Clare Ren hadn’t been back to Delpine, Vermont, in nearly seven years, but the town held onto its memories like the stubborn chill of an early spring. The same single blinking traffic light, the same peeling paint on the clapboard houses, the same quiet resignation.
In 2007, a school bus carrying 14 of her classmates had driven away from this town on a routine field trip and never returned. No crash, no wreckage, no bodies. Just an 18-year void of silence. That silence shattered the day Clare walked into a new thrift store with a crooked sign that read “Second Chances.”
There, in a dusty jewelry case, nestled between tangled chains and cracked rings, was a silver charm bracelet. It was small, delicate, with three charms: a music note, a tiny dog, and the letter J. Clare’s breath caught in her throat. It belonged to her best friend, Janie Delcore. Janie, who always smelled of cinnamon gum and never, ever took that bracelet off. Janie, who was on Bus 12.
Clare had been spared by a lucky bout of strep throat. But holding this impossible object—proof that something of Janie’s had made its way back to this town decades later—ignited a fire within her. The past wasn’t just gone. It had been deliberately and quietly buried, and Clare was about to start digging.
The next morning, Clare stood before Delpine Middle School, a building haunted by the ghosts of children who never grew up. Inside, she lied to the receptionist, claiming a personal writing project to gain access to old records. The woman’s professional smile tightened at the mention of 2007. “We don’t really keep that stuff anymore,” she said, citing a mysterious “audit” that cleared out old files. But when Clare produced the bracelet, the woman’s composure cracked. She remembered Janie wearing it every day.
She granted Clare a few minutes in a back storage cabinet. There, in a 2007 student directory, Clare found it: a page for the field trip on October 12th. The bus number was 12. The teacher was Mr. Alan Baird. And the list of students was a solid block of black ink. Every single name had been redacted.
Someone had gone through this file by hand and erased them. A quick search for Alan Baird revealed nothing. No teaching credentials, no social media, no records of him existing in Vermont after 2007. It was as if the teacher, like his students, had simply vanished.
Clare’s next step was to retrace their path. An old flyer from the library’s archives listed the route: Route 6A to Deer Path Trail, leading to Bear Hollow Preserve. The trail was now a barely-visible gravel ribbon disappearing into the woods.
With no cell signal, Clare followed it on foot. She found a clearing with a cracked concrete slab half-sunk into the earth. Carved into its base was a code: BHP27. As she photographed the eerie scene, a man emerged from the trees, a shovel in his hand.
He introduced himself as Tom Granger, a volunteer on the search team back in 2007. His story confirmed Clare’s deepest fears: the official search was a sham. “They told us to stop,” he said, his voice heavy with a guilt he’d carried for 18 years. “After the third day, the state pulled resources.”
He confessed that they had found a single set of bus tracks leading off the main path, but the next morning, the tracks were gone—“washed out like someone hosed them down.” They were ordered not to mention it.
The reason, he explained, was the hollow itself. “Bear Hollow wasn’t just a preserve,” Tom said grimly. “It was a decommissioned testing site. Chemical, psychological, maybe both.” The code Clare found, BHP27, stood for Bear Hollow Project, Building 27.
The conspiracy deepened at the town library. The town council minutes from the week of the disappearance in October 2007 were missing, pages physically torn from the binder. But records from the month before revealed something explosive: the council had approved a “restricted lease” for parcel BHP27 to an unnamed “third party research” group, with no public access permitted until November 1st. The field trip on October 12th never should have happened.
As Clare dug deeper, the town’s silence began to feel menacing. An elderly man warned her to stop “digging up the old ghosts.” A silver pickup truck appeared in her rearview mirror too many times to be a coincidence. Then came the text from an unknown number: “You’re asking dangerous questions. Let it go.”
Undeterred, Clare uncovered a personnel file from her father’s time as a teacher. It listed Alan Baird as an “interim science teacher,” terminated in October 2007. His file was stamped: “File Closed. Do Not Pursue.” A search for his name led to a single, cached forum post from 2008. A user claimed to have seen a man matching Baird’s photo near Bear Hollow. When asked if he needed help, the man had simply said, “They’re not gone. They’re underneath.”
The final piece of the puzzle came from a call to the Vermont Department of Transportation. An archivist named Drew Langley confirmed Bus 12 was equipped with a GPS transponder. “That’s the weird part,” he told her. “The GPS unit transmitted normally until 8:14 a.m., about 20 minutes before it should have reached Bear Hollow. Then it stopped. Like someone cut the power.” The last ping came from just past the Deer Path Trail fork.
But there was more. “There was a second signal,” Langley said, his voice low. “Another unit briefly picked up something at 3:17 a.m.”
Clare stood in her father’s quiet kitchen, the bracelet on the table beside a growing pile of evidence. The bus hadn’t simply crashed. It had been led to a secret testing site, its signal deliberately cut. A teacher and 14 children were erased, not just from the world, but from history itself.
And now, 18 years later, a second, mysterious signal from the dead of night promised a truth more terrifying than she could ever have imagined. The town of Delpine hadn’t lost a bus; it had sacrificed one. And Clare was determined to find out why.
