The modern world didn’t fade away gradually; it was amputated.
One minute, my GPS was cheerfully announcing an arrival time of 4:15 PM, displaying the clean, digital blue line of the interstate. The next, the signal bar on my dashboard screen dropped to zero, the blue line vanished into a gridless void, and the cheerful robotic voice said, Recalculating.
Then, silence.
I was at the Trestle Bridge.
It was a massive, rusted skeleton of iron and timber spanning the gorge where the Blackwood River churned three hundred feet below. It was the only way in or out of Oakhaven, a choke point that felt less like infrastructure and more like a warning. Beyond the bridge, the world simply stopped. A wall of white—the Oakhaven Shroud—sat heavy in the valley, looking solid enough to bruise a knuckle against.
I stopped the car at the mouth of the bridge. The engine idled, a nervous vibration under my hands.
“Turn around,” I whispered. “Go back to Seattle. Call Miller. Tell him to trace the postmark.”
But I didn’t turn around. My hand moved to my bag on the passenger seat, fingers brushing the stiff edge of the blue envelope. Let’s Play. The challenge hooked into the soft meat of my pride and pulled. I wasn’t the frightened girl who had left on a bus; I was Elara Vance. I ate bullies for breakfast.
I eased off the brake. The tires hummed against the metal grating of the bridge, a sound that vibrated in my teeth. As I crossed the midpoint, the fog swallowed the hood of my Subaru. The sunlight died instantly, replaced by a diffuse, gray twilight that made it impossible to tell if it was morning or midnight.
The air changed, too. I cracked the window an inch, and there it was—the perfume of my nightmares. Cedar, heavy and sharp. The wet, cloying scent of decaying ferns. And ozone, like the air before a lightning strike.
I was home.
Oakhaven hadn’t changed, and that was the worst thing it could have done. As I rolled off the bridge and onto Main Street, the decay was preserved, fossilized in the damp air. The town was a scar cut into the dense rainforest, a collection of buildings that looked like they were slowly losing a war with the moss.
I passed the old mill, its windows shattered eyes staring blankly at the road. I passed the diner where the “River Rats”—the kids from the trailer parks down by the water—used to smoke menthols and glare at us “Hill Toppers” as we drove by in our parents’ SUVs. The class line here was drawn in elevation. The higher up the mountain you lived, the cleaner your blood was supposed to be.
I looked up toward the ridge, where the fog was thickest. Somewhere up there, buried in the gray, was the Glass House. The Vance Estate.
My stomach gave a violent lurch, acid rising in my throat.
I can’t go there. Not yet.
The thought of walking through that front door, of seeing the dust motes dancing in the sterile silence of my mother’s museum, was physically impossible. I needed a buffer. I needed a neutral zone.
I pulled the wheel hard to the left, steering away from the ridge and toward the lower end of town.
The Timberline Motel was a U-shaped sore on the landscape, sporting a neon sign that buzzed with the sound of an angry hornet. Only the letters IMBER and MOT were illuminated. I parked between a rusted pickup truck and a dumpster that smelled of fish guts.
The lobby smelled of lemon pledge and despair. The clerk, a teenager with acne scars and a hoodie pulled low, didn’t look up from his phone as I slapped my credit card on the counter.
“One night?” he mumbled.
“A week,” I said. “Maybe more.”
He looked up then, eyes narrowing as he took in my blazer, my sharp haircut, the city grit on my boots. He didn’t recognize me. Good. To him, I was just a tourist lost in the Shroud.
“Doll Festival is this weekend,” he said, sliding a key across the laminate. “Rates go up on Friday.”
I froze. On the counter, a flyer was taped next to the register. It showed a crude drawing of a figure made of straw being consumed by flames. Burn Your Burdens, the text promised. The Annual Oakhaven Doll Festival.
“Right,” I said, my voice tight. “The fire.”
I grabbed the key—room 104—and got out of there before he could ask why a tourist looked like she was about to be sick.
Room 104 was clean, in the way a hospital room is clean—bleached within an inch of its life. I threw my bag on the bed and went straight to the bathroom, splashing freezing water on my face. I looked at myself in the spotted mirror. Dark circles were already bruising the skin under my eyes.
“Focus, Vance,” I told the reflection. “Report the letter. Trace the sender. Leave.”
Simple. Clinical.
I took the blue envelope, secured my press badge to my belt—my shield, my armor—and walked back out into the drizzle.
The Oakhaven Police Station was a brick block that looked like it had been built to withstand a siege. It sat squarely between the library and the post office, the three pillars of small-town civilization.
