CHAPTER 12 — THE POLICE FILE
The following morning, George decided that guessing was no longer enough.
The disappearances along Blackwood Road had begun to form a pattern, but every answer they found seemed to create another question.
Rebecca's diary suggested that something had happened inside the Kant house in 1998.
Arthur Bell clearly knew more than he was willing to admit.
The abandoned house across the road had produced fresh footprints despite supposedly being empty for years.
Now George wanted to see what the police had actually recorded when people disappeared from the road.
He spent most of the morning contacting local offices and searching old archives before finally obtaining access to a collection of police records that had been stored away for decades.
The files were incomplete, some pages were faded, and several reports had been damaged by time, but there was enough information to begin comparing the cases.
George spread the documents across the study floor and started with the oldest disappearance he could find.
The first reports seemed unrelated, exactly as the official histories had suggested.
Different years. Different people. Different circumstances.
But as George compared them line by line, the similarities became difficult to ignore.
In several cases, the missing person's possessions had been left behind almost exactly as they had been before the disappearance.
Wallets remained in drawers. Clothing remained in wardrobes.
Personal documents were untouched. In one case, a woman's handbag had been found inside her house even though she was supposedly believed to have left voluntarily.
In another, a man's passport and identification documents were still sitting on a desk.
George moved to the vehicle records. Several missing people had owned cars, yet the vehicles had been abandoned rather than taken.
Some were found near their homes, while others were discovered along roads leading toward the woods.
There were no clear signs of accidents or forced entry.
The pattern was becoming more uncomfortable with every file he opened.
Then George noticed another similarity. The bank accounts of several missing people had never been touched after their disappearances.
No withdrawals. No transfers. No attempts to access savings.
If they had truly left voluntarily, as investigators had repeatedly suggested, why had none of them taken money?
Why leave behind the resources necessary to begin a new life?
George wrote the question in his notebook and continued reading.
In several reports, investigators had found no evidence that anyone had broken into the homes.
Doors were locked or unlocked normally. Windows were intact.
There were no obvious signs of struggle.
Nothing had been overturned. Nothing suggested violence.
The houses simply looked as though their occupants had stepped away and never returned.
Even more disturbing was the fact that relatives often insisted that the missing person had chosen to leave voluntarily.
George found the same language appearing repeatedly in different reports: “The family believes the individual left by choice.”
He stared at the sentence. It appeared too often to be coincidence.
Mara entered the study and found George surrounded by files.
“What have you found?” she asked. He handed her several reports.
“Read the disappearance summaries.” Mara moved through them one by one.
“These are different cases.” “I know.” George pointed toward the notes.
“But look at what they have in common.” Mara read the details again.
Possessions left behind. Vehicles abandoned.
Bank accounts untouched. No forced entry.
Families insisting the person had left voluntarily.
She looked up. “That's strange.” George nodded.
“And it happens more than once.” He pulled another folder from the pile.
“There's something else.” Inside was a report from an investigator who had apparently questioned the original conclusions.
The investigator's name appeared at the top of the page.
Detective Thomas Reed.
Mara read the first few pages. Unlike the earlier reports, Reed's notes were filled with questions rather than conclusions.
He had underlined inconsistencies in several disappearance cases and repeatedly challenged the idea that the missing people had simply chosen to leave.
One note stated that there was no financial evidence supporting voluntary disappearance.
Another questioned why multiple vehicles had been abandoned without their owners taking personal belongings.
Reed had also compared several cases that had occurred years apart and marked similarities between them.
At the bottom of one page, he had written a sentence that made George stop: “Either these cases are connected, or someone has gone to extraordinary lengths to make them appear unrelated.”
Mara looked at George. “He saw the pattern.” George nodded. “Before we did.”
The files revealed that Reed had become increasingly interested in Blackwood Road.
He had reopened several old cases and requested access to records that had previously been closed.
He interviewed relatives, revisited abandoned properties, and apparently returned to several locations where earlier investigators had found nothing.
One report mentioned that Reed believed some witnesses had been pressured into changing their statements.
Another suggested that he suspected the official explanations had been deliberately simplified.
George found a handwritten note attached to one of the reports.
It contained only a short sentence: “Start with the Kant house.”
The handwriting was unmistakably Reed's.
George looked toward the hallway leading upstairs, thinking about Rebecca's room and the diary.
“He knew about Blackwood House,” he said.
Mara looked at the document. “Then why didn't anyone finish his investigation?”
George searched the remaining records for an answer.
The final pages concerning Detective Reed were noticeably different from the others.
His investigation had been reopened, but only briefly.
There were requests for additional interviews, property searches, and forensic examinations.
Then, without explanation, the records stopped.
George found a separate report dated several months later.
Detective Thomas Reed had died. The official cause was described as a sudden medical event.
There was no evidence of foul play, and the report stated that his death was unrelated to his investigation.
George read the sentence twice. Mara stood beside him.
“When did he die?” she asked. George looked at the date.
It was only weeks after Reed had reopened the cases.
“Shortly after he started looking into them again.”
Mara was silent. George turned another page.
Reed's personal notes had never been completed.
Several questions remained unanswered. One file contained a final handwritten line: “The disappearances are not the beginning.”
George placed the document on the floor between them.
“What does that mean?” Mara asked. He shook his head.
“I don't know.” He gathered the files into a single pile and looked at the names written across their covers.
Daniel Kant. Helen Kant. Rebecca Kant. Thomas Reed.
Different people from different years, yet their stories were beginning to overlap.
The police had repeatedly explained the disappearances as voluntary departures, but Reed had rejected that explanation.
He had seen the same details George was now seeing.
People vanished without taking possessions.
Vehicles were abandoned. Money remained untouched.
Doors showed no signs of forced entry. Families repeated the same explanation.
And when Reed began asking whether those similarities meant something, his investigation ended with his death.
That evening, George placed Detective Reed's final notes beside Rebecca's diary.
The contrast between them was unsettling.
One belonged to a child who had written about people she was forbidden to name.
The other belonged to a detective who had spent years trying to identify the same hidden pattern.
George opened Reed's final page again. Beneath the sentence “The disappearances are not the beginning,” there was a second line he had not noticed before.
It had been written faintly in pencil beneath the first.
“Find out what happened before 1998.”
George looked at Mara. She looked toward the basement door. For the first time, they understood that Daniel Kant's disappearance might not be the mystery they needed to solve. It might only be the point where someone wanted the story to begin.