In the summer of 1989, four cousins arrived at their grandmother’s isolated farmhouse in rural Iowa for what should have been an ordinary family reunion.
But on a sweltering July night, all four children vanished without a trace, leaving behind halfeaten dinners and a house filled with silent witnesses.
For 36 years, their disappearance remained one of Iowa’s most haunting unsolved mysteries.
Then in 2025, demolition workers tearing down the abandoned Holloway farmhouse discovered something sealed behind the basement walls.
Something that would finally reveal the horrifying truth about what happened that night.
If you’re drawn to true crime mysteries that delve deep into the darkest corners of human nature, subscribe to True Stories Vault for more haunting investigations into cases that time forgot.
The Holloway farmhouse stood three miles outside of Asheford, Iowa.
A white clapboard structure with peeling paint and a wraparound porch that sagged in the middle.
By the summer of 1989, the house had belonged to Vera Holloway for 43 years, and she took pride in hosting her children and grandchildren for their annual July gathering, despite the arthritis that made climbing the stairs increasingly difficult.
That year, four of her grandchildren were scheduled to spend the week.
Emma Holloway, 14, whose sharp mind and love of mystery novels made her the natural leader of the cousin group.
Daniel Patterson, 12, quiet and observant, always carrying a sketchbook.
Grace Patterson, 10, Daniel’s sister, who collected insects and kept them in jars with holes punched in the lids.
and Thomas Whitmore, eight, the youngest, who still believed in monsters under the bed and refused to sleep without a nightlight.
They arrived on a Saturday afternoon in early July, delivered by their respective parents, who would return the following weekend to collect them.
The children had stayed at the farmhouse many times before.
They knew the creaking stairs, the musty smell of the root cellar, the way the cornfield seemed to whisper at night when the wind moved through them.
What they didn’t know was that by Monday morning, all four of them would be gone.
The police would find their beds unmade, their suitcases still packed, their grandmother Vera in her rocking chair on the back porch, alive, but unable or unwilling to speak.
She would die 3 weeks later without ever explaining what happened to the children in her care.
The investigation would consume thousands of hours, generate hundreds of leads, and ultimately solve nothing.
The farmhouse would stand empty for decades, slowly rotting, becoming a local legend whispered about by teenagers who dared each other to approach it after dark.
And deep within its walls, behind layers of plaster and wood, a secret waited in absolute silence, until someone finally tore the walls down.
Patricia Holloway had not thought about the farmhouse in years.
Not consciously, anyway.
The memories lived in a sealed chamber of her mind behind walls she had carefully constructed and maintained for 36 years.
But when her phone rang on a Wednesday morning in March 2025, and a man identifying himself as Detective Caroline Pierce’s assistant asked if she could come to the Asheford Police Department, those walls began to crack.
She stood in her kitchen in De Moine, 62 years old now, her daughter Emma forever frozen at 14.
In every photograph she kept, the coffee maker burbled behind her, and through the window she could see her neighbors cat crossing the lawn.
Ordinary life continuing its ordinary rhythm.
“Mrs.
Holloway,” the voice on the phone pressed.
“Are you still there?” “Yes,” Patricia said, her voice steady despite the trembling in her hands.
What is this about? Detective Pierce would prefer to discuss it in person.
Would you be available this afternoon? Patricia knew what it meant when police wanted to talk in person after all these years.
They had found something.
The drive to Ashford took 90 minutes, and Patricia spent them remembering things she had tried to forget.
Emma’s laugh, bright and sudden.
The way she braided Grace’s hair, how she read to Thomas at night, doing all the voices from his picture books.
Emma had wanted to be a writer.
She kept journals filled with stories and observations, and Patricia had kept those journals for years before finally boxing them up and storing them in the attic, unable to bear reading her daughter’s handwriting.
The Ashford Police Department occupied a singlestory brick building on Main Street, unchanged since Patricia had last seen it in 1989.
She parked in the small lot and sat for a moment, gathering herself.
Then she walked inside.
Detective Caroline Pierce was younger than Patricia expected, perhaps 40, with dark hair pulled back in a neat ponytail and eyes that suggested she didn’t sleep well.
She rose from behind her desk as Patricia entered, extending a hand.
“Mrs.
Holloway, thank you for coming.
I know this is difficult.
” Patricia took the offered seat, her purse clutched in her lap exactly as she had clutched it 36 years ago when different detectives asked different questions.
“You found something?” Detective Pierce nodded slowly.
The Holloway farmhouse was scheduled for demolition.
The property was sold last year after finally clearing probate.
The demolition crew started work on Monday.
She paused, choosing her words carefully.
They found a concealed space behind the basement walls.
Patricia’s breath caught.
What was in it? Human remains, Detective Pierce said quietly.
Four sets.
We’re still in the preliminary stages of examination, but the medical examiner believes they’re consistent with children aged 8 to 14.
The room tilted slightly.
Patricia gripped the arms of her chair, focusing on breathing.
How long were they there? Decades.
The space was sealed with plaster that matches the original construction of the house.
There’s evidence of deliberate concealment.
Detective Pierce leaned forward, her expression careful.
Mrs.
Holloway, I need to ask you some questions about that week in July 1989.
I know you’ve answered these questions before, but sometimes new evidence helps us see old information differently.
Patricia nodded mutely.
She had answered these questions hundreds of times.
For police, for FBI agents, for private investigators she had hired with money she didn’t have.
She had answered them in her sleep, in therapy, in the dark hours before dawn when guilt and grief became indistinguishable.
“Walk me through that Saturday,” Detective Pierce said.
“When you dropped Emma off.
” Patricia closed her eyes, letting herself remember.
It was July 8th.
Emma had been excited for weeks.
She loved staying at Grandma Vera’s farmhouse.
All the cousins did.
It was tradition.
She opened her eyes.
My brother Michael and his wife Janet brought Daniel and Grace.
My sister’s ex-husband brought Thomas.
Linda was going through her divorce and couldn’t face a family gathering.
We all arrived around 2:00 in the afternoon.
How did Vera seem? Normal.
She was 76, had some health issues, but she was sharp, completely lucid.
Patricia’s fingers twisted the strap of her purse.
She made lemonade.
The kids ran around the property.
We stayed for about an hour, made sure everyone was settled.
And none of you were concerned about leaving four children with an elderly woman.
She’d been hosting them every summer for years, and Emma was 14, old enough to help with the younger ones.
She was responsible.
Patricia’s voice cracked slightly on the last word.
Responsible.
As if that had mattered.
As if being responsible had saved her.
Detective Pierce made a note.
Tell me about Vera’s hired hand.
Clayton Morris.
Patricia stiffened.
Clayton Morris.
The name that had haunted every theory, every nightmare.
He was a drifter.
Worked odd jobs around the area.
Vera hired him to help with repairs around the property.
He was there that Saturday when we dropped the kids off.
How did he interact with the children? He barely looked at them.
He was working on the porch railing.
When we left, he was still there.
Patricia met the detective’s eyes.
He disappeared the same night the children did.
That’s not a coincidence.
Clayton Morris was investigated extensively.
Detective Pierce said he was never found because he ran because he did something terrible and ran.
Detective Pierce didn’t argue.
She consulted her notes again.
When did you realize something was wrong? Sunday evening.
I called to check on Emma and there was no answer.
I tried several times.
Finally, I called the neighbors, the Hendersons.
They lived about a mile down the road.
Asked them to drive over and check.
Mr.
Henderson found Vera on the back porch in her rocking chair, staring at nothing.
The kids were gone.
Their things were still in their rooms.
No note, no sign of struggle, just gone.
Patricia could still remember the phone call from Mr.
Henderson, his voice shaking as he tried to explain what he’d found.
She had driven to Ashford at 90 m an hour, her husband white knuckled in the passenger seat.
By the time they arrived, police cars already lined the long driveway, their lights painting the farmhouse blue and red.
Vera never spoke again.
Patricia continued, “She was physically unharmed, but it was like something broke inside her.
The doctor said it might have been a stroke, but I think it was shock, trauma, whatever she saw or knew, it shut her down completely, and she died 3 weeks later.
Yes, at the hospital, she never regained speech.
Patricia’s hands had gone numb from gripping her purse.
For 36 years, I’ve wondered what she could have told us, what she knew.
Detective Pierce was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, “Mrs.
Holloway, the concealed space where we found the remains, it was accessed through a false panel in the basement wall.
” The panel was behind a large shelving unit that would have required considerable strength to move.
The space itself appears to have been used for storage at some point, possibly during prohibition, but it had been sealed with plaster and painted over.
The only way someone would know it was there is if they already knew the house very well.
Patricia absorbed this.
You’re saying whoever did this knew about that space.
Knew the house.
Yes.
And had the time and privacy to seal four children inside and replplaster the wall without being disturbed.
The image tried to form in Patricia’s mind.
Emma and the others trapped in darkness sealed away, but she couldn’t let herself see it.
Not fully.
Not if she wanted to remain functional.
Clayton Morris worked on the house.
He would have known.
We’re pursuing every avenue.
Detective Pierce said, “But I want you to understand something.
The remains were found with the children’s belongings, clothes, a sketchbook, a jar that might have contained insects, a small flashlight.
They appear to have been placed there, not trapped there accidentally.
” “Placed there?” Patricia’s voice rose.
What does that mean? Detective Pierce’s expression was grave.
The medical examiner is still working to determine cause of death, but preliminary examination suggests the children may have already been deceased when they were concealed.
This wasn’t imprisonment.
It was concealment of bodies.
The careful walls in Patricia’s mind began to collapse.
For 36 years, she had imagined Emma taken somewhere, held captive perhaps, suffering, but alive for some period of time.
The idea that she might have died that very night, that Sunday’s frantic phone calls had been made when Emma was already gone.
Mrs.
Holloway.
Detective Pierce’s voice seemed distant.
Patricia, I need you to breathe.
Patricia realized she was hyperventilating.
She forced herself to slow her breathing to focus on the physical room around her.
The detective had moved closer, her hand on Patricia’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Detective Pierce said quietly.
“I know this is devastating, but after all these years, you deserve the truth.
Your family deserves answers.
” Patricia nodded, unable to speak.
After a moment, she managed, “What happens now? We’re conducting a complete forensic examination, DNA testing to confirm identities, though based on the ages and the belongings found.
We’re confident these are your daughter and her cousins.
We’re also reintering anyone connected to the case who’s still alive.
And we’re searching for Clayton Morris.
