“I run here. Sometimes walk. Sometimes just... come out to be alone and enjoy the quiet.” Sienna closed her eyes for a moment.
“This morning too?” Rad frowned.
“Yes, I came for a run.” Sienna’s eyes found his.
He absorbed that without changing expression.
That explained some of the freshest disturbances near the garden edge. If she had been out here this morning before calling him, whatever trace he might have found had probably been trampled, blurred, or mixed in with her own.
He didn’t say it aloud.
There was no point. She already looked tightly wound enough to snap, and telling her she might have disturbed evidence would help neither of them.
So he only nodded once and kept moving.
The trail bent gradually left, dipping through a patch of palmetto before opening slightly. Rad lifted a branch out of his way and stepped into a narrower corridor between the trees.
They had been walking for about fifteen minutes when he stopped dead.
Ahead of them, half-swallowed by weeds and shadow, stood the blackened shell of a cabin.
Even ruined, it was unmistakable.
The roof had long since collapsed inward. The remaining walls were scarred dark with old fire damage, their frames warped and skeletal against the greenery trying to reclaim them. Sunlightspeared through the broken structure in sharp golden bars, making the ruin look even more ghostly.
“That’s the tragedy cabin,” Sienna said quietly.
It was the cabin that had burned ten years ago. The place that still lived in town memory like an old wound no one could quite stop touching. Rad stepped closer, scanning automatically.
No drag marks led to it. No recent disturbance stood out around the burned shell. The ground here was uneven but heavily trodden in the same vague way as the rest of the path. Whoever had taken the safe had not obviously brought it here, and nothing about the ruin suggested it had been used recently for concealment.
Still, the sight of it unsettled him.
“It feels wrong out here, doesn’t it?” Her gaze stayed on the cabin. “Like the ghosts still have something to tell us.”
He could not argue with that and suppressed a shudder at how accurate her words might just be.
For a moment, neither of them moved. The woods seemed quieter around the ruin, as if even the birds had chosen to hold back.
Then Rad forced himself to focus.
He photographed the path junction, the cabin exterior, the surrounding ground, and the direction the trail continued beyond it. He took his time, checking the area in widening circles, but the result stayed the same.
Nothing useful.
At last he lowered the camera.
“No sign they brought the safe this way,” Rad said. “But I’ll see if I can find out, on the quiet, who checked in or left the camp and cabin grounds within the last couple of days.”
“Do you want to go back?” Sienna asked.
Rad nodded, and they walked back in silence. He let Sienna lead the last part toward the garden opening, and when the pool house came back into view through the trees, he felt some of the strange pressure lift from his chest. Not much. Just enough.
At the edge of the lawn, he paused and looked back once more at the path vanishing into the woods.
A clear path, yes.
Just not a clean one.
