The Wrong Trail
The police returned on a gray afternoon, the kind of day where the sky felt pressed too low. Their knock was firm, professional. The mother opened the door with shaking hands, bracing for bad news.
This time, though, the officers carried not grief, but a quiet, almost smug certainty.
"We've uncovered a new lead," the older one said, stepping into the living room.
The family sat—mother, father, two shadows in an empty house. The officers laid a folder on the table, sliding out the first piece of evidence: a page torn jaggedly from a notebook.
The handwriting was rough, uneven. We'll never go back. We can't. It's better this way.
The mother stared at it, her lips parting as though the words themselves could bite her.
"Mara's journal," the officer explained. "We found this in her backpack. Looks like a note she didn't want read."
Her husband leaned forward, fingers trembling not from fear but fury. "That's not her handwriting."
The officer arched an eyebrow. "It matches closely enough. We'll get it analyzed, of course, but—"
"No," the father snapped. His hand slammed down on the table, startling everyone. "Mara's hand was steady. She drew, she sketched detail so fine you could see each hair on a bird's wing. She didn't scratch out letters like this. Look."
He shoved Mara's sketchbook across the table, flipping it open to a drawing of the oak tree. The roots spiraled with a kind of dreadful precision, each line deliberate. "This is hers. Compare it. This—" he jabbed the page with the scrawled note, hard enough to crumple it— "isn't."
The room went still. The younger officer cleared his throat, awkward, avoiding the father's glare. "We've also had a student come forward. Says she overheard the girls talking about not wanting to go home anymore. Something about… being done."
The mother pressed her hand to her mouth. Her vision swam.
"You mean to tell me," the father growled, "that after three months of searching, after dogs, volunteers, the entire town combing the woods—you're ready to write this off as teenagers sulking after a fight?"
The officers exchanged a look. Their silence was louder than words.
The mother felt something fracture inside her. For the briefest second, she wanted to believe the police. She wanted the neatness of their story: the girls upset, storming off, hiding until they chose to return. It was easier than imagining the whispering tree, easier than waking from dreams of her daughters' faces behind glass.
But then she saw her husband—eyes bloodshot, knuckles white around the sketchbook—and the dread in her gut deepened. He looked like a man teetering on the edge of something he couldn't come back from.
When the officers left, their reassurances clattering like tin in the silence, the gossip spread faster than wildfire. At the grocery store, in hushed voices at the post office, neighbors began whispering:
They ran away. It was the argument. Those girls always were strange.
Some said Elena had always seemed too perfect, bound to snap. Others muttered that Mara had been the problem all along, dragging her sister into trouble.
The mother heard them when she went into town. Every whispered theory cut like glass.
And still, the children of the neighborhood dared each other to creep near the oak. Some came back pale, swearing they heard laughter from its branches. Others claimed they saw faces in the bark, mouths opening as if to scream but no sound escaping.
The mother tried to ignore it. She clung to her dreams of the girls, fragile threads of hope.
But her husband didn't sleep anymore. He sat hunched over the sketchbook long into the night, whispering to himself, tracing the lines of roots as though they were a map. He was convinced. The police were wrong. The note was wrong. The town was wrong.
Only the tree was right.
And one night soon, he would go to it.