He’d be in his 70s now if he’s still living.
What about Vera? Patricia asked.
Could she have? She couldn’t finish the question.
We’re exploring all possibilities, Detective Pierce said carefully.
I know that’s not the answer you want.
Patricia stood, her legs unsteady.
I need to call my brother and Linda.
They need to know.
Of course, we’ll be releasing a statement to the media tomorrow.
I wanted you to hear it from us first.
Detective Pierce handed Patricia a business card.
My cell number is on there.
Call anytime, day or night.
I promise you, Mrs.
Holloway, we’re going to find out what happened.
Patricia took the card, her fingers numb.
As she turned to leave, a thought occurred to her.
Detective, that night, Sunday night, when Mr.
Henderson found Vera, did anyone check the basement? Detective Pierce consulted her file.
Officers searched the entire house, including the basement.
But if the concealed space was behind a shelving unit and painted over, she trailed off.
They walked right past them, Patricia said softly.
Emma was there the whole time.
All of them were, and no one knew.
She walked out of the police station into the weak March sunlight.
Across the street, she could see the hardware store where she used to buy Emma’s school supplies.
Ashford hadn’t changed much in 36 years, but everything had changed.
Emma wasn’t missing anymore.
She was dead.
She had been dead all along, sealed in the darkness of Vera’s basement, while Patricia made phone calls and organized searches and printed flyers and refused to give up hope.
The hope had been a lie.
But at least now, finally, there might be truth.
The news broke on Thursday morning and by afternoon the media had descended on Asheford like locusts.
Patricia watched the coverage from her hotel room.
She had checked into the Ashford Inn rather than make the drive back to De Moine, unable to leave now that Emma was so close.
On television, reporters stood outside the Holloway farmhouse property, now cordoned off with police tape, cameras panning across the condemned structure that had become a crime scene.
After 36 years, the reporter in toned gravely, “The mystery of the Holloway farm disappearances may finally be solved.
Sources confirm that human remains consistent with four children have been discovered concealed in the basement walls.
Patricia muted the television and picked up her phone.
She had 17 missed calls, reporters mostly, though several were from people she hadn’t spoken to in decades.
friends from 1989 who had helped search who had brought casserles who had eventually stopped calling when years passed and Emma didn’t come home.
There was also a text from her brother Michael at the police station now.
Call me when you can.
She called.
Michael answered on the first ring.
Trisha.
His voice sounded exactly as it had the night the children vanished.
Thin, stretched, on the edge of breaking.
Did they tell you about the DNA? Not yet.
I just met with them yesterday.
They called me in this morning.
They’re rushing preliminary DNA analysis.
They want to confirm.
He paused and Patricia heard him struggling to compose himself.
They want to confirm it’s really Daniel and Grace.
As if there could be any doubt.
I know, Patricia said quietly.
Michael and Janet’s twins.
Daniel with his sketchbook.
Grace with her jars of beetles and butterflies.
Have you talked to Linda? Not yet.
I don’t know what to say to her.
Thomas was only eight.
Trisha, 8 years old.
His voice broke.
They found his flashlight with him.
That superhero flashlight he carried everywhere because he was afraid of the dark.
Patricia closed her eyes.
She remembered that flashlight shaped like a rocket ship.
How Thomas clicked it on and off compulsively.
The fact that he’d had it with him in that sealed space suggested he’d known he was going into darkness.
Had he been afraid? Had Emma tried to comfort him? “I need to see where they found them,” Patricia said.
“The detective said the property is off limits, but I need to see it, Michael.
I’ll go with you,” Michael said immediately.
“Tonight after the reporters leave, we’ll find a way.
” They met at 11 that evening in the parking lot of the old general store, now closed for the night.
Michael looked older than his 64 years, gay-haired and holloweyed.
He embraced Patricia wordlessly, and they stood that way for a long moment.
Two people bound by loss that had shaped every year since 1989.
“Linda’s flying in tomorrow,” Michael said as they climbed into his truck.
She wants to be here for the identification once the DNA is confirmed.
They drove in silence through the dark Iowa countryside, fields stretching endlessly on either side of the road.
The farmhouse had always been isolated.
The nearest neighbor a mile away, the nearest town 3 mi.
That isolation had been part of its charm once.
Now it felt sinister, a place where terrible things could happen unseen.
The property was dark when they arrived.
The police tape ghostly in Michael’s headlights.
He parked on the road and they approached on foot, stepping over the tape.
The farmhouse loomed ahead, its windows boarded up, its porch collapsed.
It had been abandoned since Vera’s death, falling slowly into ruin.
“I should have torn this place down years ago,” Michael said.
After Vera died when it passed to us, I couldn’t face it.
None of us could.
So, we let it rot.
It wouldn’t have mattered, Patricia said.
They were already behind the walls.
They walked around the side of the house to where Michael remembered the basement entrance.
The external cellar doors had been removed by the demolition crew, leaving a gaping opening.
Michael pulled out a flashlight.
Not a superhero flashlight, but a heavy mag light that cast a strong beam into the darkness.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Patricia said.
But she was already descending the concrete steps into the basement.
The space smelled of earth and decay.
Decades of moisture and neglect.
Michael’s flashlight beam swept across the basement, revealing the skeletal remains of old furniture.
Boxes dissolved into pulp.
And there, along the far wall, a section where the plaster had been completely removed, exposing old brick and timber framing.
Patricia approached slowly.
She could see where the false panel had been, the space behind it now empty.
Crime scene tape marked the area, and evidence markers sat on the ground where the remains had been found.
Four markers, four children.
They were right here, Patricia whispered.
All this time, Michael’s flashlight revealed details she couldn’t see in the darkness.
Scratch marks on the inside of the bricks as though someone had clawed at them.
Patricia felt her stomach lurch.
“Detective Pierce said they were already dead when they were placed here,” she managed.
“That this was concealment, not imprisonment.
” “Then what made those marks?” Michael asked, his voice strange.
Patricia had no answer.
She moved closer and her foot struck something in the debris.
She looked down and saw it was a jar.
One of Grace’s insect jars still intact somehow, though empty now except for dirt.
Patricia picked it up carefully, cradling it in her hands.
Grace loved catching fireflies.
Michael said, his voice breaking.
Every summer she’d fill these jars with them, watch them light up at night.
Janet would make her release them before bed.
Patricia couldn’t speak.
She held the jar and thought about a 10-year-old girl who collected insects, whose world had been wide open with possibility, who had died in this darkness holding this jar.
“A sound from above made them both freeze.
” Footsteps on the floor overhead, slow and deliberate.
“Someone’s in the house,” Michael whispered.
They stood motionless, listening.
The footsteps moved across the floor above them, heading toward what Patricia remembered as the kitchen.
Then they stopped.
Silence pressed down thick and waiting.
“Could be police,” Patricia whispered back.
“Doing another sweep.
” Without lights, without a vehicle.
The footsteps started again, this time moving toward the basement door.
Patricia’s heart hammered against her ribs.
They were trespassing on an active crime scene.
If it was police, they would be in trouble.
But something about the slow, deliberate pace of those footsteps didn’t sound like police.
Michael grabbed Patricia’s arm and pulled her behind the old furnace, switching off his flashlight.
They crouched in darkness, breathing as quietly as possible.
The basement door at the top of the interior stairs creaked open.
A thin beam of light swept down the stairs, a flashlight handheld.
Patricia could hear someone descending, their footfalls careful on the wooden steps.
The light moved across the basement, passing over where they hid, then focusing on the exposed wall where the children had been found.
In the reflected glow of the flashlight, Patricia could make out a figure, tall, thin, wearing a dark jacket, not a police uniform.
The figure moved to the wall and stood there for a long moment, then reached out and touched the exposed brick almost reverently.
Michael’s grip on Patricia’s arm tightened painfully.
They watched as the figure knelt down where the evidence markers stood, head bowed as if in prayer or grief.
Then the figure pulled something from a pocket.
Patricia couldn’t see what and placed it carefully on the ground among the markers.
The figure stood, swept the flashlight beam around the basement once more, and then turned and climbed the stairs.
The basement door closed.
Footsteps receded across the floor overhead.
After several minutes of silence, Michael finally turned his flashlight back on.
They emerged from behind the furnace and approached the wall.
There, among the evidence markers, was the item the figure had left, a small tarnished silver cross on a chain.
That’s Thomas’s, Patricia breathed.
Linda gave it to him for his 8th birthday.
He was wearing it when she stopped.
Thomas had been wearing that cross when he disappeared.
How could it be here now? Unless we need to call Detective Pierce, Michael said, pulling out his phone.
Right now, Detective Pierce arrived at the farmhouse within 20 minutes, accompanied by two uniformed officers and a crime scene technician.
By then, Patricia and Michael had climbed out of the basement and were waiting by Michael’s truck.
The silver cross sealed in a plastic bag Michael had found in his glove compartment.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Pice said, but her tone was more weary than angry.
She took the bag, holding it up to examine the cross under her flashlight.
“You’re certain this belonged to Thomas?” “Yes,” Patricia said.
His mother gave it to him.
He wore it constantly.
He had it on when he disappeared.
Pierce’s jaw tightened.
And you saw someone place this here.
Can you describe them? Michael recounted what they’d witnessed.
The tall, thin figure in dark clothing.
The deliberate way they’d approached the wall.
How they’d knelt as if paying respects.
PICE listened intently, then radioed for the officers to search the immediate area, though Patricia suspected whoever it was had long since vanished into the dark countryside.
This changes things, PICE said quietly, studying the cross.
If Thomas was wearing this when he disappeared, and someone is returning it now, that suggests that someone knows what happened.
Patricia finished.
someone who was there.
Pierce nodded grimly.
I need you both to come to the station tomorrow morning.
We’ll go through everything again.
What you saw, what you remember from 1989.
Everything.
She paused.
And I need to tell you something.
We’ve located Clayton Morris.
Patricia’s breath caught.
Where? California.
He’s been living in a care facility outside San Diego for the past 12 years.
advanced Alzheimer’s.
He doesn’t remember his own name most days.
Pierce’s expression was carefully neutral.
I’m flying out tomorrow to interview him or try to, but I want you to understand if he’s our suspect, we may never get a confession.
His mind is gone.
But he ran.
Michael said, “The night the children disappeared, he vanished.
That’s guilt.
” “It’s suspicious,” Pice agreed.
but it’s not proof and there’s something else.
She hesitated, then seemed to decide they deserve to know.
We found fibers in the concealed space.
