CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jenna stood motionless, her gaze fixed on Billy Schmitt and his deputies as they canvassed the churned earth by the side of the dirt road, reading the remnants of a struggle. She felt a chill despite the June warmth, knowing this was where Sarah Thompson’s fate had turned.

“Ranger, make sure every inch is photographed before anyone else steps in,” Jenna told him.

“Got it, Sheriff,” Billy replied with a nod, his deputies already snapping pictures.

“Secure the outermost perimeter,” he directed his men. The rangers focused on their work, the silence broken only by the occasional crackle of branches underfoot and the distant call of a lone bird. Their expressions were grim as they methodically marked off a large area with yellow tape.

“Jenna?” Jake’s voice pulled her back from her observations. “We should head back to the office and regroup.”

She turned to face him, the short strands of her hair fluttering slightly as a breeze swept through the pines. “You’re right,” she replied. “There’s nothing more we can do here. Let’s get back to Trentville and start connecting the dots.”

They trudged back to the ranger’s station where their separate vehicles were parked, but before they parted, Jenna pulled out her phone.

“You go on ahead,” she told Jake. “I’m going to call Colonel Spelling. He needs to know what we’ve found.”

“Of course,” Jake replied. His eyes met hers briefly, a silent nod passing between them—a shared understanding that boiled beneath the surface of their professional rapport.

“Tell you what,” Jake said. “I’ll pick us up something to eat on the way back. All that hiking has made me hungry.” With a grin, he got into his car and drove away.

Jenna hit the speed dial for Colonel Spelling of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. The ringing tone echoed hollowly before the familiar voice answered.

“Colonel, it’s Jenna Graves,” she reported. “We’ve found the spot in Whispering Pines where Sarah Thompson was taken. There’s no doubt in my mind—it was an abduction. She didn’t just wander off the trail or succumb to an accident. This was intentional.”

“Understood, Sheriff Graves,” came the eventual reply. “Sorry to hear it, but I’ll send a team to Whispering Pines. Is that all you need for now?”

Jenna hesitated, the line crackling with anticipation. There was something else, an intuition she couldn’t shake.

“Actually, Colonel,” she started, “I think this case might be part of something ongoing. An aspiring writer, Mark Reeves, disappeared from Trentville a decade ago. No trace of him since. I’m starting to think these aren’t isolated incidents.” She could almost hear Spelling’s mental gears grinding, processing her suspicion.

“You think there’s a connection?”

“Instincts say yes,” Jenna admitted. “It’s a hunch, but my gut’s telling me we’re looking at something bigger—a pattern we’ve overlooked.”

“Mark Reeves, you said?” Spelling’s tone was now laced with concern.

“Yes, but I don’t think you’ll find any records on him. He wasn’t from around these parts. He was just traveling through Trentville when something seems to have happened to him. As far as I know, he was never reported missing. But even so …”

Her voice faded, and she paused, trying to frame the request she was about to make.

“I need a comprehensive list of missing persons in Missouri,” she finally said.

There was a brief silence on the line, then Spelling’s reply came. “That’s a hefty request, Jenna. How far back are we talking?”

Jenna paused, considering that Mark Reeves’s decade-old disappearance could very well be a piece of a larger, darker puzzle. If there were others, they needed to know. And then she considered the span of years since Piper had vanished.

“Twenty years,” she finally said, her decision made. “I need to see everything.”

“Twenty years?” Spelling repeated, his tone revealing his astonishment. “You realize the active list alone is—”

“Yes, there must be hundreds of names, just the active ones,” she affirmed, the gravity of the situation pressing down on her. “But I believe there might be others before Reeves. Can you do it?”

“Of course,” Spelling conceded after a moment. “It may take a little while to compile, but you’ll have it. But Jenna, what are you looking for?”

“Patterns,” she answered succinctly, her gaze drifting to the spot where Sarah had vanished, now cordoned off by the diligent deputies. “Connections that might have been overlooked.” Her mind already began sifting through potential correlations, her analysis as instinctual as breathing.

“Patterns…” Spelling repeated, the word sounding like a puzzle yet to be solved. “Alright, I’ll get my people on it. You’ll have your list.”

“Thank you, Colonel. This could be critical.” Jenna ended the call, her thumb lingering on the disconnect button as she felt the magnitude of what she’d just set into motion. Twenty years of names, lives interrupted, families waiting for closure—she was about to dive into a sea of lost souls.

She took a moment, standing alone by her patrol car, feeling the vastness of the task ahead. The air was thick with heat and the scent of pine needles baking on the forest floor. Jenna could feel the beginnings of an ache at the back of her skull, a reminder that lucid dreams often left her more exhausted than rested.

Her drive back to headquarters in Trentville was a blur of green foliage and dusty roads, the hum of the tires a monotonous drone beneath the turmoil of her thoughts. When Jenna pushed through the door of the building, the cool blast of air from the struggling AC unit was a momentary reprieve from the June afternoon.

The front area was empty except for a lone receptionist who greeted her cheerfully and then went back to whatever she was reading on her cell phone.

