7. Reluctant Allies #3
“These are all from the archives,” she says, sliding a protective sleeve towards me. “I’ve been collecting them for years. Patterns that nobody talks about but everyone knows.” Her voice drops. “Disappearances. Decades of them.”
The newspaper trembles slightly in my hands.
“YOUNG MOTHER MISSING AFTER CUSTODY DISPUTE,” screams the headline.
A grainy photo beneath shows a woman, barely older than me, her smile tight and unnatural, arms wrapped around a small child as though someone might snatch him away.
June 17, 1992. I skim the first paragraph: dinner still bubbling on the stove, back door unlocked, no signs of struggle. Just… gone.
“There are more,” Nora continues, spreading out article after article across the porch. “Going back at least sixty years. Maybe longer, but the records get spotty before that.”
Each headline tells a similar story: a person vanishes without warning, belongings left behind, no signs of a struggle, no body ever found.
Almost as if they woke up one day and decided it was time to leave.
The faces stare up at me, men, women, young, old, their newsprint eyes holding secrets their mouths never told.
“I don’t understand,” I say, though a creeping suspicion is already forming in the back of my mind. “Why are you showing me these?”
Nora hunches closer, her words barely audible despite our solitude on the porch. Her finger traces the red circles marking the yellowed newsprint. “See it? The timing?” She jabs at a faded headline from 1985.
The photo shows a gangly boy with defiance burning behind his eyes.
“This kid vanished exactly seventy-two hours after standing court against the mayor’s golden boy.
” Her nail slides to another clipping, this one showing a woman with haunted eyes and a tight smile.
“And her? Gone the night after she got legal protection from her ex. The same ex whose family owns half the storefronts downtown.”
My eyes dart between the articles, connecting the invisible dots. “You’re saying the missing weren’t random victims.”
Nora shakes her head. “They were targets,” she confirms, eyes flashing with an intensity I’ve never seen in her before. “People who’d received threats, who were vulnerable, who had enemies in positions of power.”
She pulls out another sleeve, this one containing not news articles but what appear to be property records. “And here’s where it gets interesting—nearly half of them had some connection to your estate.”
I stare at her, pulse quickening. “What kind of connection?”
Nora fans the documents across the porch between us. “People who lived here. Family members who inherited it. Even just regular visitors.” Her finger traces a connection between the three yellowed pages. “And somehow, your estate is a common denominator in all of their stories.”
The sun is setting, stretching our shadows across the porch while Nora keeps pulling papers from her bag.
Birth records. Death records. Property papers.
Marriage records. She’s clearly been digging into this for a long time, piecing together a huge puzzle that’s finally starting to make sense to me.
“So you think someone’s been… what exactly? Kidnapping people?” I ask, trying to reconcile this with what Dr. Rao told me about protection and what Marta’s map suggests about safe houses.
Nora laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “That’s what I thought at first. A serial predator working for generations.” She shakes her head. "Until I started finding them.”
I cock an eyebrow. “Finding who?”
“The missing.” She slides a final sleeve toward me, this one containing recent printouts rather than historical documents. “Not all of them. Maybe a third. But enough to establish a pattern.”
I flip through the papers, my jaw dropping. Facebook profiles. Apartment leases. Driver’s licenses. Holy shit, it’s them. That kid from ‘85? He’s some professor in Oregon now, middle-aged and looking happier than ever.
The mom who vanished in ‘92? There she is, grey streaks in her hair, flour-dusted apron, beaming in front of her Arizona bakery. And the woman who escaped her husband in 2001, she’s got her arm around some silver fox in Florida, looking ten years younger than she should.
My throat tightens as I stare at the faces. “They’re… alive,” I whisper, fingers hovering over the images as if they might disappear at my touch.
Relief washes over me, but then something darker follows. 'They escaped, just disappeared. Left everything behind.' The thought makes my stomach twist, even though I understand why they had to leave.
Nora’s fingernail makes a soft click against the estate’s deed, my deed now, as she taps it deliberately.
“These weren’t random disappearances or escapes.