The lab is analyzing them, but preliminary examination suggests they’re from painters drop cloths, industrial grade, the kind used for renovation work.
Clayton was doing renovation work on the house, Patricia said.
Yes, but so were several other people over the years.
Vera kept meticulous records of repairs and improvements.
Between 1985 and 1989, she hired at least four different contractors for various projects.
Patricia felt frustration rising.
So, you’re saying it might not have been Clayton.
I’m saying we need to investigate thoroughly.
Follow the evidence, not just our assumptions.
PICE looked between them.
I know you want answers.
I know you’ve waited 36 years, but I need to do this right.
These children deserve justice, not just convenient conclusions.
After PICE left, Patricia and Michael sat in his truck, neither ready to drive away.
The farmhouse loomed before them, its dark windows like empty eye sockets.
“Do you remember much about that week?” Michael asked finally.
Before the reunion, Patricia thought back.
Emma was excited.
She’d just finished 8th grade, made the honor role.
She was reading Stephen King.
I kept telling her those books were too mature, but she was so advanced for her age.
She smiled sadly.
She wanted to show Daniel her new mystery novel.
She thought he’d like the illustrations.
Daniel drew constantly, Michael said.
That sketchbook they found with him.
Janet and I have been going through his old drawings trying to remember what he was like.
It’s been so long, Trisha.
Sometimes I can’t remember his voice.
I know, Patricia whispered.
She had the same fear that Emma was becoming less real with each passing year, more photograph than memory.
There’s something I never told anyone, Michael said quietly about that Saturday when we dropped them off.
When we were leaving, Daniel came running out to the car, said he’d forgotten to tell us something, but when I asked what, he just looked at me and said, “Never mind.
” Then he went back inside.
“Kids forget things,” Patricia said, but she felt uneasy.
“What if he was trying to tell me something was wrong? What if he sensed something and I just drove away?” “Michael, don’t don’t do that to yourself.
I’ve spent 36 years asking what if.
What if I’d called earlier on Sunday? What if I’d insisted on staying the weekend? What if I’d never let Emma go? Patricia’s voice hardened.
The only person responsible for what happened is whoever killed them.
They drove back to Ashford in silence.
Patricia returned to her hotel room and tried to sleep.
But every time she closed her eyes, she saw that tall figure kneeling in the basement, placing Thomas’s cross among the evidence markers.
Someone who knew, someone who perhaps had been carrying that cross for 36 years, unable or unwilling to speak until now.
The next morning, Patricia met Detective Pierce at the police station before the detectives flight to California.
Pierce looked like she hadn’t slept.
dark circles under her eyes, her hair hastily pulled back.
“I wanted you to see this before I left,” Pice said, leading Patricia to a conference room.
“The table was covered with photocopied documents, police reports, witness statements, contractor records.
This is everything from the original investigation.
I’ve been going through it all week, and there are some inconsistencies that bother me.
” Patricia sat down pulling one of the reports toward her.
It was dated July 10th, 1989, the day after the children were discovered missing.
A statement from Elaine Henderson, the neighbor who had checked on Vera.
Elaine died 8 years ago, PICE said, seeing what Patricia was reading.
But her husband, Raymond, is still alive.
He’s in his 90s in a nursing home here in Asheford.
I interviewed him on Tuesday.
What did he say? He remembers that night very clearly.
He and Elaine drove over when you called them, found Vera on the back porch.
But here’s what’s interesting.
Raymond says there was a vehicle parked behind the barn, a dark sedan.
When police arrived and started searching the property, the car was gone.
Patricia looked up.
That’s not in the police report.
No, Raymond mentioned it at the time, but somehow it never made it into the official record.
The investigating officers were focused on the missing children, and by the time they thought to ask about the car in more detail, Raymond couldn’t remember the make or model.
He just knew it didn’t belong there.
Could it have been Clayton’s? Clayton drove a pickup truck, according to the DMV records from 1989.
We found it abandoned in Nebraska 2 weeks after the disappearance.
Pierce pulled out another document.
But there’s more.
Vera’s telephone records show she made a call at 6:45 that evening, Sunday evening, just hours before you tried to call her.
Who did she call? A number that belonged to a pay phone at a truck stop outside Cedar Rapids.
The call lasted 3 minutes.
Pierce met Patricia’s eyes.
Someone drove to Cedar Rapids from Asheford, received a call at that pay phone, then possibly drove back.
That’s a round trip of about 3 hours.
The children were last confirmed alive when you spoke to Emma on Sunday afternoon.
By the time Elaine Henderson arrived at 9:30 that night, they were gone and Vera was catatonic.
Patricia’s mind raced through the implications.
Vera called someone, told them something was wrong or asked them to come and they did.
Or she was calling to confirm something, to tell someone the coast was clear.
PICE held up a hand before Patricia could protest.
“I know you don’t want to think Vera was involved, but we have to consider every possibility.
” “Vera loved those children,” Patricia said firmly.
“She would never have hurt them.
People are capable of surprising things, especially when they’re protecting someone.
” “Pice gathered the documents.
I’ll be back tomorrow night.
In the meantime, I want you to think about something.
Think about everyone who had access to that house.
Everyone who knew the children would be there that week.
Everyone who might have known about that concealed space in the basement.
After PICE left, Patricia sat alone in the conference room, surrounded by decades old paperwork.
She pulled out her phone and called Linda, her younger sister, who answered on the first ring.
Patricia, I just landed in Cedar Rapids.
I’m renting a car and driving to Asheford.
Linda, there’s something I need to ask you about Thomas’s father.
About Derek? There was a long pause.
What about him? Where was he the weekend Thomas disappeared? I don’t know.
We were separated by then.
He’d moved out in May.
Linda’s voice grew guarded.
Why did he have access to Vera’s house? Did he know the property? Of course he did.
We spent summers there for years, just like you and Michael.
Patricia, what are you asking? Patricia chose her words carefully.
The police are looking at everyone who knew the house.
Everyone who might have had access.
Derek was Thomas’s father.
He would have known Thomas was going to be there that weekend.
You think Derek killed his own son? Linda’s voice rose.
And his nieces and nephew.
Are you insane? I’m not saying that.
I’m saying the police need to investigate everyone.
Derek wasn’t a good husband, but he wasn’t a murderer.
And for your information, he’s dead.
Has been for 5 years.
Heart attack.
Linda’s voice shook with anger or grief or both.
I’m hanging up now.
I’ll see you in Asheford, but I don’t want to talk about this.
The line went dead.
Patricia sat staring at her phone, feeling the fractures spreading through what remained of her family.
But she couldn’t stop asking questions.
Not now.
Not when they were finally so close to the truth.
She spent the rest of the morning going through the documents PICE had left, taking notes, making connections.
The list of contractors who had worked on the house between 1985 and 1989 included several names she recognized.
Bill Patterson, Michael’s father-in-law, who had repaired the roof in 1986, Frank Chen, who had replaced pipes in 1987, and others she didn’t know, workers Vera had hired for various projects.
One name stood out, James Holloway, Patricia’s own father.
He had done electrical work in the basement in the winter of 1988, just a year before the children disappeared.
Patricia felt cold.
Her father had died in 1995.
His heart giving out while he mowed the lawn.
He had been devastated by Emma’s disappearance, had searched tirelessly, had never recovered from the loss.
The idea that he could have had anything to do with it was impossible, wasn’t it? She thought about the figure in the basement last night, placing Thomas’s cross among the evidence markers, tall and thin.
Her father had been tall and thin, but her father was dead.
Had been dead for 30 years.
Patricia pushed the thought away.
She was grasping at shadows, seeing conspiracies where there might be nothing but tragic coincidence.
But as she gathered the papers to leave, one more document caught her eye.
A statement from a local man named Vincent Marsh, who had reported seeing children in the woods near the farmhouse on the Monday morning after they disappeared.
The police had investigated and found nothing.
Vincent Marsh had been written off as an attention seeker, someone drawn to the tragedy, wanting to be part of the story.
But Patricia remembered that name from somewhere else.
Where she pulled out her phone and searched for Vincent Marsh in Asheford, Iowa.
The first result made her stomach drop.
Vincent Marsh had died by suicide in 1991, 2 years after the children vanished.
The obituary was brief, mentioning only that he had struggled with mental health issues and was survived by his sister, Margaret Marsh Reeves, who still lived in Asheford.
Patricia wrote down the name and address.
She would visit Margaret tomorrow after Pierce returned from California.
Because if Vincent Marsh had really seen something in those woods, and if his sister knew what he’d told the police, it might be the thread that unraveled everything.
Outside the police station, reporters still clustered, cameras ready.
Patricia avoided them, slipping out the back exit and walking to her hotel.
The afternoon had grown gray and cold, storm clouds building in the west.
By evening, rain was pelting the windows and Patricia sat in her room watching the local news coverage of the case.
Her phone buzzed.
A text from Michael.
Linda is here.
We’re going to the morg tomorrow for preliminary viewing before DNA confirmation.
Are you coming? Patricia typed back.
Yes.
Another text appeared.
This one from an unknown number.
They’re not telling you everything.
The children didn’t die the night they disappeared.
They died slowly in the dark, listening to her rock in her chair above them.
Patricia’s hands shook as she read it again.
Then she called Detective Pierce’s cell phone.
It went to voicemail.
Pierce was on the plane to California.
Patricia left a message about the text, then forwarded it to the number Pierce had given her for emergencies.
An hour later, a uniformed officer arrived at her hotel room to take a statement.
The text had come from a burner phone, he explained.
Impossible to trace.
Probably someone who had seen the news coverage and wanted to insert themselves into the case.
It happened in high-profile investigations, but Patricia couldn’t shake the words, listening to her rock in her chair above them.
Had the children been alive in that sealed space? Had they heard Vera rocking back and forth, back and forth while they suffocated in the darkness? The medical examiner hadn’t confirmed cause of death yet.
PICE had said preliminary examination suggested they were already dead when concealed.
But what if that was wrong? Patricia curled up on the hotel bed fully clothed and tried not to imagine Emma’s last moments.
Tried not to hear her daughter’s voice calling for help.
tried not to picture her scratching at the bricks while above her, Vera rocked and rocked and rocked, either unable or unwilling to save them.
The rain hammered against the window, and Patricia didn’t sleep at all that night.
The Ashford County morg occupied the basement of the hospital, and Patricia had not been inside since 1989 when she’d gone there hoping desperately that a body found in a nearby county might be Emma.