I walked in, shaking the rain from my coat. The station was warmer than the outside, smelling of stale coffee and floor wax. The front desk was empty.
“Hello?” I called out.
“Hold your horses,” a voice boomed from the back.
A door opened, and a man stepped out. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a Detective’s shield on a belt that looked strained by the weight of his gun. He had dark hair that was starting to gray at the temples and eyes the color of the river during a storm—murky, turbulent green.
He stopped dead when he saw me. The file he was holding slapped against his thigh.
“Elara?”
The name sounded foreign in his mouth, rusty from disuse.
“Julian,” I said. I kept my chin high, my posture rigid. “Or is it Detective Thorne now?”
Julian Thorne. The boy who had kissed me under the bleachers while the homecoming game roared in the distance. The boy who had promised to get me out of this town. The boy I had left behind without so much as a goodbye note because I knew if I looked back, I would turn to salt.
He looked older. Harder. The softness around his jaw was gone, replaced by stubble and tension. He looked like a man who had seen things he couldn’t unsee.
“What are you doing here, Elara?” He didn’t smile. There was no warmth, only a wary confusion. He crossed his arms, blocking the path to the back offices.
“I’m here to file a report,” I said, reaching into my bag. “Harassment. Mail fraud. Take your pick.”
I slapped the blue envelope onto the counter between us.
Julian stared at it, then back at me. “You came back after fifteen years because of a letter?”
“It’s a death threat, Julian.”
“Does it say ‘I’m going to kill you’?”
“It implies it.”
He sighed, a long, weary sound that scraped against my nerves. “Elara, we’re a little busy right now. If this is some Seattle journalist thing—”
“It’s an Oakhaven thing,” I snapped. The old dynamic flared up instantly. The ‘River Rat’ defending his turf, the ‘Ice Queen’ looking down from her tower. “Someone dug up something from my property. They sent me photos.”
He finally picked up the envelope. He didn’t open it. He just weighed it in his hand, his thumb brushing the texture of the paper.
“We don’t have the resources for a forensic analysis on hate mail right now,” he said, tossing it back on the counter. “Sheriff Miller is out, and I’m…” He trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck.
“You’re what?” I pressed. “Too busy writing parking tickets?”
His eyes flashed. For a second, I saw the boy I used to know, the one with the temper that burned hot and fast. He took a step closer to the counter, leaning in until I could smell him—rain, gun oil, and cheap soap.
“I’m working a missing person case, Elara. A girl. Eighteen. Same age you were when you ran.”
The words landed like a physical blow.
“Who?” I asked, the instinct to take notes twitching in my fingers.
“Sarah Miller. The Sheriff’s niece.” He lowered his voice, glancing toward the back room as if the walls were listening. “She vanished three days ago. Vanished into thin air, right out of her backyard.”
“Runaway?” I asked, though I knew the answer. In Oakhaven, people didn’t run away. They got swallowed.
“That’s what we hoped,” Julian said. His expression darkened, the mask of the professional cop slipping just enough to show the fear underneath. “Until an hour ago.”
“What happened an hour ago?”
Julian looked at me. Really looked at me. He was searching for something—maybe the girl he used to love, maybe the cold-hearted bitch who abandoned him. I didn’t know which one he found, but he decided to trust her.
“We found her sweater,” he said softly. “In the Weeping Woods. About two miles past the treeline.”
“And?”
“And it was covered in blood, Elara. A lot of it.” He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper that chilled me more than the fog outside. “And there was something else. The way the clothes were found… they weren’t just discarded. They were folded. Neatly. Like laundry.”
My breath hitched.
Folded.
Like a doll’s clothes put away for the night.
“It’s not a missing person case anymore,” Julian said, his eyes locking onto mine. “It’s a homicide. So excuse me if I don’t have time for your letter.”
I stared at him, the room tilting slightly. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.
“Julian,” I said, my voice trembling despite my best efforts to freeze it over. “Open the envelope.”
“Elara, I said—”
“Open the damn envelope!”
He recoiled at the sharpness of my tone. Slowly, he picked it up again. He slid the photo out.
I watched his face. I watched the color drain out of it until he looked as gray as the sky outside. He stared at the doll, at the cracked face of Annabel, at the hands posed in prayer.
“This doll,” he whispered. “The dress… it’s blue lace.”
“Yes.”
He looked up at me, and for the first time, there was no anger in his eyes. Only horror.
“Sarah Miller,” he said. “She was wearing a blue lace dress when she disappeared.”