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Chapter 1
The Ledger Under the Floor

Clara Voss had spent most of her adult life distrusting family stories, particularly the ones that improved with age. By the time she turned onto the gravel road leading toward the Voss farmhouse, she had heard at least six versions of her grandfather Silas's disappearance, and each one required her to believe something different about the man. He had fled Missouri with another woman, drowned while drunk, been murdered over moonshine money, joined a criminal operation farther south, or simply walked into the Ozark woods and decided never to come back.

The farmhouse offered no opinion. It stood beyond a field of September grass beneath two enormous black walnuts, its white paint weathered gray and its porch sagging toward the eastern corner. Clara stopped her car beside the gate and stared at the barn behind the house, remembering the lantern she had seen there the previous night and wondering whether exhaustion had manufactured it.

She had slept badly at a motel twelve miles away, waking twice from dreams of someone knocking beneath her bed. In daylight, the memory seemed embarrassingly theatrical, but Clara had learned during eight years of researching historical crimes that embarrassment was often useful. It made people discard observations before deciding whether they mattered.

She retrieved her canvas bag from the passenger seat and walked toward the house. The county attorney handling the estate had given her three keys, an inventory prepared after her grandmother's death, and repeated warnings about rotten floorboards. None of the paperwork explained why the property had remained legally tangled for so long, nor why Silas Voss had never been declared dead despite disappearing more than three decades earlier.

Inside, the farmhouse smelled of dust, cedar, and something unexpectedly sweet. Clara stood in the entrance hall until she recognized the last scent as dried corn, although there was no corn in sight. Her grandmother Evelyn had kept the rooms almost aggressively ordinary: floral curtains, maple furniture, framed school photographs, and a ceramic bowl filled with buttons.

Clara set her bag on the dining table and removed the inventory. She had come looking for records, not ghosts, and the dining room seemed the sensible place to begin because Evelyn had stored household papers in a rolltop desk there. Two hours produced tax receipts, feed invoices, insurance documents, church bulletins, and a stack of letters from Clara's father that became increasingly infrequent after 1998.

Nothing mentioned Silas's disappearance. More strangely, nothing mentioned the still.

Clara carried the last drawer to the table and turned it upside down. A yellowed envelope slid free from beneath the wooden insert, but it contained only a photograph of four men standing beside a truck. Three were strangers; the fourth was Silas, younger than Clara remembered him, with his sleeves rolled above his elbows and one boot resting on the truck's running board.

On the photograph's reverse, Evelyn had written four names in blue ink: Silas Voss. Everett Dane. Hollis Bell. Warren Pike. May 1989.

Clara read them twice. Silas had disappeared in October 1989, which made the photograph close enough to matter, and she recognized Everett Dane's surname from the road sign she had passed near town. Dane Hollow Road began less than three miles from the farmhouse.

She photographed both sides with her phone and slipped the original into an archival sleeve. When she returned the drawer to the desk, something scraped beneath her shoe. Clara looked down and found a narrow crescent of polished brass protruding from the gap between two floorboards.

She crouched and worked it loose with the edge of a house key. It was not a coin, as she first thought, but a flattened brass token stamped with the number 17 on one side and a crude crescent moon on the other. A dark residue clung inside the stamped grooves, carrying the same sweet corn smell she had noticed when she entered.

Clara placed the token beside the photograph. Neither appeared on the estate inventory, but that meant little if Evelyn had hidden them deliberately. What interested Clara was the floorboard itself, because its nail heads were less oxidized than those surrounding it.

She fetched a screwdriver from the kitchen junk drawer and carefully lifted the board. Beneath it lay a shallow cavity lined with old newspaper, and inside the cavity rested a narrow accounting ledger wrapped in waxed cloth. Clara felt the quickening she always experienced when an investigation stopped being theoretical and put something tangible into her hands.

The ledger's cover bore no title. Its first dozen pages contained columns of dates, initials, gallon amounts, and figures that looked like payments, beginning in February 1987. Clara turned pages slowly until she reached the final months of 1989, where the handwriting changed from neat pencil to hurried blue ink.

Several entries included the number seventeen. September 3 listed 17 / E.D. / 12 / paid, while September 18 recorded 17 / H.B. / 8 / owing. On October 6, someone had written W.P. says close 17 before frost and underlined the sentence twice.