It hadn’t been that time.
It had been someone else’s tragedy.
This time it was hers.
Michael and Linda waited in the hallway outside the viewing room.
Linda looked older than her 58 years, her face drawn in pale dark circles beneath her eyes.
She embraced Patricia stiffly, and neither of them mentioned their phone conversation from the previous day.
They said the remains are in poor condition.
Linda said, her voice carefully controlled.
That we should prepare ourselves.
They’re using dental records and DNA for positive identification.
But they wanted us to see if there’s anything, jewelry, clothing, that we might recognize.
A morg attendant led them into a cold, sterile room where four gurnies stood in a row, each covered with a white sheet.
Dr.
Sarah Klene, the medical examiner, waited beside them, her expression professionally compassionate.
Thank you all for coming.
Dr.
Klene said, “I know this is incredibly difficult.
What you’re about to see is not your children as you remember them.
These are skeletal remains that have been concealed for over three decades.
I want to prepare you for that reality.
” Patricia nodded mutely.
Beside her, Michael’s breathing had gone shallow and rapid.
Dr.
Klene approached the first gurnie.
We’ve arranged them by age, youngest to oldest.
This first is consistent with a male child approximately 8 years old.
She pulled back the sheet to reveal the smallest skeleton laid out with heartbreaking precision.
The bones yellowed with age.
Beside it lay a few scraps of clothing, a t-shirt so deteriorated it was barely recognizable and a small flashlight tarnished but intact.
Linda made a sound somewhere between a sob and a gasp.
That’s Thomas’s flashlight.
The rocket ship one.
Dr.
Klene nodded gently.
We found it with the remains.
There’s also this.
She indicated a small plastic bag containing what looked like fragments of a comic book.
The pages fused together by time and moisture.
We believe it’s a Superman comic.
He loved Superman, Linda whispered.
She swayed slightly and Patricia steadied her, though she felt unsteady herself.
They moved to the second gurnie.
a slightly larger skeleton, also small, delicate bones that Dr.
Klene identified as consistent with a female child, approximately 10 years old.
Beside these remains lay a glass jar, one of Grace’s insect jars, and scraps of what had once been a yellow dress.
Grace wore yellow constantly, Michael said, his voice breaking.
It was her favorite color.
The third gurnie held the remains identified as Daniel, 12 years old, male, with the skeletal fragments of what had been his fingers, curved as if holding something.
Dr.
Klene showed them the something.
A sketchbook, its pages mostly destroyed, but a few drawings still visible.
One showed the farmhouse, rendered in careful detail.
Another showed four figures, children, standing in a field.
Michael reached out as if to touch the sketchbook, then pulled his hand back.
He drew that the day we dropped them off.
I remember he was sitting on the porch drawing the house.
Finally, they came to the fourth gurnie, the oldest, the largest.
Emma.
Patricia couldn’t bring herself to look at the bones, focusing instead on the items laid beside them.
A necklace Patricia had given Emma for her 13th birthday.
The remains of jeans and a t-shirt.
And a journal remarkably preserved in a plastic bag they must have sealed it in.
The cover bearing Emma’s name in her own handwriting.
She kept everything in that journal.
Patricia whispered.
Every thought, every story.
She wanted to be a writer.
Dr.
Klein’s expression softened.
We’ll preserve everything carefully.
Once the investigation is complete, these items will be returned to you.
She paused.
I need to tell you something about the remains.
The manner of death.
Patricia forced herself to look at the doctor.
How did they die? There’s no evidence of trauma to the bones.
No signs of stabbing, shooting, or blunt force injury.
However, there are some indicators that suggest esphyxiation.
Specifically, we found fibers in the nasal and oral cavities consistent with fabric being placed over their faces.
Someone smothered them, Michael said flatly.
That’s our preliminary conclusion.
Yes, the children were alive when they were taken to that basement space.
Based on the positioning of the remains and the personal items with them, it appears they were arranged carefully, perhaps even with some care.
But the presence of the fabric fibers and the fact that all four died in the same manner suggests this was intentional homicide.
Linda was crying silently, tears streaming down her face.
Patricia felt numb beyond tears.
Smothered.
Emma had been smothered, struggling for air while someone held fabric over her face until she stopped breathing.
“Is there any way to know how long it took?” Patricia heard herself ask.
if they suffered long.
Dr.
Klene hesitated.
That’s difficult to determine after so much time, but based on what we know about esphyxiation, it would have been minutes, not hours.
Small mercy.
Patricia almost laughed at the absurdity of it.
Minutes of terror and suffocation instead of hours.
How grateful she was supposed to feel.
There’s one more thing, Dr.
Klein said carefully.
The journal, Emma’s journal, we’ve been processing it as evidence, and there are entries from that weekend, from Sunday, the day they disappeared.
Would you like to know what she wrote? “Yes,” Patricia said immediately.
Dr.
Klene pulled out a folder and extracted photocopied pages.
Patricia recognized Emma’s handwriting, careful and neat, her daughter’s voice reaching across 36 years.
Sunday, July 9th, 1989.
Something weird is happening.
Grandma Vera has been acting strange all day, jumpy, distracted.
She keeps looking out the windows like she’s expecting someone.
Daniel noticed it, too.
He asked me if I thought Grandma was okay, and I said yes, but I’m not sure.
This afternoon, a man came to the house.
I didn’t recognize him, but Grandma seemed to know him.
They talked on the front porch for a long time.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but grandma looked upset.
When the man left, she went to her room and closed the door.
Tonight at dinner, Grandma barely ate.
She kept checking the clock.
After we cleaned up, she told us we should all go to bed early.
It’s only 7:30, Thomas complained, but she insisted.
She said we had a big day tomorrow and needed our rest.
I’m writing this in bed.
Grace is already asleep, but I can hear Daniel moving around in his room.
The house feels wrong tonight.
I can’t explain it.
It just feels wrong.
There was one more line added later in different pen.
The handwriting rushed.
Someone’s in the house.
I hear the entry ended there.
Patricia stared at the photocopied page at those final incomplete words.
I hear.
What had Emma heard? Footsteps, voices.
The person who would kill her.
We believe this was written shortly before the children were taken.
Dr.
Klein said quietly.
The time of death is estimated between 8 and 10 p.
m.
on Sunday evening.
The man who came to the house, Michael said.
Who was he? Did Vera have a visitor log, a calendar, anything? Detective Pierce is investigating that.
Dr.
Klene said she’s been in contact from California and asked me to tell you she’ll be back tonight.
She has new information about Clayton Morris.
They left the morg in silence, stepping out into gray afternoon light that felt too normal, too ordinary.
The world continued around them, cars passing, people shopping, someone laughing in the distance.
While inside the morg, four children lay on gurnies reduced to bones and scraps of clothing and the belongings they’d had with them when they died.
Linda excused herself, saying she needed to be alone, and drove away in her rental car.
Michael and Patricia stood in the hospital parking lot, neither ready to leave, but with nowhere to go.
“Emma saw the killer,” Patricia said finally.
“That man who came to the house, she saw him and she wrote about him in her journal.
Unless he came back later or unless it was someone else entirely.
Michael rubbed his face.
God, Trisha, they were just kids.
Why would anyone do this? Patricia had no answer.
They had asked that question for 36 years.
And even now, with the children found and the evidence mounting, the why remained elusive, obscene, incomprehensible.
Her phone buzzed.
A text from Detective Pierce.
Landed in De Moine, meeting at police station at 6:00 p.
m.
Important developments.
Bring Michael and Linda.
It was 4 now.
Patricia and Michael got coffee at a diner and sat without drinking it, watching the clock.
At 5:30, they drove to the police station.
Linda arrived moments after them.
Her eyes red, but her jaw set with determination.
Detective Pierce looked exhausted but energized like someone running on adrenaline and purpose.
She led them to the conference room and closed the door.
I interviewed Clayton Morris, she said without preamble or tried to.
He’s in advanced dementia as I told you.
Most of the time he doesn’t recognize anyone.
He thinks he’s still a young man, but sometimes he has moments of clarity and I happened to be there for one of them.
What did he say? Patricia asked.
He said he didn’t kill the children and I believe him.
Pierce held up a hand to forestall their protests.
Let me explain.
I asked him about July 1989 about the Holloway farmhouse.
At first he didn’t respond.
Then he started crying and said I tried to stop it.
I tried but she said it was the only way.
She Michael leaned forward.
Vera that’s what I assumed.
So I asked Vera said it was the only way and he became very agitated kept saying not Vera the other one the one who came at night then he lost coherence again started talking about his mother asking for water I couldn’t get anything else from him Patricia’s mind raced the other one Emma wrote about a man coming to the house a man Vera talked to on the porch yes and that’s the second development Pierce pulled out her phone and brought up a photograph.
The care facility where Clayton lives keeps old belongings from residents, things they had when they were admitted.
I asked to see Clayton’s.
Among his possessions, was this.
She showed them the photo.
It was a letter yellowed with age, the handwriting shaky but legible.
Patricia leaned closer to read it.
Clayton, you were right to run.
They would have blamed you.
But you need to know the truth.
I didn’t want this.
She forced my hand.
Said if I didn’t help her, she’d tell everyone what I’d done.
So, I helped her put them in the walls.
And I’ve lived with it every day since.
I’m dying now.
Cancer.
Maybe that’s justice.
But before I go, I need someone to know.
It was her idea, her plan.
She called me and said, “Come quickly.
Bring the supplies.
help me fix this.
And I did.
God help me.
I did.
When you read this, I’ll be dead.
Maybe that’s better.
I can’t undo what I did.
But at least you’ll know you weren’t crazy for running.
You saw what you saw.
She killed those children and I helped her hide them.
The letter was signed.
James.
Patricia felt the room tilt.
James.
My father’s name was James.
I know, PICE said gently.
Patricia, I need you to tell me everything you remember about your father’s relationship with Vera.
Everything about that summer, everything about who he was.
Patricia couldn’t speak.
She stared at the photographed letter, at her father’s name signed at the bottom, and felt reality fracturing around her.
James Holloway, her father, the man who had taught her to ride a bicycle, who had walked her down the aisle at her wedding, who had held newborn Emma with tears in his eyes.
That man had helped seal four children behind a basement wall.
“No,” she heard herself say.
“This is wrong.
My father wouldn’t.
He couldn’t, Patricia.
” Detective Pierce’s voice was gentle but firm.
I know this is devastating, but we need to understand what happened.
Your father is mentioned in Ver’s contractor records.
