For forty years Marta Thornwood had let one dead girl stay buried. This morning, at the edge of her woods, someone dug the girl back up. A dead raven hung from a low branch, wings spread, feet bound with red thread. Marta knew this bird. Its glossy black feathers and one red eye had watched her cabin for weeks. Now it swung stiff in the cold. Someone had killed her only watcher and left it where she would find it. She understood the message. Forty years ago she fled Pleasant View after a girl vanished and no one would name the truth. Marta had hidden in these trees ever since, growing old among strangers who never asked her name. Two weeks ago she pulled the old case file from a locked chest. She had told no living person. Yet someone knew. Her hands shook as she cut the thread. She would not run again. Running had cost her everything the first time. Small feet rustled in the brush behind her. Marta turned. Four animals watched her from the roots of the great oak. A fox sat with its tail curled tight. An owl blinked slow from a branch. A raccoon and a red squirrel crept forward, noses working. She had fed these creatures scraps for years. They had never come this close, and never together. The fox trotted past her legs. It stopped, looked back, then went on toward the oak. The squirrel followed. Marta hesitated, then walked after them, the dead raven still in her fist. They led her behind the oak's wide trunk, into a fold of the woods she had never searched. There, high in the branches, stood a house. Elven builders had woven it into the living wood. Carved runes traced the door. A round window glowed with old dust. Vines had swallowed the stairs. It had stood hidden here the whole time she lived below it. The raccoon climbed the steps and scratched at the door. Marta forced it open. Inside, papers covered a table. Maps. A child's drawing. And a photograph she knew: the missing girl, smiling, taken the summer she disappeared. Marta's breath caught. Someone had gathered these things and hidden them above her head. The warning at the wood's edge was not a threat to make her stop. It was bait to make her look. And it had worked. She set the dead raven on the table beside the photograph. Whoever built this house had been watching the case longer than she had. They knew she would return to it. They had counted on it. Marta picked up the photograph with steady fingers. She was no longer hiding. Now she had to find out who had been waiting for her all these years, and why they wanted her to start.