December arrived and with it the particular silence of a town waiting for something.
Hollow Creek felt it. Not everybody knew what they were waiting for, but the kind of people who paid attention -- the ones who had lived there long enough to know when the air changed -- felt it. The quiet on Route 9. The way the Road Kings had pulled back from their usual haunts. The fact that Dutch had not been seen at any of his regular spots in two weeks.
Ellie felt it too. Not because anyone told her -- Rafe was careful about what he shared, not to protect her from worry but because some things belonged only to the club -- but because she had been paying attention to this world for months and she had learned to read it the way she read a kitchen: by what was missing, by what was too still, by the ab
