"The police SUV?"
"A means of diverting attention away from my husband. He was the first on scene that night. That girl got in without issue. I mean, aren't you going to trust an EMT at a crash site?"
"So Bob Anderson saw EMT lights through the trees.”
"Now you're thinking straight. Though I'm not sure for how long." She shoved him between the shoulder blades. "Keep moving."
Noah stumbled but stayed on his feet. The silo was fifty yards ahead. The rusted dome was dark with rain and the mud sucked at his boots with every step.
"Then the rest followed after that," Lydia said. Her voice had shifted. Not confessional. Not boastful. Conversational. She'd thought about this for so long that it had become ordinary. "Earl knew the roads. Knew the dead spots. Knew which girls were passing through the deli or the agency or the campus. He'd often parked at the gas station between calls. He’d spot them. Place the rag. Follow. And when the car stalled, there he was. An EMT on a dark road. They'd climb right in."
“Why?”
"For Paul." Her voice softened. Just slightly. The way it had softened when she'd talked about her son in the kitchen during Noah's first visit. "He's a good boy. He never laid a hand on those girls. He wouldn't hurt anyone. But he can't... he doesn't understand how to be with a person the way other men do. People can be cruel. You should see how girls look at him. The way they talk to him. Like he's nothing." She paused. "Earl and I, we just wanted him to have someone. A companion. Someone who would stay. I won't be here forever. Earl's gone. Our lineage ends with him unless someone is there."
They reached the silo. A metal door, rusted at the hinges, set into the concrete base.
"My husband read about it. Stockholm syndrome, they called it. That woman back in the seventies. Patty Hearst. He thought if we just gave them enough time, they'd bond with Paul. They'd see him the way we saw him. A gentle soul. A good heart." She paused. "But they didn't. So we made them disappear."
"Open the door and step in," she said.
Noah pulled the door. It scraped open on rusted hinges and the air that came out was cold and smelled like concrete and damp earth and something else underneath. He stepped inside.The silo was empty. A hollow cylinder of concrete rising thirty feet above him, the rusted dome letting in thin blades of light through the gaps in the metal.
Lydia pointed with the gun to a metal hatch in the floor. A ring handle set flush into a steel plate.
"Open it."
He crouched and pulled the hatch. It swung up on heavy hinges, revealing narrow steps descending into darkness. A string of bare bulbs lit the way down.
"Go on. Head down."
Noah started down the steps. His hands were cuffed in front of him and he braced himself against the walls on either side. The concrete was cold against his palms. The morphine was in his legs now, making each step feel like it was happening at a distance, his body moving on instructions his brain was sending from somewhere far away.
"So you kept them here," he said.
"Easy to conceal. Soundproof. My husband built it. Started as a survivalist thing, a bunker beneath the silo in case the world went sideways. The rest came after." Her footsteps followed him down, steady, unhurried. The gun was still behind him.
"But they didn't bond," Noah said.
"No." The word was quiet. "We gave them chances. All of them. Weeks. Months sometimes. But they didn't see Paul the way we needed them to. They saw a captor. They saw a cage. They fought and screamed. They attacked him. And we couldn't let them go. They'd seen the property. They'd seen Paul. They'd seen us." Her voice was flat now. Clinical. "I knew through Jessie what was happening with Three Pillars. How the community worked. How girls passed through. How disappearances got absorbed into the cult's reputation. I figured if similar girls went missing, they'd trace it back to the community. Not to us."
"And the bog?”
A silence behind him. "Jessie and I used to go there. When we were girls. The bridge, the water, the tamaracks. It was our place." She paused. "It's still my place."
"After Earl died," Noah said. His voice was thickening. The words came slower now. "You kept going."
"I continued doing what I could. It's not as easy without the EMT van. But you'd be surprised how easily a young girl will get into a vehicle with an aging nurse on a dark road."
Noah reached the bottom of the staircase. The bunker opened up into a room roughly twelve by twelve. Concrete walls. Concrete floor. A bare bulb in the ceiling. A cot against the far wall with a thin mattress, the sheets tangled and stained. A bucket in the corner. Zip ties on the floor, some cut, some intact. A length of chain bolted to the wall with a padlock hanging open at the end. The room smelled like sweat and urine and something older than both, something that had seeped into the concrete over years.
The cot was empty. But the room wasn't unused. It was a room that had held people. Many people. For a long time.
"You told Seraphine that Derek killed her mother."
"I told her what she needed to hear. She wanted someone to blame and Derek was already dirty. Guilty of something." Lydia stepped off the last stair and into the bunker. "All I had to do was point her toward the bog, point her toward Derek, and let her broken mind do the rest."
"And when she went to the police with the sketch?"
