PART 3 – Echoes on Horseshoe Pike
Evelyn hadn’t driven that far in months.
Her old Chevy Impala, sun-bleached and stubborn, coughed to life just after dawn. She wrapped herself in Carl’s old flannel coat and packed a thermos of weak coffee. The folded page of notes lay on the passenger seat beside a creased road atlas and a half-eaten roll of peppermints.
It was nearly an hour’s drive to the backwoods outside Elizabethtown — where Horseshoe Pike curved like a snake through stretches of dead cornfields, rusted silos, and forgotten sheds. Evelyn drove with both hands on the wheel, her eyes scanning everything.
She hadn’t told Mace she was coming. He’d just try to talk her out of it.
But this wasn’t recklessness. It was muscle memory. When you’ve spent thirty years taking other people’s panic and turning it into calm, your instincts don’t die with retirement. They sharpen in silence.
And last night, that silence had been broken.
As she pulled off the main road and into a gravel lot littered with tires, she spotted the place: a squat building behind a rusted fence, with a crooked sign reading “Crawley’s Auto & Salvage”.
It looked like the kind of place where things — and people — disappeared.
Evelyn stepped out of the car and adjusted her scarf. The morning air smelled like gasoline and frost. She walked past a line of busted vehicles, each with shattered windshields and stories no one bothered to tell.
Inside the garage, a bell above the door jingled.
A man looked up from under a lifted Ford F-150. Mid-fifties, red bandana, thick arms covered in tattoos. His eyes flicked over Evelyn like she was a misplaced package.
“You lost, ma’am?”
“No,” she said plainly. “Just curious. Heard this was the place to fix up something stubborn.”
He grunted. “Depends what kind of stubborn you’re talkin’.”
She offered a tight smile. “Mine’s a ’99 Impala. Still kicks when it wants to.”
He wiped his hands on a rag. “You’re not from around here.”
“I’m from everywhere,” she said.
His eyes narrowed slightly. “You with the township?”
“Nope. Retired dispatcher. Just pokin’ around. Heard some folks from an old crew used to race back this way. Iron Teeth, I think?”
Something in his face twitched. A name that still had teeth.
“They gone,” he said quickly. “Club folded. Buncha drunks and wannabes. Place’s quiet now.”
“You ever seen a red pickup around lately?” she asked gently. “With a wolf patch sticker?”
He didn’t answer right away. Just turned back toward the workbench. “Lots of red trucks around here.”
Evelyn caught the flicker of something on his arm — just above the rolled sleeve. A faded tattoo of a wolf’s head, snout raised.
She let her silence hang in the air like a loaded gun.
Then, carefully, she pulled something from her pocket. A small black recorder — nothing fancy. But real enough to make people nervous.
“Mind if I ask you something on the record?” she said softly.
He stiffened. “You a cop now?”
“Nope. Just someone who still listens.”
And with that, she turned and walked back toward her car. Slowly. Purposefully.
She didn’t need him to confess. She just needed him to panic.
Back inside the Impala, she clicked the recorder on. Not to catch his voice — but to say her own thoughts aloud.
“Red Ford, same man. Wolf tattoo. Works at Crawley’s. Avoided questions. One confirmed lead.”
She clicked it off. Her pulse thumped hard.
Her next stop was the trail behind the lot — an overgrown stretch of dirt that led toward the abandoned race tracks where the Iron Teeth used to drink and fight and disappear. She parked near the edge, where the gravel thinned into weeds.
It was quiet. Unsettlingly so.
The trees around her looked like bony arms reaching for something they never got. In the wind, she swore she heard something. Not a voice — but a presence.
Then she saw it — half-hidden behind a rusted oil drum: a scrap of pink cloth tangled in a briar bush.
Evelyn’s throat closed.
She stepped forward, her knees aching with every bend, and pulled the cloth free. It was a child’s sleeve. Faded, torn. She pressed it to her face and smelled oil, sweat… and something else. Fear.
And suddenly, her headset — the one she’d left in the car, still tuned in — hissed to life from inside the Impala.
She ran, faster than she thought possible.
By the time she threw the door open, the static was already clearing. Then came the voice — faint, trembling.
“I think he’s asleep…”
It was Jamie.
Evelyn grabbed the headset.
“Jamie! I’m here. I’m nearby. You need to stay as quiet as you can. Can you hear me?”
A soft gasp. “You’re real?”
“I am. And I’m close.”
Silence. Then: “I saw trees. When the door opened… trees and something blue. A tarp.”
She scribbled it all down, her fingers barely keeping pace.
“I’m coming, Jamie. I swear to you.”
But just before the signal faded again, she heard something else.
A second voice.
Low. Rough. Slurred.
“You talkin’ to someone, kid?”
Then the line cut out.
