The package from Walter Prescott arrived at Agatha's farmhouse on a gray Saturday morning in late January, thick enough that the postal carrier had needed two hands to carry it up the porch steps. Emma and Cassidy had taken the bus to Millbrook that morning specifically to be there when it came, both of them too restless with anticipation to wait for Agatha's usual measured phone summary.
"He does not do anything by half measures," Agatha said, slicing open the packing tape with a letter opener while Emma and Cassidy watched from across the kitchen table. "I warned you both he'd been documenting this for the better part of a decade. I did not warn you he apparently documents everything."
Inside were photocopied newspaper clippings going back nearly ninety years, hand-drawn maps of the old textile mill and the surrounding woods, and a thick binder of Prescott's own careful notes, organized by decade with the kind of meticulous cross-referencing that made Emma suspect he and Agatha would get along extremely well in person.
"Start with the mill itself," Agatha suggested, sliding a folder across the table. "I believe the history there may prove considerably more relevant than either of you expect."
The Ashford Hollow Textile Mill had operated from 1889 until its closure in 1974, employing, at its peak, nearly three hundred workers from the surrounding town and the smaller settlements scattered through the valley. The photocopied newspaper clippings painted a grim picture of its final decades a devastating fire in 1931 that killed eleven workers trapped on the mill's upper floor, followed by a slow, decades-long decline in working conditions that culminated, according to a 1968 exposé Prescott had carefully preserved, in a scandal involving unsafe machinery and a company more concerned with output than the safety of its workforce.
"Eleven deaths in a single fire," Cassidy said quietly, reading over Emma's shoulder. "That's a lot of grief to leave unresolved in one place."
"It is," Agatha agreed. "And unlike the Ashgrove house, where a single family's specific, personal grief created the anchor, I suspect Ashford Hollow's situation may be considerably more complicated — an entity potentially anchored not to one grieving family, but to an entire community's unresolved trauma, spread across decades of industrial neglect and repeated tragedy."
"Is that worse?" Emma asked. "More people involved."
"I genuinely don't know," Agatha admitted. "It may mean a more diffuse, harder-to-locate anchor point. It may also mean there is no single, clear ritual of the kind Marion Ashgrove performed no obvious basement circle, no specific object or location where the grief was deliberately concentrated. That would make identifying exactly what we're dealing with, and where, considerably more difficult than it was with the Ashgrove house."
The Missing Teenagers
The most recent folder in Prescott's package concerned the two teenagers who had disappeared in the past six months a boy named Cole Bennett, seventeen, who vanished in August after telling friends he intended to explore the old mill on a dare, and a girl named Priya Nair, sixteen, who disappeared in October under circumstances local police described as "unclear," though Prescott's notes indicated her family had found the mill's outer gate mysteriously unlocked the morning after her disappearance a detail that made Emma's stomach turn with sharp, immediate recognition.
"That's exactly what happened with Vivian," she said quietly. "And with Daniel Whitfield. The gate, left open, the morning after."
"I noticed the same parallel," Agatha said grimly. "It is, I believe, the strongest evidence yet that we are dealing with something genuinely similar in nature to what anchored itself at Hollow Lane regardless of how different the underlying grief that created it might turn out to be."
Prescott had also included brief interviews he'd conducted, with the families' permission, in the weeks following each disappearance. Cole Bennett's mother described her son growing increasingly withdrawn and exhausted in the weeks before he vanished, plagued by dreams he refused to discuss in detail. Priya Nair's older brother described nearly identical symptoms sleeplessness, a strange mark appearing on his sister's collarbone that she'd covered with makeup and refused to explain, and a haunting, distant quality to her voice in the days before she disappeared, as though she were only half-present in her own life anymore.
"A mark," Cassidy said, her voice tight. "Just like Emma's."
"It appears so," Agatha confirmed. "Which suggests, at minimum, that whatever anchors itself to that mill operates through a mechanism remarkably similar to what we faced at Hollow Lane marking its chosen target, and slowly, patiently, working to isolate and exhaust them until resistance simply becomes too costly to maintain."
Emma sat back in her chair, absorbing the weight of it all eleven mill workers dead in a single tragic fire, decades of a town's unresolved grief and anger over corporate neglect, and now two teenagers marked and taken within a single autumn, faster and more urgently than anything Ravenswood had ever faced.
"We need to talk to Prescott directly," she said finally. "Not just read his files. If this thing really is anchored to an entire community's grief instead of one family's, I think we need someone who actually understands Ashford Hollow's history as thoroughly as he clearly does, standing with us when we eventually go there."
"I agree entirely," Agatha said. "I have already suggested as much in my most recent letter to him. He has responded with considerable enthusiasm I believe, if I am reading his correspondence correctly, that he has spent the better part of a decade hoping someone, anyone, would finally take his research seriously enough to act on it."
A Growing Team
Over the following weeks, through a careful exchange of letters and phone calls, the shape of what awaited them in Ashford Hollow slowly came into focus. Walter Prescott, it turned out, was a retired high school history teacher in his early sixties, widowed, with an entire spare bedroom converted into what he cheerfully described, during his first video call with the group, as "a somewhat obsessive shrine to my hometown's worst decade."
"I've been documenting this for years," he told them, his weathered face crowded into the corner of Emma's laptop screen, "and I confess I'd nearly given up hope that anyone outside Ashford Hollow would ever take it seriously. Most folks around here have simply learned to avoid the mill property and not ask too many questions. It's easier, I suppose, than confronting something nobody quite has the language to explain."
"We understand that better than you might expect," Emma said. "Ravenswood was exactly the same way, for over a hundred years."
"Then perhaps," Prescott said, something like cautious hope creeping into his voice for the first time since the call began, "you're exactly the kind of help this town has been needing for a great deal longer than six months."
Emma exchanged a glance with Cassidy, feeling the same mixture of resolve and quiet fear she remembered from the very beginning of everything at Hollow Lane the sense of standing at the edge of something far larger and more dangerous than she fully understood yet, but no longer facing it with the desperate, isolated courage of a single frightened girl.
This time, she reminded herself, she had an entire team already assembled before she'd even set foot inside the gate.
"Tell us everything you know about that fire in 1931," she said. "I think that's where we need to start understanding exactly what kind of grief we're actually dealing with, before we ever decide it's safe enough to travel north."