Jeremy looked at her.

“It’s all right, Jeremy,” she said. “I’m a nurse.”

He still had Tom’s wrist trapped like a vise.

“You,” he said to her, stern as a four-star general. “Not him.”

She nodded. Jeremy released Tom’s wrist.

“Run for help,” she told Tom. “Right now. Go!”

He didn’t argue. He seemed relieved to get away from this moment that asked more of him than he had to give.

In her backpack, Maggie kept a small first aid kit, a flashlight, and her stethoscope. She checked Ralph’s pupils, breathing, heart rate, and temperature. All good. All strong.

“Help me roll him,” she said. They rolled Ralph onto his side so she could check his back for injuries. Damp leaves stuck to his skin. She peeled them off one by one, revealing long, narrow scars. Deep animal scratches? A run-in with barbed wire?

She touched the scars. They were older wounds, long healed. Gently, she laid him onto his back again.

“Where did you go?” she asked Jeremy.

He looked at the boy on the ground, then at her, and his one-word answer was frightening enough that she asked him nothing more.

“Far.”

Then Jeremy, who had been so eerily calm until that moment, wept. Relief? Happiness? No. He and Ralph had just been found. Why did he cry like something unbearably precious had been lost?

Then the EMTs arrived and pushed Maggie out of the story.

She watched from a distance as the first responders did their work. Jeremy, who had stopped crying by then, refused a stretcher, so he walked out of the forest at Ralph’s side. Maggie and Tom followed them, like the final members of a religious procession.

By the time they reached the parking lot, the cavalry had arrived. A dozen cop cars. A dozen fire trucks. Four ambulances for two boys. Everyone wanted to see this show.

Maggie watched silently, Tom at her side, as EMTs loaded Ralph Howell into the ambulance, Jeremy climbing in behind him.

Tom said, “He almost snapped my wrist. How does a kid lost in the woods for six months get that strong?” He rubbed his wrist and eyed Jeremy, who should have been a skeleton, but instead, he and Ralph looked muscular and well fed, not the boys in their missing photos but young men now.

Maggie didn’t answer. She was still reeling, trying to make sense of her last moments in the woods alone with the boys. Before the EMTs and forest rangers arrived, Maggie sat and listened as Jeremy spoke under his breath to Ralph in a language she had never heard before and never would again. His words were like the sound of dry leaves rustling and skittering on the breeze through an autumn wood. And whatever he said, she knew that if she understood the words, she would understand one of the deep secrets of the world, a secret the world needed to keep.

When he stopped speaking, a red bird landed on a branch above their heads. Cardinal red but not a cardinal. A red crow, though there was no such thing as red crows, even in Red Crow.

She looked at Jeremy. He raised his finger to his lips.

Surely she’d imagined it. She’d been swept up in the moment, half-crazed with adrenaline. No red crows. No magic words. A good story, yes, but not a fairy tale. They didn’t have fairy tales in West Virginia. They were lucky to have a Target.

Then again, why not here? Why did France and Germany and all those places get to have fairy tales but not West Virginia? Wild West Virginia. Wonderful West Virginia. Beautiful and dangerous and dark and strange West Virginia. Why didn’t they get to have magic here, where the hills rolled like ocean waves and the morning mist was as thick as the silence of a family keeping secrets? If fairies were in the world, they couldn’t find a better place than the Crow to tell their tales…

Maggie never saw the boys again after that day. It wasn’t her story, and neither is this one, but she never forgot the moment when the universe allowed her to brush her fingertips along the spider-lace edges of a true-blue fairy tale.

Boys vanishing into the woods, then magically reappearing after everyone thought they were dead…if that’s not a fairy-tale ending, what is?

It actually wasn’t a fairy-tale ending.

It was, in fact, only the beginning.

Storyteller CornerA Recipe for a Fairy Tale

Hello. This is your Storyteller. You may already be wondering why I’m intruding onto the story like this, which is a fair question. But this is a fairy tale and fairy tales play by their own rules. I wanted you to be aware of these rules so we could all, pun intended, be on the same page. First, what is a fairy tale? A wise and kind teacher I once knew worked up her own recipe. It went something like this…

Mrs. Adler’s Recipe for a Fairy Tale

For any fairy tale worth its salt, you will need most, if not all, of the following ingredients…

One princess in some sort of trouble and/or distress.

One magician. If a magician is unavailable, you may substitute a wizard and/or wise woman. Basically, anyone with magic powers who knows more than they’re willing to tell.

One hero, the more unlikely, the better.

One to three villains worth fighting (and don’t skimp on the evil deeds).

A member of a royal family disguised as a nobody.

A pinch of unusual animals.

Place all ingredients into a world that is not our own, mix well, and let it rise.

You’ll know you’ve created a good fairy tale if your story ends happily ever after for the heroes and badly for the villains.

You may have noticed “The Storyteller” isn’t listed in the recipe, but I am there, I promise you. We’ll play Rumpelstiltskin’s game, and I’ll let you guess my name.

Oh, for this story, you should also know about the rule of three. In fairy tales, things are always coming in threes—three bears, three wishes, three clicks of your heels to get back home.

And fairy tales also begin with “Once upon a time…” and end with “They all lived happily ever after.”

And of course, fairy tales are fiction. Always.

Well, except for this one.

Chapter One

Our Story Now Begins

The drive from Emilie Wendell’s house in Milton, Ohio, to Bernheim Forest outside Louisville took a good two and a half hours. She’d wanted to make it in two hours and fifteen minutes, but accident traffic caused a bottleneck on I-65 south. She prayed the taping would be delayed. These things never started on time, right?

For weeks, she’d been internet-stalking Jeremy Cox, hoping and praying he’d somehow end up near her house. Then finally, that morning, she’d woken up to a Google alert in her email. A documentary TV show called Whereabouts Unknown would be doing a taping at Bernheim that day—special guest, the famed missing persons investigator Jeremy Cox. She’d thrown on yesterday’s clothes—red leggings, a T-shirt, and a hoodie—stuffed her feet into her boots, and ran out of the house.