He did electrical work in the basement in January 1988.
He would have known about that concealed space.
Half the county knew about Vera’s house, Michael said, his voice sharp.
People talked about the old bootleger tunnels, the hidden rooms.
James wasn’t the only one who did work there, but he’s the one who wrote this letter, PICE said.
And according to the timeline, he had the means and opportunity.
The medical examiner estimates time of death between 8 and 10 p.
m.
on Sunday, July 9th.
Where was your father that night, Patricia? Patricia closed her eyes, trying to remember.
36 years ago.
She and her husband had been home in De Moines waiting for Emma’s promised phone call.
Her father had been where she couldn’t remember, couldn’t recall if she’d even spoken to him that day.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“I don’t remember.
” Pierce pulled out more documents.
“I’ve been going through phone records from July 1989.
Vera made that call at 6:45 p.
m.
to a pay phone in Cedar Rapids, but she made another call before that at 6:15 to your parents’ house, Patricia.
The room went silent.
Patricia felt Michael and Linda staring at her, felt the weight of Pice’s revelation pressing down.
Her father Vera had called her father.
“What did they talk about?” Patricia asked, though she already knew the answer didn’t exist.
Phone records showed calls made, not conversations had.
The call lasted 4 minutes.
Then 30 minutes later, Vera called the pay phone in Cedar Rapids.
Cedar Rapids is halfway between De Moines and Asheford.
PICE laid out a map.
If your father left De Moines immediately after Vera’s call, he could have made it to that pay phone by 6:45.
and from there he could have reached the farmhouse by 8:00.
“This is insane,” Patricia said, her voice rising.
“You’re saying my father drove to Asheford and murdered four children, including his own granddaughter? What possible reason could he have?” “That’s what we need to figure out.
” Pierce turned to Linda.
“Did your father have any history of violence, instability? Was there anything in his past that might explain this?” No, Linda said firmly.
Daddy was gentle, kind.
He was devastated when Thomas disappeared.
It destroyed him.
Guilt can look like grief, PICE said quietly.
Patricia stood abruptly, her chair scraping against the floor.
I need air.
I can’t.
I need to think.
She walked out of the conference room, through the police station, out into the parking lot.
The evening air was cool, the sky fading from gray to darker gray.
She leaned against her car and tried to breathe, tried to reconcile the father she remembered with the man described in that letter.
I didn’t want this.
She forced my hand.
What did that mean? How had Vera forced him? And why had Clayton Morris been there, witnessed it, and run rather than going to the police? Michael followed her outside.
Trisha, we need to talk about this.
What is there to talk about? Apparently, our father was a child murderer who we never suspected for 36 years.
Or he’s being framed.
Michael said that letter could be fake.
Someone trying to shift blame away from the real killer.
Patricia wanted to believe that.
Desperately wanted to believe it.
But the letter had been in Clayton Morris’s possession for decades, sealed away in a care facility.
Who would plant evidence there and why? Detective Pierce wants to search Dad’s old house, Michael continued.
The one mom sold after he died.
The new owners still live there.
She’s getting a warrant.
Patricia nodded numbly.
Her parents’ house.
She hadn’t been there in years, though it was only 20 minutes from her current home.
After her mother died in 2003, 8 years after her father, the house had been sold to a young couple.
Patricia had no idea if they’d renovated, changed things, destroyed whatever evidence might have existed.
“There’s something else,” Michael said.
“Something I need to tell you about Dad.
” Patricia looked at him.
In the parking lot lights, Michael’s face was haggarded, aged by more than just the past few days.
In 1987, two years before the kids disappeared, dad had some kind of breakdown.
Do you remember? He was in the hospital for a week.
Patricia searched her memory.
I remember he was sick.
Mom said it was exhaustion.
It wasn’t exhaustion.
It was a psychiatric hold.
He’d threatened to kill himself.
Michael’s voice was barely above a whisper.
Mom made me promise never to tell you or Linda.
She was ashamed.
Said people would judge him, judge our family.
He was suicidal for that one week.
Yes.
Then they put him on medication and he seemed fine.
But Trisha, what if he wasn’t fine? What if there was something wrong with him that we didn’t see? Patricia felt sick.
Her father suffering in silence.
Her mother keeping secrets.
36 years of lies layered upon lies.
And now the truth emerging like poison from a wound.
Detective Pierce needs to know this.
She said finally they went back inside.
If you’re drawn to truth to Michael’s revelation deep corners making nature subscribe to mental health history is more haunting investigations into it.
Lots of people struggle with depression and never harm anyone.
She paused.
However, there’s something in Clayton Morris’s interview that might connect.
He kept saying she made him do it.
She knew his secret.
I thought he meant Vera knew something about Clayton.
But what if he meant she knew something about James? Blackmail, Linda said slowly.
If Vera knew about Dad’s breakdown, his suicide attempt, maybe she threatened to expose it.
Back then, mental illness was stigmatized.
Dad could have lost his job, his reputation.
But that’s not a reason to murder children, Patricia said.
Even if Vera was blackmailing him, why would he agree to kill Emma, his own granddaughter? PICE met her eyes.
What if he didn’t agree to kill them? What if Vera killed them and then she blackmailed him into helping hide the bodies? The letter’s words echoed in Patricia’s mind.
I didn’t want this.
She forced my hand.
But why would Vera kill the children? Michael asked.
What possible motive could she have? That’s what I’m trying to determine.
Pierce said.
I’ve been going through Vera’s medical records, her financial records, anything that might give us insight into her mental state that summer.
And I found something interesting.
She pulled out another document.
In March 1989, four months before the disappearance, Vera was diagnosed with earlystage dementia.
She was prescribed medication, but according to her doctor’s notes, she refused to take it.
Said she didn’t trust doctors.
Dementia, Patricia repeated.
So, she might not have been thinking clearly.
It’s possible her judgment was impaired, but dementia doesn’t typically cause violent outbursts, especially not calculated acts like this appears to have been.
PICE hesitated.
There’s one more thing.
In May 1989, 2 months before the reunion, Vera updated her will.
She left everything to charity, nothing to her children or grandchildren.
When your parents challenged the will after her death, they discovered she’d liquidated most of her assets in the weeks before the disappearance.
Nearly $200,000 withdrawn in cash.
“Where did the money go?” Michael asked.
“We don’t know.
It was never found.
” Patricia’s mind was reeling.
dementia, a changed will, missing money, a mysterious man visiting the house, and somehow all of it had culminated in four dead children sealed behind a basement wall.
I need to visit Margaret Marsh Reeves, Patricia said suddenly.
Vincent Marsh’s sister, the man who claimed he saw the children in the woods the next morning.
Pierce frowned.
Vincent Marsh was considered unreliable.
His statement didn’t lead anywhere, but he killed himself 2 years later.
What if he saw something real? What if the guilt of not being believed drove him to suicide? Pierce considered this.
All right, I’ll come with you.
Linda, Michael, I need you to think about anything unusual from that summer.
Any conversations with Vera, any changes in her behavior, anything at all that seemed off.
They left the police station as full darkness settled over Asheford.
Patricia rode with Pierce to Margaret Marsh Reeves’s house, a small ranchstyle home on the outskirts of town.
The porch light was on, and through the windows they could see the blue glow of a television.
Margaret answered the door on the second knock.
She was in her 70s, thin and brittle, with suspicious eyes that narrowed when Pierce showed her badge.
I don’t talk to police, Margaret said immediately.
You people destroyed my brother.
Mrs.
Marsh Reeves, I’m investigating the Holloway case.
The remains of the children have been found.
I believe your brother may have witnessed something important, and I need to know what he told you.
Vincent didn’t witness anything.
He was sick, schizophrenic.
He heard voices, saw things that weren’t there.
Margaret’s hand tightened on the door frame.
And when he tried to tell you people the truth, you called him crazy and sent him away.
Two years later, he was dead.
“What truth was he trying to tell?” Patricia asked, stepping forward.
“Please.
” One of those children was my daughter.
Margaret’s expression softened slightly.
She looked at Patricia for a long moment, then sighed.
“Come in.
I’ll tell you what Vincent told me, but I don’t think you’ll believe it any more than the police did.
” They followed her inside to a cluttered living room that smelled of cats and old books.
Margaret gestured for them to sit, then lowered herself into a worn armchair.
“Vincent had an episode that weekend,” she began.
July 9th, 1989.
He’d gone off his medication, said it made him feel dead inside.
He went walking in the woods near the Holm, the way he often did when he was agitated.
Around 9:00 that night, he saw lights at the farmhouse.
Cars, people moving around.
“How many cars?” Pierce asked, pulling out a notebook.
He said, “Three.
” One was Vera’s station wagon.
The others he didn’t recognize.
He watched from the woods.
Vincent did that sometimes, watched people.
It wasn’t right, but he was harmless.
Margaret’s voice cracked slightly.
He saw a man carrying something from the house to the barn.
a large bundle wrapped in cloth.
Then another man helped him.
They made four trips.
Patricia felt cold.
Four bundles.
Four children.
Did he recognize the men? Pierce pressed.
He said one was tall and thin.
The other was shorter, stockier.
He couldn’t see their faces from where he was hiding.
But then an older woman came out.
He assumed it was Vera.
She stood on the porch watching the men work.
and Vincent said.
Margaret paused clearly uncomfortable.
He said she was laughing.
Not loud, but he could hear it.
This quiet, terrible laughter.
The image sent horror crawling up Patricia’s spine.
Vera watching men carry her dead grandchildren to the barn, laughing.
It was incomprehensible, obscene.
What happened then? Pierce asked.
The men went into the barn with the bundles and stayed there for hours.
Vincent got scared and went home.
The next morning, he heard the children were missing.
He tried to tell the police what he’d seen, but they said he was having delusions.
Said there were no other cars at the farmhouse that night.
No men, nothing.
Margaret’s eyes filled with tears.
Vincent started to doubt himself.
Thought maybe he had imagined it, but the guilt ate at him.
2 years later, he walked into traffic on Highway 30.
The official report said accidental death, but I know better.
He couldn’t live with the thought that he’d seen something real, and no one believed him.
Mrs.
Marsh Reeves, Pierce said carefully.
You said the men carried the bundles to the barn, not to the basement.
That’s what Vincent said, to the barn.
Pierce and Patricia exchanged glances.
The children had been found in the basement, sealed behind the wall.
Why would they have been taken to the barn first? What was in the barn? Patricia asked.
