2. The Admirer’s Notebook

The wetlands swallowed sound. That was the first thing Mira noticed as she pulled her car onto the gravel shoulder of Bell River Road and killed the engine. The rain had stopped an hour ago, leaving the world drenched and steaming, and the silence that rushed in to fill the space was not peaceful but watchful. Frogs had gone quiet. Birds had vanished. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath.

She sat behind the wheel for a long moment, the photograph resting on the passenger seat beside her. The hunting blind in the picture was somewhere out there, hidden among the reeds and the black water. She had studied the map from Darian's cell wall long enough to memorize the five marked locations. This was the closest one. The one labeled with the earliest date.

June seventeenth, twenty-sixteen.

Four months after Aldric Marsh was strapped to a gurney in a sterile room at Blackwood and pumped full of chemicals designed to stop his heart. Four months after the newspapers declared that the Marsh Wren was finally silent. And somewhere out here, in the place where the killer had once walked, her brother had begun something of his own.

Or so the map suggested. Or so the warden believed. Or so the handwriting on the back of the photograph whispered, like a voice through a wall, too faint to understand but too persistent to ignore.

Mira grabbed her flashlight and stepped out of the car.

The air hit her like a wet blanket. It smelled of decay, of vegetation rotting in stagnant water, of something older and sharper beneath. Phlox, maybe. She remembered the scent from her childhood, from that camping trip with her father and Darian, when the flowers had been blooming along the marsh's edge and their father had warned them not to pick any. "They grow where the ground is unstable," he had said. "Step in the wrong place, and the marsh will swallow you whole."

She had not thought about those words in years. Now they came back with the force of a premonition.

The path to the hunting blind was nearly invisible, overgrown with sawgrass and cattails. She followed the beam of her flashlight, stepping carefully, her shoes sinking into the mud with wet, sucking sounds. Mosquitoes hummed in her ears. Once, she thought she saw a light flickering between the trees, but when she turned, there was only darkness and the distant glow of the prison lights behind her.

The hunting blind rose from the reeds like a skeleton. It was an old structure, built of weathered planks and corrugated tin, its roof half-collapsed, its windows empty frames gaping at the night sky. Someone had tied a rope across the doorway, and attached to the rope were small, rusted bells. They did not ring as Mira ducked underneath, but they shivered slightly, as if disturbed by something other than wind.

Inside, the floor was covered in debris. Old beer cans, a rotting sleeping bag, the charred remains of a campfire. But beneath the casual detritus of trespassers, Mira saw something more deliberate. The walls were covered in carvings, not the careful script of Darian's cell but rough, hurried symbols scratched with a heavy hand. Circles within circles. Triangles that pointed downward. A shape that might have been a bird in flight, or might have been something else entirely.

And there, on the back wall, partially obscured by a collapsed shelf, were words written in black marker:

"The nest is ready. The teacher has come. The song begins."

Mira's flashlight trembled. The handwriting was Darian's. She had spent the afternoon sorting through his notebooks, learning the rhythm of his letters, the way he pressed harder on the downstrokes, the peculiar flourish he gave to his capital letters. This was him. There was no doubt.

But beneath it, in a different hand, someone had written a response:

"Sing louder. I am listening."

The elegant, left-slanted cursive. The same hand that had written "Remember me" on the back of the photograph. The same hand that Mira had seen before, in a memory she could not quite catch, like a fish slipping through her fingers in dark water.

She took out her phone and photographed the wall, her hands unsteady. The flash was blinding in the small space, and for a moment she saw afterimages, phantom shapes that danced in her vision. When they cleared, she noticed something else. A metal box, rusted at the edges, wedged beneath a loose floorboard near the back corner.

She pried it open with numb fingers.

Inside was a collection of newspaper clippings, carefully folded and preserved in plastic sleeves. They were all about Aldric Marsh. His arrest. His trial. His execution. The photographs showed a man with hollow cheeks and pale eyes, a man who looked like he had already left his body long before the state took it from him. But there were other clippings too. Articles about the victims. Seven women, all between the ages of nineteen and thirty-four, all with brown hair and green eyes. All found in the wetlands with phlox petals in their mouths.

And at the bottom of the box, beneath the clippings, was a photograph that was not from any newspaper.

It showed a young woman standing in front of the very hunting blind where Mira now sat. She was smiling, her brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, her green eyes squinting against the sun. Her hand rested on the shoulder of a boy who could not have been older than ten, his face half-turned away from the camera as if he did not want to be seen.

Mira's heart stopped.

The boy was Darian. She recognized the angle of his jaw, the way he held his shoulders slightly hunched, as if expecting a blow. But the woman... the woman was no one she had ever seen before.

She turned the photograph over. On the back, in elegant left-slanted cursive, were the words: "Elena. The second nest. June seventeenth, twenty-sixteen."

Beneath that, in Darian's cramped handwriting: "The teacher has shown me the way. Now I must learn the song."