Clara sat back. The initials corresponded perfectly to Everett Dane, Hollis Bell, and Warren Pike, the three men standing with Silas in the photograph. That could be coincidence, but coincidence became less persuasive when someone hid the supporting record beneath a floor.

She turned to the final written page. Most of it had been torn away, leaving only a jagged strip near the binding, but three lines remained legible: Oct. 21 — S.V. took north road. Oct. 22 — lantern seen at creek. Oct. 23 — Evelyn knows.

Clara's mouth went dry. According to every official account she had found, Silas had last been seen on October 21, when he supposedly left the farmhouse alone sometime after supper. Evelyn had always insisted she knew nothing about where he was going.

A vehicle crunched over the gravel outside.

Clara covered the ledger with the inventory sheet before approaching the window. A dark green pickup had stopped beside her car, and a broad-shouldered man in a tan sheriff's department uniform stepped out. His hair was mostly gray, but Clara recognized the face before he reached the porch.

Deputy Calvin Rusk had been a young patrol officer when Silas vanished. He had also been one of the last people documented as having spoken to him.

Clara opened the door before he knocked. "Deputy Rusk."

"Sheriff now." His gaze moved past her into the house before returning to her face. "You must be Clara."

She hadn't told the sheriff's department she was coming.

Rusk seemed to read the question in her expression. "Small county. Your attorney called about the property transfer." He rested one hand against the porch post. "Thought I'd make sure you knew the barn isn't safe."

"Everyone's very concerned about my floorboards."

"Floorboards don't worry me." His smile arrived late and disappeared quickly. "Old structures do."

Clara studied him. "Did you know my grandfather well?"

Rusk looked toward the barn. For several seconds, the only sound was the ticking of cooling metal from his truck. "Well enough to know he had a talent for making trouble look profitable."

"Was he moonshining?"

That brought his eyes back to hers. "Who told you that?"

"No one." Clara kept her voice neutral. "It's an old Missouri farm, and my grandfather disappeared. I'm testing family folklore."

Rusk stepped closer to the threshold but did not cross it. "Then here's some free advice from somebody who investigated the real thing. Most stories about illegal stills get bigger every time they're repeated, and eventually somebody mistakes a good story for evidence."

"Was there a still on this property?"

"No."

His answer came too quickly.

Clara heard a faint metallic tap from the dining room. Rusk heard it too; his expression changed before he could conceal it. Another tap followed, then a third, evenly spaced.

"The house settling?" Clara asked.

"Probably."

The dining room was warmer when she returned to it. Rusk remained at the front door while Clara approached the table, where the inventory sheet still covered the ledger. Nothing appeared disturbed except the brass token.

It was no longer beside the photograph.

Clara found it on the floor beneath the window, standing impossibly upright between two boards. The crescent-moon side faced her, and a thin line of fresh moisture had appeared across the wood, as though a wet finger had been dragged from the token toward the western wall.

Rusk entered without being invited. When he saw the token, all color left his face.

"You've seen this before," Clara said.

He didn't answer. His attention had fixed on the number seventeen, and Clara watched recognition harden into something closer to fear.

"Where did you get it?"

"Under the floor."

Rusk bent as if to pick it up, then stopped his hand several inches above it. "You need to put that back."

"Why?"

"Because Silas wasn't the first Voss to disappear over Number Seventeen."

Clara felt the investigation shift beneath her. She had assumed seventeen identified a still, a batch, perhaps a customer route, but Rusk was speaking about it as though the number had existed before Silas's operation.

Behind them, something struck the western wall from inside it.

Clara turned toward the sound. A second blow shook dust from the baseboard, followed by a slow scraping that traveled downward until it reached floor level. Then the room became silent.

Rusk backed toward the door. "Don't open that wall."

Clara looked at him. "What's behind it?"

His face told her he knew.

Rusk left without answering, and Clara waited until his truck disappeared beyond the walnut trees before returning to the ledger. She removed the inventory sheet and opened it to the October entries again, searching for anything she had overlooked. Near the binding of the torn final page, almost hidden beneath the ragged paper fibers, someone had written one additional line vertically in pencil.

She tilted the book toward the window and read the words.

If the lantern comes back, Number Seventeen has been opened.

Chapter 1 complete.