Back in her own vehicle, Josie drove for an hour and a half in darkness, staying off the interstate, using only the rural roads to get to the turn-off to her great-grandparents’ old house. They had owned twenty acres of land which they had sold to Alton Gosnell when Josie was five years old. Alton, and Alton’s father before him, had owned roughly ten acres abutting the twenty acres that Josie’s great-grandparents lived on. The property was near the top of one of the mountains on Denton’s outskirts. It was remote and about thirteen miles from the center of Denton, but still considered part of the city.

Like the Colemans’ place, her great-grandparents’ old house was high off the road, at the end of a long, rutted driveway overgrown with grass and brush. She drove past the entrance to it three times before she found it. The Gosnells had erected two steel bars with a chain between them on which hung a “No Trespassing” sign. Once she saw it, she drove a half mile down the road to a wide area of shoulder. She pulled off the gravel and into the trees, her shocks protesting as she rode over a downed fence and a few small logs. She couldn’t risk being seen from the road. Once her vehicle was safely nestled behind a grove of trees, she turned off the engine and climbed into the backseat. She had an emergency kit that had a blanket inside it. She retrieved the blanket and stretched out beneath it, Carrieann’s Marlin in her hands.

She woke a few hours later to the thin light of day pouring through the windows. Slowly, she sat up and glanced outside. There was no movement near her car, no sounds except the insistent chirp of birds in the trees all around her. Her cell phone revealed six missed calls from Ray, three from what she knew was Misty’s cell phone, and two from Trinity Payne. None from Carrieann, which was good. They had agreed to have no contact unless Luke took a turn for the worse. Josie didn’t want to leave a trail back to her and June.

She checked her text messages. There were a dozen from Ray imploring her to call him, or at least to tell him where she was and he would come to her. She had slept through it all. Her exhaustion ran deep and it was tempting to crawl back beneath her blanket and keep sleeping. But she couldn’t. Isabelle Coleman was still out there. These faceless men kidnapping and abusing young women had to be stopped.

Josie turned her phone to sleep mode, relieved herself quickly by the side of the car and snatched up the Marlin, picking her way through the forest toward the Gosnell property and on to the old chained-off driveway. By the time she found it, the sunlight had started to burn off the fog that swirled along the forest floor. A fine sheen of sweat covered her face, beads of it rolling down her back as she walked along the side of the driveway, ears pricked for the sounds of a vehicle or footsteps approaching.

Finally, she came to the overgrown clearing where her great-grandparents’ house sat, its white siding now gray with dirt and grime. The center of the roof had caved in. A gnarled tree branch had fallen onto the floor of the front porch, causing the wood flooring to splinter. The Gosnells had bought the property but let the house fall into disrepair. Josie had only snippets of memories of being inside the house with her father and grandmother. She didn’t have any emotional attachments to the place, but it seemed a waste to let it fall down.

She circled the house, glancing into the windows as she went. It was empty and dark, its plaster walls crumbling inside, the floorboards sagging. A chipmunk scurried over her feet, and she yelped in surprise, swinging the gun toward the edge of the clearing where the tiny creature had disappeared. Satisfied that no one was inside, she went to the back door and stared at the line of trees at the edge of the clearing.

She tried to pull the memory from the recesses of her brain. She couldn’t remember where she and her father had gone into the woods, only that they had meandered from the house to the forest, hand in hand. She decided to start in the center of the line of trees, almost directly across from where she stood. As she walked, she panned left and right, eyes searching for the rock formation.

She thought once she stepped into the woods her body would remember where to go, like the way your hands learned how to hold a gun after you’d trained with it and shot it for years. But her memories of the woods behind her great-grandparents’ house were like Ginger’s memories of her abduction—indistinct and out of focus. She only knew she had seen the Standing Man before.

When she realized she had circled the same moss-covered tree three times, she started marking her path, using her car keys to carve an X into the trunks at eye-level. It felt like hours before she came to what looked like an actual path in the woods. Sweat dampened her armpits so she took off her jacket and tied it around her waist. The underbrush had been tamped down into a rut just the width of the average person’s shoulders. It led downward into a small dell. As she traveled further down, one side of the leaf-strewn ground rose up into a rock face. Then she saw him. The Standing Man.

The closer she got, the sharper her memories became. It looked like a man in profile leaning up against the rock wall with one leg bent, knee jutting out, foot flat against the stone behind him. His chin dipped down as if he was looking at something on the ground. As she got closer, she saw that it wasn’t a single formation but a series of small rocks jutting out in different places, creating the illusion. It could only be seen from a certain distance and angle. Once you passed him and looked back all you saw were random rocks sticking out of the wall. A few feet from the standing man was a small opening. It was only about three feet tall. She crouched down to look inside, but there was only darkness. She pulled out her phone and turned it back on. No service, it announced. Still, it had a flashlight.

The cave was small, only big enough to accommodate two people at most. It was cool and damp and filled with rocks. She was just crawling in when, outside, a twig snapped. She startled so abruptly that she hit the top of her head on the cave’s roof. Massaging her scalp, she pocketed her phone and turned back to the entrance, sliding the Marlin around to the front of her body only to realize that the only way to hold it so that she could shoot whoever was out there was if she lay on her stomach.

Another twig snapped as she flattened her body to the ground, resting the barrel of the Marlin on some small rocks in front of her. Cheek pressed against the stock, she peered outside of the cave and waited. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. Whoever was out there wasn’t trying to be quiet. A pair of heavy, black, steel-toed boots came into view. Then a familiar voice hissed, “Jo!”

“Ray?”

The boots jumped back. Then Ray’s face appeared in the cave’s entrance. “What the fuck are you doing in there?”

She extricated herself from the cave and stood, but kept her hands on the Marlin, the barrel pointed toward the ground. Ray pointed to the gun. “And where the hell did you get that?”

Josie narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t you worry about what I’ve got.”

He stepped closer to her. His face looked thinner, his skin sallow. “I’m worried about you,” he said. “You need to come with me right now. Away from here. You can’t be here, do you understand me?”

Her hardened voice faltered. She hated herself for it. “You know what, Ray? I don’t understand anything anymore. I sure as hell don’t understand a goddamn thing about what is happening in this town anymore.”

She tried to step around him, but he moved with her, blocking her way. She poked him in the thigh with the barrel of the gun. “Get out of my way, Ray.”

“Yeah, Ray,” said a male voice to their left. “Get out of her way.”

They both turned to see Nick Gosnell standing several feet away. He held a shotgun in his hands and it was aimed directly at Josie’s head.