PART 4 – The Hardest Call
Evelyn didn’t go home.
She drove straight to the one place in Lancaster County that still made her feel like her badge hadn’t been burned along with her usefulness — the police substation off Route 743.
The young officer at the desk barely looked twenty-three. Blonde crew cut, bored expression. The kind of boy who’d call her “ma’am” like she was someone’s harmless aunt.
“I need to speak to a detective,” she said, breath shallow from urgency. “Preferably someone who knows how to listen.”
He didn’t budge. “You got an appointment?”
“No,” she said, digging in her purse. She pulled out a worn ID card — not active anymore, but still bearing the emblem of Lancaster County Emergency Services. “But I’m not just some random woman walking in off the street. I was on the other end of this line for thirty years.”
He blinked, unsure.
Then the door creaked open behind him.
Mason Caldwell stepped into the room, wearing an old pea coat and the kind of expression that said I was just trying to get coffee. His eyes landed on her — and he stopped.
“Evelyn?”
“Told you I’d find something,” she said flatly.
Ten minutes later, they sat across from each other in a cramped break room. Evelyn had her recorder on the table, her notes spread between two paper cups of vending machine coffee.
She laid it out. Jamie’s voice. The wolf patch. The red truck. Crawley’s. The cloth sleeve. The second voice.
She ended with a whisper. “You know I’m not making this up.”
Mace rubbed his chin. He looked tired, like the job had outlasted his spirit. “This could be a dozen things. Radio prank. A scared runaway. A bad memory getting worse.”
“I heard his voice,” she said, fire entering her tone. “And he’s not a ghost. He’s a boy. Alive. Somewhere near that garage. I think I walked within a hundred feet of him.”
Mace looked at her for a long time, like he was doing math with his heart.
“You found a child’s sleeve?”
She nodded.
“Where is it?”
“In my car. Wrapped in a bag. I know chain of custody,” she said dryly.
He exhaled. “Okay. Let’s say you’re right. Say this Jamie is real. We still have no address, no name, no matching missing person. And this Crawley guy? He’s on parole. Not exactly clean, but no violent priors.”
“Yet,” Evelyn snapped. “You know how many monsters don’t start with violence? They build to it.”
Mace leaned back, rubbing the back of his neck. “You want a search warrant on a gut feeling and a ghost signal.”
“No,” she said. “I want you to come with me. Tonight. We wait near that auto shop. We listen. We catch him moving. Or we don’t. But we try.”
Mace stared at her. Then slowly nodded.
“I’ll bring a radio tech. We’ll triangulate if the signal comes back.”
Evelyn didn’t thank him.
She just reached across the table and grabbed her notes, because in this business, gratitude was for later. After the screaming stopped.
That night, they waited in silence.
Mace brought a patrol officer and a tall radio technician named Kyle, who smelled faintly of fast food and old metal. They set up a van in the woods beyond the junkyard, out of sight, eyes on Crawley’s.
Inside, Evelyn wore the headset.
The scanner had been adjusted, the gain boosted, the dial honed like a razor.
She watched the auto shop go dark just after midnight.
For hours, nothing.
Then, at 1:37 AM, the static broke.
“Evelyn?”
Her heart leapt. She nearly dropped the headset.
“Jamie? I’m here.”
“I think he’s asleep. I… I tried to untie myself but my hands hurt.”
“You’re doing so good, sweetheart. Just hang on. You said you saw a blue tarp outside?”
“Yes… it flaps in the wind.”
Evelyn looked at Kyle. “Blue tarp, south-facing. You getting a fix?”
Kyle nodded, eyes glued to his equipment. “Signal strength climbing. I’ve got it… triangulating…”
Jamie’s voice cracked again. “I hear frogs sometimes. I think there’s water. Please don’t let him take me again. He said… he said if I screamed again—”
Then the second voice. Muffled. Angry.
“What’d I tell you, huh? What’d I SAY about talkin’ to ghosts?”
A rustle. A thud. Then nothing.
Evelyn’s breath hitched.
Kyle muttered, “We got it. We got him.”
Mace didn’t wait.
He grabbed the patrolman, pulled out his weapon, and they moved — silently, quickly — toward the thicket behind the garage. Evelyn stayed behind, eyes wide, heart hammering, headset still clamped tight.
She couldn’t hear the shouting.
But she saw the movement — lights flashing across rusted cars, a shadow bolting through the trees, then a loud crash.
Ten minutes passed. Felt like hours.
Then the patrolman’s voice crackled through the van’s radio: “Suspect in custody. We found him.”
Evelyn didn’t realize she was crying until Kyle gently handed her a tissue.
Then Mace’s voice came through, clear and low:
“There’s a boy. Wrapped in a tarp, inside the shed. Tied up. Cold, but alive. His name is Jamie.”
