I could go back to Alden, back to the clearing where we’d found the bodies, and try to pick up the search for Bella. But what good could I possibly do there? The place was still crawling with law enforcement. It was their job to identify the victims, to follow up on any physical evidence. Whatever scent path Bella and her kidnapper had laid, the police had almost certainly disturbed it.

There’s nothing I can do.

Cady had made a difference for me. Silver had made a difference for me. I’d spent years throwing everything I had into learning search and rescue, because if I could someday do the same for someone else, then maybe I could prove, even just to myself, that I was worth it.

That I’d deserved to be saved.

That I was good.

My eyes stung as I turned and walked back toward the house, forcing myself to focus on the search, on Bella, on anything but Silver lying in a hole she’d never climb out of.

This is what I knew: Bella’s kidnapper had taken her to a mass grave site. Was Bella meant to join those bodies? Had something gone wrong with the kidnapper’s plan? Or was the person who’d taken Bella just leading us all on a merry chase? If the sheriff had been telling the truth, the FBI believed that the kidnapper and the person who’d put those five bodies in the ground were one and the same. That meant that he or she had also probably erected the stone circle we’d found near the clearing. I had no idea what the hash marks on the tree stood for, what any of it meant to the kidnapper, but the sheriff had said that the Circle for the Lost was a Hunter’s Point tradition, dating back to the town’s founding.

As it so happened, I had a copy of the town history.

I flipped through page after page of A History of Hunter’s Point, looking for any trace of the Circle for the Lost. I found it in a set of pictures from 1922. Winter had come early that year. A group of a dozen young people—including a Ferris, a Turner, and a Rawlins—had left on what was supposed to be a months-long journey into the wilderness. It was doubtful they’d made it beyond Sorrow’s Pass.

I hadn’t thought before about the pass’s name—or where it had come from—but as the pictures told the story of the explorers’ disappearance, the word sorrow stuck with me, right up until I saw a photograph of the adjacent valley.

There, butting up against the riverbed, was a stone circle. Halfway between a grave marker and a prayer.

“Sorrow’s Pass.” I looked from one picture to the next. “The valley. The river.”