Chapter 4: The Hidden Trail
The darkness beneath the canopy of ancient white pines was absolute. The bright beam of my flashlight was the only thing keeping us from crashing headlong into the thick thickets of wild rhododendron that choked the mountain floor. I could hear the distant shouts of men back at the cottage, the slamming of truck doors, and the heavy baying of a hound being released from a truck bed.
They were tracking us.
"This way," Emma gasped, her small hand pulling at mine with surprising strength.
She wasn't leading us randomly through the brush. She was moving with absolute certainty toward a narrow gap between two massive, lightning-scarred boulders. I had spent seven summers at this cottage with Olivia, and I had never noticed this opening. It was completely obscured by a dense curtain of hanging English ivy—an invasive vine Olivia had spent years trying to eradicate from the front yard, but apparently, she had deliberately cultivated it here.
We squeezed through the gap. The moment we passed the boulders, the ground leveled out into a cleanly packed dirt path. It was an engineering marvel, hidden entirely from the aerial canopy and the surrounding ridges. The path was lined with old river stones, worn smooth by years of foot traffic.
This was Olivia’s secret.
My mind was a chaotic storm of grief and confusion as we ran. Why would my wife build a hidden trail in the middle of a national forest? Who was she hiding it from? And how did these two children know it existed?
"Hurry," Ella whispered, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps. Her bare feet were bleeding from the sharp pine needles and rocks on the path, but she didn't slow down. She didn't complain. The level of survival conditioning in these children was heartbreaking.
Behind us, the sound of the hound grew louder, its deep, rhythmic barking echoing off the stone ridges of the hollow. The men were at the boulders. They were looking for the entrance.
"The light," Emma warned, looking back at me. "Turn it off, Ethan. They can see the trees glowing."
I clicked the flashlight off. The world instantly vanished into a deep, velvety blackness. For a second, I panicked, unable to see my own hands. But then, as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight filtering through the high branches, I noticed something incredible.
Along the edges of the dirt path, small, faint pale-green rings were glowing in the dark. Foxfire. A natural bioluminescent fungus that grew on decaying wood. Olivia had been a botanist; she had written her master's thesis on subterranean fungal networks in the Appalachian chain. She had systematically lined this entire hidden trail with foxfire-infected logs. To anyone without a flashlight, the path was a faintly glowing runway through the dark, invisible from more than five feet away.
"She made this for us," Ella said softly, her voice carrying a strange confidence as we followed the glowing green trail deeper into the gorge.
"Who made it, Ella?" I asked, my boots crunching softly against the dirt. "Olivia? When did you see her?"
"Not her," Emma corrected. "The other lady. The one who looks just like her."
I stopped dead in my tracks. The glowing foxfire cast a faint, ghostly green light up into their pale faces. My chest felt tight, as if an iron band were winding around my lungs.
"What do you mean, the lady who looks just like her?"
"Olivia’s sister," a new voice answered from the darkness ahead.
I swung the tire iron forward defensively as a figure stepped out from the shadows of a massive oak tree twenty feet in front of us. A flashlight clicked on, the beam aimed strictly at the ground to avoid illuminating her face, but the reflected light was more than enough.
She was wearing a heavy tactical jacket, her dark hair pulled back into a tight braid. Her face—the sharp jawline, the slight dip in the bridge of her nose, the deep hazel eyes—was a perfect, flawless mirror of the woman I had buried three years ago.
May you like
It was Sarah. Olivia’s identical twin sister.
The sister Olivia had told me died in a car accident when they were teenagers.