Back in 1989.
Farm equipment mostly.
Vera didn’t keep animals anymore, just old machinery, supplies for repairs.
Margaret frowned.
But there was a workshop in the back.
Her husband had been a carpenter before he died.
Kept all his tools there.
a workshop with tools to cut and move lumber, materials to seal a wall.
They prepared the bodies, Patricia whispered.
In the barn, made sure they were She couldn’t finish the thought.
Pierce stood.
Mrs.
Marsh Reeves, thank you for this information.
We may need to speak with you again.
As they walked back to the car, Patricia’s phone rang.
Michael’s name on the screen.
she answered and her brother’s voice was tight with panic.
Trisha, Linda’s missing.
She left the hotel two hours ago and no one’s seen her since.
Her rental car is gone and she’s not answering her phone.
Detective Pierce immediately radioed for units to search for Linda’s rental car while Patricia tried calling her sister’s phone repeatedly.
Each call went straight to voicemail.
Michael met them at the police station, his face gray with worry.
She was upset when we left the morg, he said, talking about Thomas, about how young he was.
I should have stayed with her.
Did she say anything about where she might go? Pierce asked.
No, but Michael hesitated.
She said something strange earlier.
Said she wanted to see the farmhouse one more time before they tore it down.
I told her it was a crime scene that she couldn’t.
But Linda’s never been good at accepting no.
PICE was already moving toward the door.
She went to the farmhouse.
They took Pierce’s patrol car, lights flashing, speeding through the dark countryside.
Patricia sat in the back seat, her hands clenched together, trying not to imagine what Linda might be doing at that house, looking for answers, looking for closure, or something darker, something driven by the grief of learning exactly how her 8-year-old son had died.
The farmhouse emerged from the darkness, its windows boarded, its structure sagging.
Linda’s rental car was parked in the driveway, the driver’s door hanging open.
PICE called for backup before approaching, her hand on her weapon.
Linda, Patricia called out.
Linda, are you here? No answer.
They entered through the front door, which stood a jar.
Pierce’s flashlight swept across the interior, peeling wallpaper, water damaged floors, the detritus of abandonment.
The house smelled of rot and mildew, and something else.
Something wrong that Patricia couldn’t identify.
Linda.
Michael’s voice echoed through the empty rooms.
A sound from upstairs.
A thump followed by footsteps.
Pierce moved quickly toward the stairs.
Patricia and Michael following.
The second floor hallway stretched before them, doors hanging open on dark bedrooms.
The sound came again from the room at the end of the hall.
Pierce pushed the door open, flashlight raised.
Linda stood in the middle of what had been the children’s bedroom where Emma and Grace had slept that final night.
She was holding something, a piece of paper, yellowed and brittle.
“Linda,” Patricia said carefully.
What are you doing here? Linda turned to face them.
In the flashlight beam, her expression was strange, distant.
I found something in the floorboards.
The demolition crew loosened them, and I saw there was space underneath.
What did you find? Pierce asked, approaching slowly.
Linda held out the paper.
Pierce took it, examining it with her flashlight.
Patricia moved closer to read over the detective’s shoulder.
It was a letter written in shaky handwriting.
To whoever finds this, I’m going to die soon.
The cancer has spread and the doctors say weeks, maybe days.
I need to confess what I did before I face judgment.
On July 9th, 1989, I helped murder four children.
Not directly.
I did not put my hands on them, but I helped seal them away.
And in God’s eyes, that makes me guilty.
Vera called me that night, frantic, begging for help.
She said there had been an accident, that the children were dead, that Clayton had killed them in a rage and run off.
She said if anyone found out, the family would be destroyed.
She begged me to help her hide what had happened.
I was weak.
She knew about my hospitalization, my suicide attempt.
She said if I didn’t help, she would tell my daughters, my wife, everyone.
she would destroy what was left of my reputation.
So I went.
But when I got there, I saw the truth.
There had been no accident.
The children were arranged in the basement, carefully positioned, their faces covered with cloth.
They looked peaceful, almost like they were sleeping.
And Vera was calm.
Too calm.
She told me she had saved them from something worse.
She said God had told her what to do.
I was a coward.
I should have called the police right then, but Vera was my mother-in-law family, and she was clearly insane with grief or dementia or something broken inside her.
And Clayton was there, terrified, saying he’d tried to stop it, but she’d threatened him, too.
She knew things about him, he said.
Things from his past.
So, we sealed them in the wall.
Clayton and I, with Vera watching, it took hours.
The whole time Vera talked about how they were safe now, how she’d protected them.
I didn’t understand then and I don’t understand now.
I have lived with this guilt for 6 years.
It has poisoned everything.
I cannot eat, cannot sleep, cannot look at my remaining grandchildren without seeing the ones I helped in tomb.
I deserve whatever hell awaits me.
The money, Vera’s $200,000.
She gave it to Clayton to disappear, to start over somewhere far away.
She gave me 10,000 to keep quiet.
I donated every penny to the search efforts for whatever that’s worth.
I’m sorry.
God forgive me.
I’m so sorry.
James Holloway, February 1995.
The letter ended there.
Patricia felt the room spinning.
Her father hadn’t killed the children.
Vera had.
But he had helped hide them, had kept the secret, had let the family suffer in uncertainty for 6 years while he carried the truth to his grave, almost to his grave.
He had written this confession and hidden it in the floorboards of the room where Emma and Grace had slept there last night.
Had he hoped someone would find it, or had he hidden it where he thought it would never be discovered, salving his conscience without risking exposure? “She said God told her to do it,” Linda whispered.
“Vera killed Thomas because God told her to.
” “Religious delusion,” Pice said quietly.
Combined with dementia, it’s possible she experienced a psychotic break.
Believed she was protecting the children from something real or imagined.
Protecting them from what? Michael demanded.
What could possibly be worse than death? PICE shook her head.
We may never know what was going through Vera’s mind.
Delusion doesn’t follow logic.
Patricia looked around the bedroom trying to imagine that final night.
The children in their beds maybe already asleep.
Vera entering.
Had she woken them? Had they been afraid? or had she smothered them so quickly they never understood what was happening.
There’s more,” Linda said.
She pointed to the corner of the room where the floorboard had been pried up.
“There’s something else down there.
” Pierce knelt and reached into the gap.
She pulled out a small metal box rusted with age.
Inside were more papers, receipts, notes, fragments of Vera’s fractured mind, and at the bottom, a photograph.
PICE held it up to her flashlight.
It showed a young girl, perhaps 16, with dark hair and frightened eyes, written on the back in Vera’s handwriting.
Sarah, 1952.
“Who is Sarah?” Patricia asked.
Pierce pulled out her phone and did a quick search.
After a moment, her expression changed.
Sarah Holloway, Vera’s daughter.
She disappeared in 1952 at age 16.
The case was never solved.
The room went silent.
Vera had lost a daughter to disappearance in 1952.
37 years later, her grandchildren had vanished in the same house.
It wasn’t coincidence, Patricia said slowly.
Vera wasn’t just having a psychotic break.
She was reliving her trauma.
She thought, understanding dawned, horrible and clear.
She thought she was saving them the way no one saved Sarah.
But saving them from what? Michael repeated.
PICE was going through the other papers in the metal box.
She pulled out a newspaper clipping from 1952, yellowed and brittle.
The headline read, “Local girl disappears.
” The article described Sarah Holloway’s vanishing.
last seen walking home from a church function, never arrived.
The town had searched for weeks.
No body was ever found, but there was another clipping beneath it dated 6 months later.
This headline read, “Drifter arrested in string of assaults.
” The article described a man named Robert Kaine who had attacked several young women in the area before being caught.
He had confessed to two murders but was suspected in more.
He was executed in 1954.
Written in the margin in Vera’s shaky handwriting, “He took her.
He hurt her.
I couldn’t save her.
” Vera believed this man, Robert Cain, had killed her daughter, Pice said.
But she had no proof, and he never confessed to it.
Patricia stared at the photograph of young Sarah.
And then 37 years later, she’s living in the same house with four grandchildren.
What if something triggered her, made her believe they were in danger from someone like Robert Cain? The visitor, Michael said.
Emma wrote about a man coming to the house that afternoon.
A man who upset Vera.
PICE nodded slowly.
If Vera saw a stranger approaching the children and in her deteriorating mental state, she conflated him with the man who took her daughter.
She killed them to save them.
Patricia finished.
She thought death was preferable to what she believed would happen if they were taken.
The horror of it settled over them.
Vera, trapped in her trauma, unable to distinguish past from present, had smothered four children, believing she was protecting them from a fate worse than death.
a fate that had befallen her own daughter decades earlier.
“She loved them,” Linda said, her voice breaking.
In her broken mind, she thought she was saving them.
“But Clayton and your father knew the truth,” Pice said.
“They saw what she’d done, and instead of stopping it or reporting it, they helped her hide it out of fear or loyalty or weakness.
” Patricia thought about her father’s final years.
The way he’d grown increasingly withdrawn after Emma’s disappearance, the way he’d refused to talk about it, would leave the room when anyone mentioned the case.
She had thought it was grief.
Now she understood it was guilt, eating him alive from the inside.
The man who visited that afternoon, Patricia said, “We need to find out who he was.
If Vera thought he was a threat, there must be some record, some way to trace him.
I’ll check visitor logs, interview neighbors, anyone who might have seen him,” Pierce said.
She carefully bagged the letters and photograph as evidence.
But right now, we need to get you all out of this house.
It’s not safe, and you shouldn’t be here.
They descended the stairs in silence.
But when they reached the front door, Pierce’s radio crackled to life.
A patrol officer’s voice urgent.
Detective Pierce, we have a situation.
Elderly male at the station says he has information about the Hol case.
Says he’s the one who visited Vera that day.
Says he’s ready to confess.
Pierce’s eyes widened.
She keyed her radio.
Copy that.
On our way.
They drove back to Ashford at speed, arriving at the police station to find an old man seated in the interview room.
He was perhaps 80, thin and frail, with wispy white hair and hands that trembled as they rested on the table.
Detective Pierce entered with Patricia, Michael, and Linda following.
The old man looked up and Patricia saw tears tracking down his weathered cheeks.
“My name is Robert Chen,” he said.
“I was Vera Holloway’s physician in 1989.
I came to her house on July 9th to check on her condition.
” He paused, struggling to compose himself, and I’ve lived with the guilt ever since.
Dr.
Robert Chen looked diminished in the harsh fluorescent light of the interview room, his shoulders hunched as if carrying an impossible weight.