Someone orchestrated them. For decades, maybe longer, your house has been the centre of an underground railroad of sorts.
Someone’s been watching, identifying vulnerable people, giving them shelter here, then helping them vanish completely. New names. New lives. New beginnings.”
My brain flashes to that watchtower room upstairs, all those leather-bound journals crammed with notes about who said what to whom, which families were feuding, who might be in trouble next.
I see Marta’s map with its little red dots marking safe places.
Dr. Rao’s careful records of people who’d been “protected.” Click.
Click. CLICK. Everything is falling into place as if I’ve finally got the combination right.
Nora’s finger traces across her homemade timeline, tapping at bunched-up dots. “See how they clump together? Three, four vanish, boom, boom, boom, then nothing for years. It’s almost like…” She bites her lip, eyes darting up to mine.
“As if someone works in phases,” I finish for her. “Helping people, then lying low until memory fades and the next crisis emerges.”
The sun hits Nora’s hair just right as she nods, lighting it up like a copper penny.
“Whatever, whoever is in your house,” she says, voice dropping so low I have to lean in, “they’ve been looking out for folks who needed an exit strategy.
For generations. Like maybe a family thing, you know?
Grandpa teaches dad teaches son how to spirit away the desperate. ”
She looks up at my windows going dark with evening, and I catch the goosebumps rising on her arms. “What I can’t figure out is why they’d take on that kind of risk. Century after century.”
I follow her gaze to the upper floors, where the watchtower sits invisible from this angle. Is he there now? Watching us piece together his history? Has he been guiding me towards these discoveries all along?
“How long have you known about this?” I ask, turning back to Nora.
Her eyes drop to her hands. “I’ve had my hunches for years.
The archives, they’re like this treasure chest of secrets if you dig around enough.
” She starts scooping up her papers, each movement careful and deliberate.
“But I never had anything solid until lately. Actual proof that whoever’s behind these disappearances isn’t some monster, they’re more like a guardian angel. ”
As she puts her papers into an old satchel, I feel the weight of everything she’s found settle over me. 'Why are you telling me this now?'
Nora pauses, twilight shadows making her expression unreadable. “Because you’re part of it now. Whether you choose to be or not.” She hefts her bag onto her shoulder. “And because there’s been another threat recently. Another potential disappearance brewing.”
“Who?” I ask, though dread already coils in my stomach, anticipating her answer.
She meets my eyes directly, all pretense of the bubbly archivist gone.
"You, Elara. Someone in this town wants you gone badly enough that the pattern is starting again.” She steps off the porch, pausing to glance back at the estate looming behind me.
“The question is whether you’ll be the next to vanish, or if you’re meant to play a different role entirely. ”
I watch her walk to her car, questions stuck in my throat like half-swallowed pills.
Her taillights fade down the driveway, two red dots disappearing into the dark.
I stand on the porch for a moment, listening to the crickets.
Then I turn back to the house, this strange, beautiful place I now call home.
The porch light throws my shadow across the entry hall as I step inside.
I close the door, lean against it, and let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
'Well,' I say to the empty foyer, 'that was something.
' The house stays silent, but I feel like it’s listening.
The knife crunches through the sourdough, and the smell hits me right away.
I arrange the slices on my grandmother’s old silver tray, the one with lilies around the edges that I dug out from the back of a cupboard.
I add some cheese, this sharp local stuff from the general store, and uncork the decent red wine I’ve been saving. For what, I don’t know.
Definitely not 'dinner with the stranger living in my walls.' I keep fussing with everything, moving the napkin, adjusting the glass. My hands won’t stop shaking. I’m so nervous it’s almost funny.
It feels more like getting ready for a date than leaving food for someone who might be dangerous or not even real.
I crumble four notes into tight balls before writing the fifth.
Too formal, too casual, too desperate, too detached.
My pen hovers, trembles, then commits to the page.
Finally, I settle on the simple truth: “Thank you for watching over me.” The words stare back at me.
Six words on cream-coloured paper that say both nothing and everything.
I fold it once and prop it against the wine bottle, then lift the tray with hands that struggle to remain steady.