Mira stumbled backward, the box clattering to the floor. Her flashlight rolled away, its beam spinning wildly across the walls before coming to rest on the doorway. And there, silhouetted against the faint glow of the distant prison lights, stood a figure.

She screamed before she could stop herself. The figure did not move. It was not a person. It was a coat, an old rain jacket, hanging from a nail beside the door. Someone had stuffed it with straw to create a crude scarecrow, and pinned to its chest was a note written on yellowed paper:

"You are looking in the wrong nest, little bird."

The handwriting was the elegant cursive, but it was not a warning. It was an invitation.

Mira fled.

She ran through the sawgrass and the cattails, her feet slipping in the mud, the darkness pressing in from all sides. She ran until she reached her car, and she threw herself inside and locked the doors, and she sat there shaking, her breath coming in ragged gasps, the photograph of Elena still clutched in her hand.

She should call the police. She should call someone. But what would she say? That she had found a dead man's treasure box in an abandoned hunting blind? That her brother, who had died of heatstroke in a cell with no air conditioning, might have been something more than a victim? That someone, somewhere, was still out there, still watching, still writing letters in elegant cursive?

She started the car and drove.

The Ashwick Public Library was closed when she arrived, but Mira had been a journalist long enough to know that small-town librarians often lived above their shops. She knocked on the side door until a light flickered on in the upstairs window, and five minutes later, a woman in a bathrobe appeared, her gray hair pinned up in curlers, her expression equal parts annoyance and curiosity.

"Do you know what time it is?" the woman asked.

"I'm sorry," Mira said, holding up her press credentials. "My name is Mira Voss. I'm investigating a story, and I need access to your archives. It's urgent."

The woman squinted at the credentials. "Voss. Any relation to the Voss boy who just passed at Blackwood?"

"My brother."

Something shifted in the woman's face. The annoyance faded, replaced by something more guarded. "It's the middle of the night, Miss Voss. Can't this wait until morning?"

"It's about the Marsh Wren case," Mira said, and she watched the woman's expression close like a door slamming shut.

"I don't know anything about that."

"Please. I just need to see the old newspapers. The coverage of the trial. The victim profiles. Anything you have."

The woman hesitated. Then she stepped aside and gestured Mira inside. "The archive room is downstairs. I'll give you an hour. After that, I'm calling Sheriff Tillman."

The archive room was a cramped basement filled with filing cabinets and microfilm reels. Mira worked quickly, her fingers moving through the drawers with practiced efficiency. She found the Marsh Wren file easily enough. It was thick, bulging with clippings and photographs, clearly a source of morbid local pride. Someone had kept it meticulously updated.

She spread the contents across a table and began to read.

The victims were as she remembered from the news. Seven women, all abducted from different parts of Ashwick County over a period of six years. All found in the wetlands, arranged in poses that suggested sleep, their mouths filled with phlox petals. The details of the murders had been kept from the public, but the newspaper had printed what they could. The killer had never used a weapon. He had strangled them with something thin and precise. A wire, the coroner speculated. Or a ligature made from braided twine.

Mira turned the pages faster now, searching for something she could not name. And then she found it. A photograph of the first victim. Her name was Cecilia Dunn, age twenty-two, a student at Ashwick Community College. She had brown hair and green eyes. And she looked exactly like the woman in the photograph from the hunting blind.

No. Not exactly like her. They were not the same person. But they could have been sisters.

Mira pulled out her phone and compared the two images side by side. The similarities were uncanny. The same shade of brown hair. The same green eyes. The same slight tilt of the head, as if they were both listening to something just out of frame.

She searched for the second victim. Lillian Bell. Thirty-one years old. Brown hair, green eyes. The third victim. Rosemary Finch. Twenty-five years old. Brown hair, green eyes. The fourth. Margaret Crane. Twenty-eight years old. The fifth. Sylvia Lark. Nineteen years old. The sixth. Catherine Heron. Thirty-four years old. The seventh. Helena Wren.

Mira stopped. Helena Wren. The name was too perfect to be a coincidence. And she had been the last. The one whose body led the police to Aldric Marsh. The one whose testimony, recorded in the killer's own journals, had sent him to death row.

Her hair had been brown. Her eyes had been green. And she had been found with seven phlox petals in her mouth, one for each of the women who came before her.

But the pattern did not stop there. Mira looked at the dates of the abductions. They were spaced roughly a year apart, always in the summer, always when the phlox was blooming. The police had assumed the killer was escalating, that he was becoming bolder. But what if that was not it? What if he was following a schedule? What if there was a logic to it that no one had seen?

She pulled out Darian's map and laid it beside the police reports. The five circled locations. Five dates. The first was June seventeenth, twenty-sixteen. Four months after Marsh's execution. The second was July ninth, twenty-seventeen. The third was June twenty-eighth, twenty-eighteen. The fourth was August third, twenty-nineteen. The fifth... the fifth was blank. No date. Just a location, deeper in the wetlands than any of the others, marked with a question mark.