In her office, Jenna found Jake seated beside her desk. His cheeseburger was half eaten, and another one was waiting there for her, along with a shake. Even though she’d had a big breakfast, Jenna realized she was hungry, and she started eating before she fired up her computer and clicked on her inbox.

She was surprised to see that Colonel Spelling had already sent her a list. When she loaded it onto her screen, rows upon rows of names filled the monitor, names cascading down like a waterfall. She scrolled through the entries, her eyes catching dates and locations, but it was the sheer volume that staggered her—tens of thousands of names.

“What’s this?” Jake asked.

“It’s a list of people who’ve gone missing in Missouri during the last twenty years,” Jenna said. “Colonel Spelling sent it at my request. I think there might be something here.”

“How are we supposed to work with this?” Jake muttered from over her shoulder. “Where do we even start?”

Jenna leaned back in her chair. “We look for patterns, connections, anything that ties back to Trentville.”

“Patterns?” Jake echoed, skepticism laced with concern. “That’s like finding a needle in a dozen haystacks, Jenna. Even with the entire department on it, it could take—”

“We don’t need the whole department,” she interrupted. “Just us.”

Jenna’s fingers hovered over the keyboard as she considered how much to tell him. Her dreams were hers alone, a private counsel that she had never shared with anyone except Frank, certainly not with Jake. But how could they work with each other as a team without him knowing the full truth?

Her hands moved of their own accord, opening a new document and beginning to type criteria for sorting the list.

“We’ll start narrowing our focus,” Jenna said, her tone more assured than she felt. “First, we’ll look for a pattern based on periods of time. Ten years ago, a writer—Mark Reeves—visited Trentville. He wasn’t a local, but he disappeared here. I think… it’s possible he met the same fate as Sarah.”

“Same perpetrator?” Jake asked, skepticism evident in his eyes.

“Perhaps,” Jenna replied, her intuition screaming silently about the connection. “It’s a lead worth following. We need to look for similar patterns of disappearances.”

She could feel Jake’s eyes on her as she fell silent again.

“Well, how can we narrow down the names?” Jake’s question was both practical and daunting.

“Focus on outsiders, individuals who came to Trentville and never left—at least not willingly.” She decided to once again omit mentioning how her dreams guided her thoughts; some things were better kept close until she could make sense of them herself.

“Okay,” Jake said after a moment. “Outsiders.” He ran a hand through his sandy hair. “You realize this could take us hours, right? Maybe days.”

Jenna bit her lip, wrestling with the urge to divulge the full extent of her suspicions—suspicions born from dreams and the hints of intuition. Instead, she leaned into her analytical side, the side that had earned the trust of her peers. Despite his initial astonishment, she knew Jake would follow her lead, just as he always did. Jenna was grateful for that—it meant she didn’t have to navigate the murky waters of this investigation alone.

But Jake was right about the overwhelming magnitude of their task. She simply had to figure out how to narrow down their search even further.

Then, as if in reply to her unspoken query, she remembered something that Mark Reeves had said to her in her dream—something that hadn’t made sense, at least maybe until now.

“Five years,” Mark had said to her. “It’s always five years.”

“Five years,” she said. It was at least an anchor point in the sea of names and dates that threatened to drag her down.

Jake folded his arms, looking over at her. “You think there’s something about five years we should be considering?”

“Maybe,” Jenna replied, pulling herself back to the present. In her dream, Mark had spoken those words with a sense of urgency, as though he was trying to impart a critical message from beyond. “There could be a cycle to these abductions.”

Her fingers hesitated over the keyboard, her gaze fixed on the sea of names that swam before her eyes. Each one bore a weight, a silent plea for discovery, but she sought patterns within the chaos, markers that would lead them to answers.

“We should start by searching through names over intervals of five years,” she said, without looking at her deputy. “We can start by searching through names of people that went missing five years ago. And then …”

“And then what?”

Jenna shook her head with frustration.

“I wish I could give you something more concrete, but all I’ve got are instincts.” The words felt inadequate even as they hung in the air.

Jake leaned against the edge of Jenna’s cluttered desk, his arms folded across his chest. Bafflement etched his features as he watched her struggle with the enormity of their task.

“Alright then, every five years…” Jake echoed, mulling over the concept. He might not see the same visions or dream the same dreams, but he did trust both her intelligence and her intuition.

The room fell quiet, save for the hum of the aging air conditioner and the faint tap-tap of keys as Jenna resumed her methodical search while Jake watched on. She filtered the list by dates, setting parameters around every fifth year, hoping patterns would emerge like stars in the night sky.

As she worked, a gnawing seed of self-doubt sprouted within her. Jenna knew her intuition had led her down the right paths before, yet the ambiguity of her dreams left her grappling with uncertainty.

Jake didn’t question her; he simply trusted her. But as they delved into the depths of the list, Jenna couldn’t help but wonder—how could she expect him to trust her when she wrestled with trusting herself? She sometimes questioned the rationale of chasing specters when tangible evidence should be her guide. How much could she rely on these visitations from the departed? And how much could she burden Jake with this inexplicable sense of knowing that defied logic?