Detective Pierce started the recording equipment while Patricia, Michael, and Linda sat against the back wall, observers to a confession three decades overdue.
Dr.
Chen Pierce began.
You stated you visited Vera Holloway on July 9th, 1989.
What was the purpose of that visit? I was her physician, Chen said, his voice thin and ready.
I’d been treating her for early dementia since March of that year.
She’d been deteriorating, paranoia, confusion, fixation on past traumas.
I prescribed medication, but she refused to take it consistently.
He paused, his hands trembling more violently.
That Sunday afternoon, she called my service, said she needed to see me urgently.
I made a house call around 5:00.
What did you find when you arrived? The children were playing outside.
I remember thinking they looked happy, healthy.
Vera met me on the porch.
She was agitated, kept looking toward the road.
She told me she’d seen someone watching the house from the woods, a man.
She was convinced he was going to hurt the children.
Patricia leaned forward despite herself.
Did you see this man? Chen shook his head.
No one was there.
I walked the property, looked in the woods.
Nothing.
I tried to convince Vera it was a delusion that the dementia was causing paranoia, but she became more agitated.
Insisted he was real.
Said he looked just like the man who took her daughter Sarah in 1952.
What did you do?” Pierce asked.
I made a terrible mistake.
Chen’s voice broke.
I gave her a sedative, told her to rest, that everything would be fine.
I said the children would be safe.
Then I left.
He looked up, his eyes red and wet.
I left four children alone with a woman in psychotic delusion, and by morning, they were dead.
The room was silent except for Linda’s quiet crying.
Patricia felt numb, unable to process the simple chain of terrible decisions that had led to Emma’s death.
“When did you learn what happened?” PICE continued.
“The next day, the news was everywhere.
Four children missing from Vera’s farmhouse.
I drove there immediately.
Police were searching the property.
I spoke to the lead detective, told him about my visit, about Vera’s mental state, but I didn’t tell him about the sedative.
Why not? I was afraid.
Afraid I’d be blamed for leaving the children in her care.
Afraid I’d lose my medical license, face criminal charges.
Chen’s voice hardened with self-loathing.
I was a coward.
I told myself maybe Vera hadn’t done anything.
Maybe the children really had been taken by someone and it wasn’t my fault.
When did you realize the truth? Not for years.
Not until I read James Holloway’s obituary in 1995.
The notice mentioned he’d battled depression, that he’d found peace at last.
Something about the wording troubled me.
I started thinking about that night about Vera’s phone records the police had questioned me about.
She’d called someone after I left.
Called James, I assumed, though I never confirmed it.
Chen reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope yellowed with age.
In 1996, I received this in the mail, no return address, postmarked from California.
He slid it across the table to Pierce, who opened it carefully.
Inside was a single page handwritten.
Doctor, you gave her the means and I gave her the method.
We’re both guilty.
I thought if I disappeared, if I stayed away, maybe I could forget.
But I can’t.
She smothered them while they slept.
Your sedative made it easy.
Then she made me help hide them.
Said if I didn’t, she’d tell everyone about the girl in 1978, the one I hurt when I was drinking.
I was weak, just like you.
We both put our reputations above those children’s lives.
This is my confession from 3,000 mi away where the law can’t touch me.
Maybe God will.
CM Clayton Morris, Pierce said softly.
Chen nodded.
I kept that letter for 29 years.
Read it a thousand times.
Told myself I’d go to the police, but I never did.
Even when I saw the news about the remains being found, I almost stayed silent.
He looked directly at Patricia.
But I couldn’t let your father take all the blame.
James was weak, but he didn’t kill those children.
Vera did, and I made it possible by giving her that sedative.
Patricia stood, walked to the table, and slapped Chen across the face.
The sound cracked through the room.
PICE moved to intervene, but Patricia had already stepped back, her hands stinging, tears streaming down her face.
“You let us search for 36 years,” she said, her voice shaking with rage.
“You let us hope they were alive somewhere, that we might find them.
You knew what happened, and you said nothing.
” “I know,” Chen whispered.
“I’m sorry.
Sorry.
” Linda’s voice was sharp as broken glass.
My son was 8 years old.
He died because a doctor gave a demented woman sedatives and walked away because a frightened man helped hide bodies to save himself.
Because everyone involved chose their own comfort over the truth.
You’re right, Chen said.
Everything you’re saying is right.
I’ll face whatever charges you bring.
I just needed you to know the full truth before I die.
The cancer has spread to my liver.
I have weeks, maybe less.
Pierce leaned forward.
Where did Clayton Morris go? The letter was postmarked California, but that was 1996.
Do you have any idea where he might be now? The care facility outside San Diego, Chen said.
I’ve been paying for it anonymously for 12 years since he was placed there.
It was the only penance I could manage.
Making sure he was cared for in his final years, even though he doesn’t remember who I am or what we did.
Pierce absorbed this.
You paid for Clayton’s care? How did you even know where he was? I hired a private investigator in 2010 to locate him.
By then, the Alzheimer’s was advanced.
He’d been found wandering in a grocery store, no ID, unable to say his name.
They’d placed him in county care.
I arranged for his transfer to a better facility and set up an anonymous fund for his expenses.
“Guilt money?” Michael said bitterly.
“Yes,” Chen agreed simply, though no amount of money could absolve what I’d done.
I knew that.
Detective Pierce ended the interview and arranged for Chen to be held pending charges.
As they left the station, the night had deepened to full dark.
Stars scattered across the Iowa sky.
Patricia stood in the parking lot looking up at them, trying to find meaning in the randomness of their arrangement.
“It was all senseless,” she said to no one in particular.
“Vera was sick.
She killed them thinking she was protecting them.
Dad helped hide them to protect himself.
Clayton ran to protect himself.
Dr.
Chen stayed silent to protect himself.
Everyone protecting themselves while four children lay dead behind a wall.
Not everyone, Michael said quietly.
Vincent Marsh tried to tell the truth.
It destroyed him, but he tried.
Patricia thought about Vincent, dismissed as crazy, driven to suicide by guilt and disbelief.
We should make sure his name is cleared.
Let people know he was telling the truth.
I’ll make sure of it, Pierce said.
She looked exhausted, hollowed out by days of revelation and horror.
For what it’s worth, I believe we have the full truth now.
Vera killed the children during a psychotic episode triggered by dementia and trauma.
Your father and Clayton helped conceal the crime.
Dr.
Chen’s negligence enabled it.
There are no other conspirators, no hidden layers, just tragedy and cowardice.
When can we bury them? Linda asked.
Really bury them? I mean, give them proper graves.
Soon, the medical examiner is finishing the final reports.
Then the remains will be released to your families.
Pierce’s expression softened.
I’m sorry this took 36 years.
I’m sorry for everything you’ve endured.
They stood together in the parking lot, three people bound by loss and blood, by decades of unanswered questions now answered in the worst possible way.
Eventually, Linda and Michael left to return to their hotels.
Patricia remained unable to make herself move, staring up at the indifferent stars.
Her phone buzzed, a text from an unknown number.
I’m sorry for what my illness took from you.
I loved them, too.
Vera Patricia stared at the message, her heart hammering.
Impossible.
Vera had died in 1989, 36 years ago.
This had to be someone’s sick joke, someone who’d seen the news coverage and decided to torment the families.
She showed the text to Pierce, who immediately began tracing the number.
But Patricia knew they wouldn’t find anything.
Just like the previous anonymous text, this would lead nowhere.
coming from a burner phone or a spoofed number untraceable.
Unless the person who left Thomas’s cross in the basement, Patricia said slowly.
They knew details only someone involved would know.
What if there was someone else? Someone we haven’t found yet.
Pierce’s expression was troubled.
I’ll keep investigating.
But Patricia, sometimes grieving people receive messages like this.
hoaxes, pranks, people inserting themselves into tragedy.
Try not to let it consume you.
But as Patricia drove back to her hotel, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something remained unfinished.
Some piece of the puzzle still hidden in shadow.
The funeral took place 2 weeks later on a gray morning that threatened rain.
Four small caskets, four graves side by side in the Asheford cemetery.
The service was private, just the immediate families, Detective Pierce, and a handful of people who had never stopped searching.
Patricia stood between Michael and Linda, staring at Emma’s casket.
It was white, covered in roses, so small it seemed impossible her daughter could fit inside.
But Emma had been 14 when she died, still half child, and 36 years had reduced her to bones that weighed almost nothing.
The minister spoke words Patricia didn’t hear.
She was thinking about the journal they’d returned to her.
Emma’s last entry about hearing something in the house.
Those had been her daughter’s final written words.
I hear what had Emma heard.
Vera’s footsteps approaching, the door opening, her own heartbeat as panic set in.
Patricia would never know.
Some questions would remain forever unanswered.
gaps in the narrative that time and death had sealed shut.
After the service, people approached with condolences that felt hollow after three decades.
What did you say to parents burying children who had been missing longer than they’d been alive? Patricia accepted the words numbly, nodding, thanking people, going through the motions of grief while feeling nothing but exhaustion.
Dr.
Chen had died 4 days earlier.
His cancer taking him before any charges could be filed.
His death felt like another theft.
Justice denied.
Accountability escaped.
But Patricia found she couldn’t summon rage anymore.
She was too tired for rage.
As the crowd dispersed, Detective Pierce approached.
I wanted to tell you in person, we’ve closed the case officially.
Cause of death confirmed as asphyxiation by smothering.
Perpetrator identified as Vera Holloway, deceased.
Accompllices James Holloway and Clayton Morris, both deceased.
Dr.
Robert Chen, deceased.
Everyone involved is gone.
What about the anonymous texts? Patricia asked.
The cross left in the basement.
PICE hesitated.
We traced the texts to a prepaid phone purchased in De Moine and never used again.
The security footage from the store showed a woman in her 60s, face obscured.
We couldn’t identify her.
She paused.
It’s possible someone connected to the case.
Maybe a friend of Vera or your father’s is trying to offer some kind of closure in their own way.
Or it could be unrelated, someone following the news coverage.
Without more evidence, we can’t pursue it further.
Patricia nodded.
She had expected as much.
Some mysteries nested inside mysteries, and perhaps she would never know who had left that cross or sent those texts.
“There is one more thing,” Pice said.
She pulled an envelope from her jacket.
“This was in your father’s safety deposit box.
The bank finally released the contents to the estate.
It’s addressed to you.