Five circles. Five unfinished nests.

And beneath them, in Darian's handwriting: "The song has seven verses. I have learned five. The teacher will show me the rest."

Mira's hands were shaking so hard she could barely hold the papers. Seven verses. Seven victims. But the Marsh Wren had only seven victims. Unless he did not. Unless there were more that no one had found.

Unless someone had been continuing his work.

She thought about the photograph of Elena. The second nest, the caption had said. And she was not one of the seven known victims. Which meant she was an eighth. Or a ninth. Or a number that did not exist in any official record.

The librarian appeared at the bottom of the stairs. "Your hour is up, Miss Voss. I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

Mira looked up at her. "Did you know Aldric Marsh?"

The woman's face went pale. "I don't see how that's relevant."

"Did you know him?"

"I covered his trial," the woman said slowly. "I was a reporter for the Ashwick Gazette back then. Before I retired. Before I decided I'd had enough of looking at dead women's faces."

"Did he have accomplices? Partners? Anyone who helped him?"

The woman was silent for a long moment. Then she walked to the table and sat down heavily across from Mira. "There were rumors," she said quietly. "After the execution. Rumors that he had trained someone. A protégé. Someone who wrote to him in prison, visited him, learned his methods. The police investigated, but they never found anyone. They said the rumors were just that. Rumors."

"Who started the rumors?"

The woman met her eyes. "Your brother. Darian Voss showed up at the Gazette office six months after Marsh died, asking to see the files. He said he was writing a book. A true crime biography. He said he had evidence that the Marsh Wren had an apprentice. He said he could prove it."

Mira felt the floor drop out from under her. "Did he? Prove it?"

"He never came back. A few weeks later, he was arrested for breaking into a house on the edge of the wetlands. The owner reported him hiding in her garden, watching her through the window. When the police searched his apartment, they found photographs. Hundreds of them. Women with brown hair and green eyes, all taken without their knowledge."

The librarian paused. She reached across the table and took Mira's hand. Her fingers were cold.

"He was not the apprentice, Miss Voss. Your brother was something worse. He was the one trying to find the apprentice. And from what the police could tell, he was willing to do just about anything to succeed."

Mira pulled her hand away. "You are lying."

"I wish I were. The files are here. The arrest records, the photographs, the psychological evaluations. You can read them all. But it will not change the truth."

"What truth?"

The librarian stood up and walked to a filing cabinet in the corner. She withdrew a folder and placed it on the table in front of Mira. The label read: "Voss, Darian. Ashwick Police Department. Evidence File."

"Your brother was not a murderer," she said. "Not yet. But he was looking for one. And he believed that if he could find the apprentice, he could find the rest of the victims. The ones no one else was looking for. The ones the police did not believe existed."

She tapped the folder with one finger.

"He was a good man, in his own way. But good men can still be consumed by the things they chase. And whatever your brother was chasing, it chased him right back."

Mira opened the folder. Inside was a photograph of Darian, taken on the night of his arrest. His eyes were wild, his hair unkempt, and he was smiling. It was not a smile she recognized. It was the smile of someone who had seen something no one else could see, and who had finally stopped trying to explain it.

In his hand, just visible at the edge of the frame, was a single phlox flower.

On the back of the photograph, in handwriting that was not her brother's, were three words:

"Find me first."

The elegant, left-slanted cursive. The hand that had written "Remember me." The voice that had whispered through walls and across years and into the deepest, darkest places of her brother's fractured mind.

And now it was speaking to her.

Mira closed the folder and looked at the librarian. "Where is the fifth location? The one with no date?"

The woman stared at her for a long moment. Then she reached across the table and picked up Darian's map. She studied it with the practiced eye of someone who had spent decades reading between the lines of other people's stories.

"There is an old church out there," she said slowly. "Our Lady of the Marsh. It flooded back in the nineties, and no one ever rebuilt it. If someone wanted to hide something, that would be the place."

She handed the map back to Mira.

"But I would not go out there alone if I were you. The marsh does not give up its dead easily. And sometimes, if you listen too closely, you start to hear them singing."

Mira folded the map and tucked it into her pocket. The photograph of Darian was still in her hand, his smile gleaming in the dim light of the archive room. She thought about the scarecrow in the hunting blind. The note pinned to its chest. The voice that had written, "Sing louder. I am listening."

She was not the only one looking for answers.

Someone else was out there. Someone who had known her brother. Someone who had written to him, guided him, shaped him into whatever he had become. Someone who had left a trail of breadcrumbs leading from a prison cell to a hunting blind to a flooded church in the heart of the wetlands.

And they were waiting for her.

Mira stood up and walked toward the stairs. The librarian called after her, but she did not turn around. She was already thinking about the church. The fifth nest. The last circle on the map.

She was thinking about the song, and how badly she wanted to hear it.