CHAPTER 13 — THE SECOND HOUSE
Mara discovered the existence of the second house almost by accident.
While George continued studying Detective Thomas Reed's files, she returned to the local property records and began comparing old maps of Blackwood Road with the photographs they had already collected.
She wanted to understand the area as it had existed before the disappearances, before houses were abandoned and before sections of the road were swallowed by woodland.
One map from the early 1990s immediately caught her attention.
Blackwood House was clearly marked near the eastern side of the road, but farther north, almost hidden among the trees, another structure appeared on the same property line.
It was labeled simply House No. 2. Mara checked the modern maps.
The second property no longer existed. The location was officially classified as empty woodland.
She searched older records and discovered that the house had been demolished in 2004.
No explanation was given. There was no detailed demolition report, no photograph of the remains, and almost no mention of what had stood there before the land became forest again.
Mara stared at the map for several minutes before realizing something even stranger.
The second house had stood directly behind the abandoned property across the road.
She began searching through the old photographs they had collected.
Most showed Blackwood House, Daniel and Helen Kant, or various residents of the surrounding area, but one photograph from the early 1990s showed a wider view of the road.
Mara enlarged it on her computer and examined the background.
Beyond the trees behind Blackwood House, she could see the roofline of another building.
It was partially hidden by branches, but unmistakably there.
She compared it with the old map. The position matched.
“George,” she called. He came into the study and looked at the screen.
“What's that?” Mara pointed toward the distant structure.
“The second house.” George studied the photograph.
“I thought that place was just woodland.”
“It is now.” She opened the old property map beside the photograph.
“But it wasn't always.” George leaned closer.
The two properties appeared to have been separated by a narrow strip of woodland, yet the distance between them was surprisingly small.
“Why was this never mentioned?” he asked.
Mara shook her head. “Maybe nobody thought it mattered.”
George looked at the map again. “Or maybe someone wanted it forgotten.”
They spent the next several hours searching for anything connected to the second property.
The records revealed that the house had existed for decades, although ownership information was incomplete.
At different times, it appeared to have been connected to people who had also been associated with Blackwood Road.
One document listed a family name that appeared in an older missing-person report.
Another showed that the property had been inspected several times in the 1990s, but the reasons for the inspections were not recorded in the surviving files.
Then Mara found an old newspaper photograph taken shortly before the house was demolished in 2004.
The building looked abandoned, but the image revealed something unexpected.
A narrow concrete structure extended from the rear of the house into the hillside.
At first George thought it was an old drainage channel.
Mara enlarged the photograph. “That's not drainage,” she said.
George studied it carefully. The structure appeared to disappear beneath the ground.
“A tunnel?” he asked. Mara nodded slowly. “Maybe.”
The possibility changed everything. They returned to the old map and traced the position of the second house relative to Blackwood House.
If the underground structure really was a passage, its direction seemed to lead toward the woods between the two properties.
Mara found another photograph taken from the opposite side of the road.
In the distance, beneath the trees, there appeared to be a low stone structure near Blackwood House.
It was almost impossible to see, but when they compared the angles, it seemed to align with the same underground route.
George stood back from the desk. “If there's a passage connecting them…”
Mara finished the thought. “People could move between the houses without using the road.”
George looked toward the window. “And without anyone seeing them.”
The idea offered a possible explanation for one of the strangest details in the disappearance records.
Several people had vanished from homes where there were no signs of forced entry and no witnesses who saw them leave.
If there had been another route out—one hidden beneath the ground—the missing people might never have needed to use the front doors.
But there was a problem. The passage was not mentioned in any modern property records.
George searched the demolition documents again.
Nothing. Mara checked architectural plans from the 1970s and 1980s.
Again, nothing. It was as though the underground structure had never officially existed.
Then she found a handwritten note attached to a survey from 1989.
The note was partially damaged, but one sentence remained readable: “Subsurface access restricted. Structure not included in public plan.”
George read it twice. “Restricted by whom?”
Mara shook her head. There was no name. No explanation.
The survey had been conducted shortly after one of the disappearances they had already discovered.
George looked at the date. “Someone knew about it.”
Mara nodded. “And someone specifically chose not to put it on the public plans.”
That evening, they walked toward the woods behind Blackwood House.
George carried a flashlight while Mara held the old map.
They followed the approximate route shown in the historical documents until they reached a dense section of trees where the ground became uneven.
The modern landscape gave no obvious indication that a building had ever stood there.
But once Mara compared the map with the terrain, she noticed a slight depression in the ground.
George cleared away leaves and found several old stones beneath them.
They were arranged in a straight line. A few feet farther on, they found another.
The stones appeared to form the remains of a foundation.
Mara looked around the trees. “This is where it was.”
George nodded. He moved his flashlight across the ground and found something else: a narrow concrete edge almost completely buried beneath soil and roots.
He crouched beside it. “This could be the entrance.”
Mara looked down. “Can we open it?” George examined the structure.
“Not without tools.” They stood in silence, staring at the buried remains of a place that had officially disappeared thirteen years earlier.
As darkness approached, they returned to the house with the old map and photographs.
George placed them beside Detective Reed's notes.
The connection was becoming impossible to ignore.
Reed had written that the disappearances were not the beginning.
Rebecca had written about adults entering the basement and about people she was forbidden to name.
Arthur Bell had admitted that he knew something about the house decades earlier.
The abandoned property across the road had produced fresh footprints leading toward the woods.
Now they had discovered another house that had been demolished after years of unexplained activity, along with evidence suggesting that it may have been connected to Blackwood House by an underground passage.
George looked at the map. “Maybe the houses weren't separate.”
Mara looked at him. “What do you mean?” He pointed toward the two locations.
“Maybe they were part of the same place.”
The thought was unsettling. If the passage had been used over the years, then people could have entered one property and disappeared from another without anyone on the road ever seeing them.
Later that night, Mara returned to the old photograph of the second house.
She enlarged the image one final time. Something near the basement wall caught her attention.
She zoomed in until the picture became grainy.
There appeared to be three people standing near the entrance.
One of them was an older man. The second was a woman.
The third figure was too blurred to identify.
Mara stared at the image, then compared the silhouette of the older man with the photograph of Arthur Bell from the group picture they had found behind the wall.
Her hands went cold. She couldn't be certain, but the resemblance was strong enough to frighten her.
Then she noticed a fourth detail in the photograph: a narrow path leading from the second house toward the trees behind Blackwood House.
Mara slowly closed the laptop. The second house had been demolished.
The land had been erased from the maps. But whatever had connected it to Blackwood House might still be beneath the ground.
And if the passage was still there, the disappearances might finally have a physical explanation.
Someone hadn't needed to leave Blackwood Road. They may have simply gone under it.