“Who told you that?” Lana asked softly.
Nora looked out the window, then turned around. “We never made it to the morning lake.”
The following days were a whirlwind of investigations and revelations. Forensic experts found no human remains on the bus, but they did uncover a triangular photograph behind a sign: a group of children standing in front of a boarded-up building, their faces expressionless. In the shadows behind them, a tall, bearded man.
Nora, still fragile but lucid, recalled fragments of memories: the bus driver wasn’t the one they were expecting. A man was waiting at a junction. “He said the lake wasn’t ready for us yet. That we had to wait.” She remembered waking up in a barn with blacked-out windows and clocks that always showed Tuesday, even when it wasn’t. They had been given new names. “Some of them forgot where they were going home,” she said. “But not me. Never.”
Lana followed the trails to an abandoned barn on County Line Road, once owned by a man named Avery. There, in the undergrowth, she discovered a child’s bracelet: it belonged to Kimmy Leong, another missing child. Inside, the walls were covered in children’s names, some shallow engravings, others deep and filled with anger. In a metal box, she found Polaroid photos of the children, candid and unposed: asleep, crying, eating. A new name was written on the back of each photo.
That evening, Lana sat with Nora and showed her the photo of the bus. “It was after the first winter,” Nora said softly. “They had us pose once a season to show our progress. This is the building they kept us in the longest.” Photography and digital art
Lana’s search led her to Camp Riverview, a former resort acquired in 1984 by a private foundation. There she found the building in the photograph. Outside, on the ground, were the fresh, small footprints of a child. Inside, a pale, thin boy of about ten called himself Jonah. He couldn’t remember his real name. “They took it from me,” he said. “Are you here to take me?”
Lana drove Jonah to the train station. He recognized some faces in the phone book: Marcy, Sam, Lana herself. “You were supposed to come,” he said. “This is lucky.”
Meanwhile, investigators found another photo on the bus: four children around a campfire, one of whom had dark skin and short hair. “He stayed. He chose to stay,” the note read. Lana tracked down Aaron Develin, who now lives peacefully in the city. When confronted with the situation, Aaron confessed, “Not everyone wanted to leave. I was the one who stayed when the others tried to run away. I believed it for a long time.”