” Patricia took the envelope with trembling hands, her name written in her father’s handwriting, sealed for 30 years.
She opened it carefully and pulled out a single page.
Patricia, if you’re reading this, I’m dead and you’ve learned the truth about what happened to Emma.
I don’t expect forgiveness.
I don’t deserve it, but I need you to understand.
Vera called me that night in a panic.
When I arrived, the children were already dead.
She’d smothered them in their sleep quietly with pillows.
She said God had told her to save them from the man watching the house.
She was crying and praying and completely insane with conviction that she’d done the right thing.
I should have called the police immediately.
But I looked at those children at Emma, my granddaughter, her face peaceful like she was sleeping.
And I couldn’t bear it.
Couldn’t bear the scandal, the questions, the blame that would fall on our family.
Vera was clearly insane.
putting her on trial would serve no purpose.
So, I made a choice.
Clayton and I sealed them behind the wall.
We told ourselves it was to protect Vera, to protect the family.
But really, we were protecting ourselves from guilt, from responsibility, from the consequences of our failures.
I have paid for that choice every day since.
The guilt has hollowed me out, left me a shell.
I deserve worse.
I deserve hell.
I’m sorry, Patricia.
I’m sorry.
I took your hope.
I’m sorry I let you search when I knew you’d never find them.
I’m sorry I was too weak to do the right thing.
I loved Emma.
I want you to know that even if it means nothing now.
I loved her and I failed her and I’m sorry.
Dad Patricia folded the letterfully and slid it back into the envelope.
She felt nothing reading it.
No anger, no grief, no surprise.
Just a hollow acknowledgment that her father had been exactly what she now knew him to be.
A weak man who had chosen easy lies over hard truths.
“Are you all right?” Pierce asked.
“No,” Patricia said honestly.
“But I will be eventually.
” She walked to Emma’s grave and knelt beside it, placing her hand on the fresh earth.
“I found you,” she whispered.
I never stopped looking and I found you.
I’m sorry it took so long.
I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.
The words felt inadequate, childish, but they were all she had.
Michael and Linda joined her, the three of them kneeling by the four graves.
They stayed that way for a long time, saying goodbye to the children they’d lost and the lives those children never got to live.
Finally, as the first drops of rain began to fall, they stood and walked back to their cars.
Linda paused before getting in.
“I’m moving back to Iowa,” she said.
“I can’t be three states away anymore.
I want to be close to him.
” “I understand,” Patricia said.
Michael nodded.
Janet and I have been talking about the same thing, coming back to Asheford.
We left because we couldn’t bear the memories.
But now, I don’t know.
Maybe we need to be here close to them.
Patricia looked back at the cemetery, at the four graves visible through the rain.
I’ll visit every week, she promised.
I’ll bring flowers.
I’ll tell them about their cousins, about the families they never got to see grow.
They won’t be forgotten.
It was the only vow she could keep now, the only promise that mattered.
The children were found.
The mystery solved, the truth revealed in all its ugly complexity.
What remained was remembrance, was bearing witness, was refusing to let their deaths become nothing more than a cautionary tale about dementia and delusion and cowardice.
As Patricia drove out of Asheford for the last time, heading back to De Moine and the life she would somehow have to rebuild, her phone buzzed one final time.
Another text from an unknown number.
She rests now.
They all do.
The truth has set them free.
Patricia pulled over and stared at the message.
Then slowly she typed a response.
Who are you? The answer came immediately.
Someone who kept Vera’s secrets.
Someone who should have spoken sooner.
I’m sorry.
Patricia waited for more, but nothing came.
After several minutes, she put her phone away and continued driving.
Some questions would remain unanswered.
Some guilty parties would never be found.
Life was messy that way, refusing to resolve into neat narratives with clear endings.
But Emma was home now.
After 36 years of uncertainty and searching and hoping against hope, Patricia finally knew where her daughter was.
That would have to be enough.
The rain intensified as she merged onto the highway, washing across the windshield in sheets.
Patricia drove through it, toward home, toward whatever future could be built from the ruins of the past, carrying her grief like a stone she would never put down, but might eventually learn to carry more lightly.
Behind her in the Asheford cemetery, four graves stood in the rain.
Four children who had been lost and then found, who had died in terror and madness, who were finally, after so many years, at rest.
5 years later, Patricia stood in the Asheford Community Center for the dedication of the Holloway Memorial Garden.
The space had been created through donations from families across Iowa who had lost children to violence, a place of remembrance and peace, where grief could be acknowledged and names could be spoken aloud.
Four bronze plaques were mounted on the memorial wall, each bearing a name, a photograph, and the dates that bracketed their two short lives.
Emma Clare Holloway 1975 1989 Daniel James Patterson 1977 1989 Grace Marie Patterson 1979 1989 Thomas Derek Whitmore 1981 1989 Patricia touched Emma’s plaque tracing the letters of her name Emma would have been 49 now probably with children of her own a career a life full of the ordinary moments that now seemed infinitely precious.
Instead, she was forever 14, frozen in time, existing only in memory and photographs in the hollow space she’d left behind.
Michael and Linda stood beside Patricia, older now, gay-haired and worn, but still standing.
They came to Ashford together four times a year on the anniversary of the disappearance, on each child’s birthday, and on this day, the day the memorial had been dedicated.
Detective Pierce attended the ceremony, retired now, but still carrying the case in the lines of her face.
She’d been the one to push for the memorial to ensure Vincent Marsha’s name was included on a separate plaque honoring those who had tried to speak truth in the face of disbelief.
The ceremony was brief.
A local pastor spoke about loss and remembrance.
A children’s choir sang and then families were invited to place flowers at the memorial wall.
Patricia laid roses at Emma’s plaque, just as she did every week at the cemetery.
As she stepped back, a woman approached her hesitantly, “Elderly, perhaps 80, with white hair and trembling hands.
” “Mrs.
Holloway,” the woman said softly.
“I’m Sarah Chen, Dr.
Chen’s daughter.
” Patricia stiffened.
She hadn’t spoken to anyone from the Chen family since his death 5 years ago.
I know you have no reason to want to speak with me,” Sarah continued quickly.
“But I wanted you to know.
” I didn’t know.
None of us knew what my father had done.
When we found out after he died, she paused, composing herself.
“We donated his entire estate to the memorial fund.
It wasn’t enough.
Nothing could be enough, but we wanted to do something.
” Patricia looked at this woman carrying her father’s sins and felt a flicker of something that wasn’t quite forgiveness but was close to understanding.
“Thank you,” she said finally, “for coming for the donation, for caring.
” Sarah nodded, tears streaming down her face, and moved away.
As the ceremony ended and people dispersed, Patricia walked the memorial garden alone.
Flowers bloomed in careful beds, their colors bright against the dark earth.
Benches invited reflection.
A small fountain provided the gentle sound of moving water.
It was peaceful, beautiful, everything the farmhouse basement had not been.
Her phone buzzed.
An email notification.
Patricia checked it absently, then stopped.
The sender was listed as VH.
She opened the email with shaking hands.
Patricia, this will be my last message.
I’ve carried this burden long enough and I’m dying now.
Really dying.
Not like the false alarms before.
I want you to have the whole truth before I go.
I was Vera’s sister, Margaret, younger by 10 years.
We were never close.
She thought I was too worldly, too modern.
But when Sarah disappeared in 1952, something broke in Vera.
She became obsessed with protection, with control, with preventing harm at any cost.
I visited her that Sunday in July 1989.
I was the woman in the dark sedan parked behind the barn, the one Raymond Henderson saw.
Vera had called me, frantic, saying a man had been watching the children.
I came to help to calm her down.
But when I arrived, she’d already done it, already smothered them in their sleep.
She was in the kitchen praying, completely at peace.
Said God had told her to save them from the man in the woods.
I was horrified.
I called James, begged him to help.
He came and Clayton was already there.
And we all we all made terrible choices.
I left that night and never came back.
I watched from three states away as you searched, as the case went cold, as everyone suffered.
I told myself I was protecting Vera’s memory, protecting the family, but really I was protecting myself.
I left Thomas’s cross in the basement because he died holding it.
It felt wrong to keep it.
I sent the texts because I needed you to know that Vera loved them, that her mind was broken, but her heart wasn’t cruel.
I don’t expect forgiveness.
I just want you to know the truth, all of it, and to tell you that I’m sorry.
Margaret Holloway Brennan.
The email ended with an attachment, a photograph.
Patricia opened it with trembling fingers.
It showed Vera as a young woman, perhaps 30, holding a baby girl, Sarah.
Vera’s face in the photograph was full of love and hope so different from the elderly, deteriorating woman who would one day kill her grandchildren, thinking she was saving them.
Patricia forwarded the email to Detective Pierce, then sat down heavily on one of the memorial benches, the last piece of the puzzle delivered from a deathbed.
Margaret, the unknown accomplice, finally breaking her silence.
She thought about sending a reply, but what would she say? The anger had burned out years ago, leaving only ashes and exhaustion.
Margaret would die soon, carrying her guilt to whatever judgment awaited.
Patricia couldn’t absolve her, but she couldn’t hate her anymore, either.
The sun broke through clouds overhead, casting light across the memorial garden.
Patricia sat in that light for a long time thinking about all the people who had failed Emma.
Vera in her madness, James in his cowardice, Clayton in his fear, Dr.
Chen in his negligence, Margaret in her silence, but also thinking about the people who hadn’t failed, the detectives who worked the case for decades, the volunteers who searched, Vincent Marsh who told the truth even when no one believed him, Detective Pierce who solved the unsolvable.
and herself.
She had never stopped looking.
For 36 years, she had refused to accept that Emma was gone, had kept searching, kept hoping, kept loving her daughter even in absence.
That love had changed nothing and everything.
It hadn’t saved Emma, but it had brought her home.
Patricia stood and walked back to Emma’s plaque.
She placed her hand on the bronze, feeling its warmth from the sun.
“I love you,” she whispered.
I will always love you.
Rest now, sweetheart.
You’re safe.
You’re home.
And I’ll carry you with me until we meet again.
The words were simple, inadequate, human.
But they were all she had to offer, and they were enough.
Patricia walked out of the memorial garden into the afternoon light, into the rest of her life, into the future that would always carry the past within it, but might eventually make room for something like peace.
Behind her, four names remained on the wall, speaking their truth into silence, refusing to be forgotten.
Emma, Daniel, Grace, Thomas, the children of Holloway Farm, lost and found, gone but never forgotten.
At rest.
