Chapter 25: The Bridge at Fox Creek

Investigators recovered an old receipt from the cabinet showing a rental of excavation equipment for a property near Fox Creek.
The date was two days after Eli vanished.
Calvin’s uncle signed the rental agreement.
A county maintenance log showed that the access road to the property had been closed for drainage work that same week.
A former employee remembered delivering tools to the site and seeing Malcolm’s dark sedan parked near an unfinished culvert.
He told police he had assumed the men were fixing a water problem.
When detectives showed him Eli’s photograph, he went pale.
“I remember a boy’s jacket in the truck,” he said.
“I didn’t see the boy.”
The search team surveyed the property with ground-penetrating equipment and reviewed old engineering plans.
They found several areas where the soil had been disturbed years earlier.
The first excavation uncovered discarded building material and broken concrete.
The second located an old drainage channel that had been filled improperly.
Vega asked me not to visit the property while the search continued.
I tried to work, but every sound outside my window pulled my attention away from the screen.
By Friday, the search had found an object wrapped in deteriorated canvas.
It was a small metal lunchbox with Eli’s initials scratched into the handle.

Chapter 26: The Lunchbox

The lunchbox had belonged to my brother since fourth grade.
He used it to carry guitar picks, coins, and spare bicycle parts because the handle never broke.
My father bought it at a flea market and painted Eli’s initials inside the lid.
Investigators showed me photographs rather than the object itself.
I identified the dent near the latch and the uneven black paint on the handle.
Inside the lunchbox, they found a damp notebook protected by several layers of plastic.
Most pages had been damaged, but the surviving entries described the youth employment project in careful detail.
Eli recorded names, dates, and the number of hours each teenager actually worked.
He also wrote about a locked room beneath the maintenance building.
In one entry, he described Calvin taking several boxes through the steel door after hours.
In another, he wrote that Malcolm threatened to accuse him of theft if he contacted the county.
The final surviving entry ended with a sentence that made my throat tighten.
I told Dad I would be home before midnight.

Chapter 27: A Different Kind of Grief

I had spent years blaming myself for not noticing that Eli was frightened.
The notebook showed how carefully he had hidden his fears from everyone around him.
He wanted to protect the other teenagers whose names appeared in the payroll records.
He was especially worried about Grace, who had copied some of the original attendance sheets.
He wrote that Grace would lose her scholarship if anyone accused her of altering records.
I began to see why she left town.
Her silence might have been fear rather than indifference.
Vega located her through a former employer in Oregon.
Grace agreed to speak by video call.
She was thirty-four, worked as a cabinetmaker, and looked older than the photograph in my yearbook.
When she heard that Eli’s notebook had been found, she covered her mouth with one hand.
“He kept it,” she whispered.
I asked whether she had known what happened to him.
“I knew what they threatened,” she said.
“I didn’t know what they did.”
Grace explained that Calvin warned her she would be blamed for the forged records if she contacted police.
Her father moved them out of state after anonymous threats appeared at their home.
“I wanted to come back,” she said.
“My father told me he couldn’t lose another person.”
For the first time, I understood that my family’s grief had spread through lives I barely remembered.