Chapter 6: The Watchful Detective

Chapter 6: The Watchful Detective

The air in the Blackwood funeral home was thick and cloying, heavy with the scent of lilies and grief. It was an odor that clung to the back of the throat, a perfume for the dead. I stood in the back, a ghost in a borrowed suit, trying to make myself as small as possible. But in a town this size, anonymity was a luxury I couldn't afford. The note, folded and hidden in my pocket, felt like it was burning a hole through the fabric, its three sharp words a brand on my conscience: YOU LEFT HIM.

Every hushed whisper felt like an accusation. Every sideways glance felt like a verdict. I scanned the faces in the room—old classmates now grown into strangers, parents whose faces were etched with a sorrow that mirrored my own guilt—and saw the author of the note in every one of them. They looked at me and saw the boy who lived, the uncomfortable loose end to their tidy narrative of tragedy. My presence here was an insult, a stark reminder that while their children were growing up, getting driver's licenses, and going to prom, Jacob was… somewhere else. For four years.

His mother, Sarah Vance, stood near the closed casket, a woman hollowed out by a grief so profound it seemed to have stolen the very color from her eyes. People offered her clumsy condolences, but she just nodded, her gaze fixed on the polished mahogany box that held what was left of her son. The thought of speaking to her, of offering my own empty, hypocritical words, was a terror beyond measure.

But amid the sea of averted gazes and sorrowful stares, there was one pair of eyes that held me. They belonged to an old man sitting alone in a pew near the front. He was in his late sixties, maybe early seventies, with a face like a roadmap of grim resolutions and a lifetime of bad coffee. He wore a rumpled tweed jacket that had seen better decades, and his shoulders were slightly stooped, but his gaze was anything but tired. It was sharp, analytical, and utterly devoid of pity. He wasn't mourning. He was watching. Studying me. Dissecting me from across the room with an intensity that made the hair on my arms stand up.

The service was a blur of platitudes. The pastor spoke of a life cut short, of a bright boy taken too soon. He didn't know the half of it. He didn't know about the four years. He didn't know about the dark. After what felt like an eternity, it was over. I tried to slip out during the slow, somber shuffle toward the exit, but a soft voice cut through the murmuring.

"Leo?"

It was Sarah Vance. My blood turned to ice. I turned, my entire body rigid. She stood before me, her face a mask of exhausted sorrow.

"I… I'm so sorry, Sarah," I stammered, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.

She looked at me, and for a second, I saw a flicker of the warm woman who used to give us cookies after school. "He talked about you all the time," she said, her voice a fragile whisper. "Even when you moved away. He always said you were the smart one, Leo. The careful one."

The words were a dagger, twisting in a wound I didn't know could get any deeper. The careful one. The one who had weighed his options in a split second of unimaginable horror and chosen himself.

"Thank you for coming," she said, before turning away to accept another hug, leaving me standing there, flayed open by her unintentional kindness.

I escaped into the grey, overcast afternoon. The procession to the cemetery was a slow crawl, a parade of sorrow under a weeping sky. At the graveside, as the casket was lowered into the earth, I stood at the edge of the crowd, separated by a chasm of my own making. When the first handful of dirt struck the lid, the sound was so final, so absolute, that a sob caught in my throat. This was it. The real end. The period at the end of a sentence of suffering I had helped to write.

As the mourners began to disperse, drifting back toward their cars and their lives, I remained, rooted to the spot. I needed a moment alone. But I wasn't alone.

"I never liked your story."

The voice was low and gravelly, startling me. I turned to find the old man from the church standing beside me, his flinty eyes fixed on the open grave.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

"Detective Harding," he said, by way of introduction, though he didn't offer a hand. "Retired. I was the lead investigator when your friend went missing."

My stomach clenched. This was him. The man whose name had been in all the old newspaper clippings. The man who had interviewed me, a terrified, babbling twelve-year-old, in my living room.

"Your story," he repeated, turning his sharp gaze on me. "Two boys go hiking in the woods. One, Jacob, slips and falls down a ravine. Hits his head. The other, you, panics and runs for help. By the time you lead people back, he's gone. A tragic accident. Neat. Tidy." He paused, letting the silence hang between us. "Too tidy."

"I was a kid," I said, the old lie coming automatically to my lips. "I was scared. I told you everything I remembered."

Harding gave a short, cynical huff that wasn't quite a laugh. "You told me a story. A good one. Good enough to get a town full of scared parents and overworked cops to look in all the wrong places. We searched that area for weeks, son. We found your tracks. We found the path you took running home. What we never found was a ravine. We never found a single drop of blood. We never found any sign of a boy who fell."

He took a step closer, and I had to fight the urge to back away. "I'll give you this, it was a smart lie. You didn't blame a monster or some boogeyman. You blamed an accident. Something plausible. Something that could let the town sleep at night." His eyes narrowed. "But I never slept. Because I knew you were leaving something out. Not what you saw, but where you saw it."

My carefully constructed composure began to shatter. He knew. He'd known all along.

"Jacob wasn't the first, son," Harding said, his voice dropping, becoming grim and conspiratorial. The world seemed to shrink to just the two of us, standing among the dead. "Not by a long shot. There was Billy Peterson in '83. Vanished from his own backyard, right near the woods. Sarah Jenkins in '95. Took a shortcut home from school and never made it. Little Timmy O'Connell in 2002. Gone. All of them, gone without a trace."

He was reciting a litany of ghosts, a dark history of my hometown that had only ever been whispered about as unconnected tragedies.

"The town calls it a curse," Harding continued, his gaze boring into me. "Bad luck. But a cop who's seen enough sees a pattern. A hunting ground. A predator who knows those woods better than anyone. A predator who, four years ago, got sloppy. He let one of his victims get away."

The unspoken accusation hung in the damp air. He meant me. I was the one that got away.

"Your friend didn't die from a fall," Harding said, his voice hard as iron. "He was kept. For four years. That changes everything. This isn't just a cold case anymore. You're the only person who ever walked out of that forest alive after an encounter. You are the only living witness to a crime that has been going on for decades."

He let that sink in, the weight of his words settling on me like a burial shroud. I was no longer just a coward haunted by his past. I was a key. The only key.

"I don't know what you saw in those woods, Leo," Harding finished, his voice low and intense. "But it scared you enough to lie for four years. Now you need to decide if you're more scared of it, or of letting it happen to another kid."

He turned and walked away, leaving me alone by Jacob's grave, the accusation of the note in my pocket now dwarfed by a far more terrible and inescapable truth. My lie hadn't just protected me. It had protected a monster. And now, the only person who could stop it was the coward who had let it win in the first place.