Clara began the grim work of sorting the following morning. She moved through the rooms with focused efficiency, piling moth-eaten clothes into bags and stacking modest furniture. Mark had lived simply, almost like a hermit. There were no televisions, no radios, and, surprisingly, no photographs. For a man who lived thirty years in one place, he had left almost no visual record of his existence.
As she worked, she began to notice small, unsettling inconsistencies. Every door in the house had been reinforced with heavy brass bolts, but they were installed on the outside of the rooms. The locks weren’t designed to keep an intruder out; they were meant to keep someone inside. The discovery left her with a mounting sense of dread. Who exactly was her uncle, or with whom was he working with?
She found a locked cabinet in the corner of the study and dozens of hand-drawn maps of the local terrain. They were beautifully intricate, showing every crevice and ridge. A dark thought began to take root: perhaps Mark hadn’t been a hermit, but a cog in something illicit. Between the external locks and the secret mountain paths, it looked less like a home and more like a hub for some dangerous work…