A hundred-year storm tears open the hill behind the school - and gives back the children the town was told had run away.For forty years, the story was simple. Difficult kids ran off. County wards, the placed, the unwanted - the children nobody would chase - they left the school's annex one winter or another, a form got filed, a case got closed, and the town went on being proud of its good school. That's what a runaway is: a child who chose to go, a child whose absence is their own doing, a child you don't have to look for.Then the storm comes, and the soaked hillside behind the old school lets go in the dark, and when the rain clears, Sheriff Cole Taggart is standing in the mud looking at what forty years of fill had covered. Bones. Small ones. More than one. Children, buried in courses over two decades, under the athletic field where the town's kids have played ball ever since.They didn't run. Not one of them.Greta Sikes has been saying so for forty-five years. She was a child in that annex when her bunkmate "ran away" one winter, and she knew - she always knew - because she was there, and because a thirteen-year-old doesn't run into a January night and leave her coat on the hook. For forty-five years she was the disturbed, unreliable ward with a grievance, and nobody believed her. Now the ground has opened, and the ground doesn't have a grievance.As Cole and June Taggart work the hill - with the survivor who never stopped remembering, and a groundskeeper who covered what he was told not to dig, and a podcaster named Abby Stratton asking what a town really means when it calls a child a runaway - they uncover a school that disposed of the children it was supposed to protect, and a town that believed they ran because believing it kept the school good and kept the shame on the children. The revered principal whose name is on the gym architected it. The old coach who ran the annex is still alive, still sharp, and - for once - still reachable. And the superintendent running the school today is using the disaster to bury it all again.And one of the fourteen was a local boy. Edie Kessler spent forty years believing her difficult son ran away because she wasn't enough to keep him. She's about to learn he never left her at all.The Runaways is the fourteenth book in The Raven Creek Files, a series of small-town crime thrillers about the crimes a community buries to keep its idea of itself - and the people brave enough to dig them up. A story about the word a town uses for the children it decides not to look for.Each book stands alone - start anywhere.
