in fact. He needed to call the authorities immediately.
Bob Montgomery reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone to make a call that would forever change the peaceful town of Bundydale.