Hollow Ground
Jack Mercier swore he'd never drive back down that mountain road. But when the call comes , the kind that splits a life into before and after , he loads his pickup and aims for the fog bank hanging off the ridge. Twenty years ago, Jack left the hollow with a secret sealed beneath the chapel floor and his younger brother Theo at his side. Now Nell is waiting at the old place with bad news, Joan has vanished, and the sheriff , Tobias Keane, a man who never forgot what the Merciers buried , is asking questions at the foot of the drive. The locals remember everything: Hank Bristow at the diner counter, Darla Connors behind the post-office glass, old Cal Bridges with his hounds, and Father Owen Thatch, who heard Jack's last confession on the night he left. Even Lyla Vale, who came up from the city asking questions nobody wanted answered, has gone quiet. Her husband Marcus is tight-lipped, and her notebook has stopped appearing in the mail. Eunice Park at the clinic and old Ruth Granger at the church both know more than they're saying, and Deke Mallory has been seen up at the old mine road after dark. Jack has until sunrise to find his mother, face the man he wronged, and decide whether the mercy of silence is worth one more body in the ground , or whether the truth, dragged at last up from the hollow, might set them all free.