Chapter 41

CHAPTER 41

FIFTY MILES NORTH , Margaret Marple stood at the edge of a Putnam County cornfield as Auguste Poe stepped into the tattered rows.

“This is where the school bus was abandoned?” Marple asked.

Poe pointed ahead to a patch of trees near a drainage gulley at the edge of the field. “Parked down there,” he said. “Covered in camo netting. Hidden from the road and practically invisible from the air.”

Marple nodded. The bus had already been towed to the municipal garage. But in terms of evidence, it had turned out to be an empty shell. No prints. No traces of blood or other bodily fluids. No clothing. No weapons or shell casings. The five children, all eight years old, had disappeared without a trace, leaving their backpacks on their seats. Marple scanned the photos of the bags on her iPad as she walked. The kids had scrawled names across the backs in thick marker or glitter pen. Olivia. Ava. Lucas. Grace. Logan.

No trace of the driver. Bill Barnes. Sixty years old. Ex-Army. Former security guard. Marple flicked to his photo. Massive guy with a woodsman’s beard. New to the job but, by all accounts, a gentle giant. The kids apparently called him Hagrid.

She and Poe had made the trip back up here from Brooklyn in Poe’s ’77 Trans Am, which was a lot speedier than the limo—though, as Marple had pointed out, a lot less comfortable. She’d considered asking Holmes to join them but decided against locating him and goading him to come along. She knew the pressure of the writers’ convention yesterday had put him in a sour mood, and figured the trip out here in a cramped sedan would only make things worse.

“Do you think he’s serious about leaving for good?” Poe called out from a few furrows away.

“I haven’t given up on him,” said Marple. “But we can’t let the work suffer in the meantime.” She exchanged her shoes for calf-high Wellingtons, which she pulled up to cover the legs of her tweed trousers. She stepped into the field and followed Poe along a set of deep, wide vehicle tracks.

A few sections of crime-scene tape had come loose from stakes at the border of the field. They wafted in the breeze like tattered yellow ribbons.

Poe’s boots crunched through the remnants of the season’s corn stalks, now brown and dry. Marple stopped next to him. There was no obvious connection between the missing third graders and the missing St. Michael’s babies. Marple had been immersed in studying the black market for newborns. But older kids? The possibilities made her shiver.

“Chowchilla,” Poe muttered under his breath.

“Pardon?” said Marple.

“Chowchilla, California—between Fresno and Modesto. Back in 1976, some kidnappers hijacked a school bus and hid the kids underground in a quarry. Perfect crime, until the bus driver and the kids dug their way out.”

Marple scanned the empty field. “Nothing underground here, I assume.”

Poe shook his head. “The FBI did a good job. Heat-seeking drones, body-sniffing dogs, ground-penetrating sonar. Not a single hit. The kids aren’t buried. At least not anywhere in this field.”

Marple and Poe walked carefully between the corn furrows. Poe pointed at a set of heavy-duty tread marks leading away from the bus. “Tractor marks,” he said. “More than two weeks old. No new vehicle tracks. And not a single footprint leading away from the bus.”

Marple looked up, scanning the clear blue sky. “Perplexing,” she said. “It’s like they were all spirited away by a spaceship.”

When she glanced back in Poe’s direction, he was standing still in a corn row, his eyebrows slightly raised.

“Margaret,” he said, “you are a never-ending source of inspiration.”