Chapter 11 - Caleb Voss
Caleb Voss had been nineteen when Thomas Bell died.
Now he was fifty-six and still lived less than five miles from the vineyard.
That fact made me angrier than anything else.
For thirty-seven years, everyone had talked about Claire as if she had vanished into the earth. Meanwhile, the witness who built the official story had spent his life right down the road.
Sheriff Molina knew the name.
“Voss has done contract work for half the farms in the county,” she said. “No violent record. A few DUIs. Tax trouble.”
Dad shook his head. “He lied in 1989.”
“Then we’ll ask him why.”
We drove to Caleb’s property before dark.
His house was empty.
But Dad’s truck sat behind a shed.
The driver’s door was open.
The recipe box was missing.
Inside the shed, deputies found fresh tire chains, two rifles, and a stack of old newspaper clippings about Claire’s disappearance.
One clipping had my father’s face circled in red ink.
Another had Ethan’s mother, Rebecca, photographed at age twelve.
Across it someone had written: SHE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO LIVE HERE.
Ethan turned pale.
I asked Sheriff Molina, “Was Caleb watching her?”
“Looks that way.”
Behind the clipping stack was a map of the Hawthorne Vineyard.
Three locations were marked.
The cellar.
The chapel.
And the frozen pond behind the north ridge.
Eleanor stared at the last mark.
“No.”
“What?” I asked.
She gripped my arm.
“The pond was drained once. Summer of 1990.”
“Why?”
“Richard said the dam needed repair.”
Richard was not with us. Sheriff Molina had left a deputy watching him at the estate.
Ethan looked at the map.
Then his phone rang.
It was the deputy.
Ethan answered.
His expression changed immediately.
“What do you mean he’s gone?”
The deputy’s voice was loud enough for me to hear.
“Richard Cole disappeared from the house fifteen minutes ago.”
May you like
Ethan looked toward the darkening ridge.
And from somewhere beyond the trees, an engine started.
