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“Hers.”
Judy caught her gently.
“Your mother’s?”
Elizabeth nodded through tears.
“She carried it everywhere.”
An agent photographed the backpack before lifting it into an evidence container.
Beneath it, they found human remains.
Hannah Harper was finally coming home.
Two more graves were located before sunset.
Women whose names we didn’t know yet.
Women, Walter Mills had described as trouble.
Judy stood beside the playground long after the investigators finished.
I walked over.
“You okay?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
She leaned against me.
Not for half a heartbeat.
Not accidentally.
She rested her head against my chest and let me hold her.
“I keep thinking about Emily,” she said.
“What about her?”
“She knew.”
“That the women were buried here?”
“Maybe.”
She looked toward the camp office.
“She kept leaving pieces everywhere. The key. The tapes. The letters. The boxes.”
“She knew one person might not find everything.”
“She built a trail.”
“And you followed it.”