Ashes in the Wind

By Shafi ulhaq

They said it was faulty wiring. That’s what the fire report concluded. An accidental blaze. The neighbors echoed the same thing. “A tragedy,” they called it. “A shame,” “a loss.”

But I knew it wasn’t an accident.

My grandmother’s house was old but not careless. It creaked, it sighed, but it stood proudly at the edge of the small town like a monument to memory. Her home wasn’t just bricks and furniture. It was a library of whispers, a museum of tucked-away grief and half-told truths.

Three days before the fire, a letter arrived. No return address. No stamp. Just my name, in her unmistakable handwriting.

Inside:

“Don’t trust what they say. When the house is gone, you’ll know everything you need to.”

She’d been dead for six months.

I didn’t tell anyone about the letter. I folded it into my wallet and carried it to the blackened ruins the morning after the fire.

The air still smelled like death and ash. Most of the house had collapsed. The porch was just nails and splinters. Her beloved rocking chair was nothing but charred legs. But amidst the wreckage, in the bedroom corner where her cedar dresser once stood, something glittered.

A rusted iron box. Untouched by soot or flame.

I knelt beside it, hands trembling. The lock gave way easily, as if it had been waiting. Inside: a faded newspaper clipping, a photograph burned at the edges, and a page torn from an old leather journal.

The article was from 1973 — about a missing teenage girl, just seventeen. Name: Alice Fairburn. Last seen outside my grandmother’s house. No leads. No suspects. Disappeared into thin air.

The photograph was worse.

It showed a man in a dark suit. Handsome. Tall. Standing beside my grandmother. Smiling, but not really. Eyes too wide. A smile that didn’t reach anything but his teeth. Someone had scratched his name off the back in red pen.

The journal entry was short. Scrawled hastily in a slanted hand:

“I never meant to lie. But he came back that night. Looking for her. I couldn’t let him take her again. I buried what I had to. Under the floorboards. He never came again.”

My breath caught. I looked around the ruins, the scorched timber and skeletal remains of walls. The floorboards were gone, swallowed in the blaze. But the space beneath them—maybe not.

I returned later that night with gloves, a flashlight, and a shovel. I dug for hours. Splinters in my palms, my arms aching. The sky turned violet, then ink-black. Just when I thought it was hopeless, my shovel hit metal.

A small trunk, sealed shut. I forced it open.

Inside: a locket, a bloodstained ribbon, and a small notebook. Pages brittle with time. Written in a careful, girlish script:

“He said he’d take me to a better place. That I was special. But he locked the door. Said no one would miss me. I screamed. She heard. She saved me.”

Alice Fairburn.

The rest of the notebook was filled with her writing — journal entries, desperate prayers, poems. Her story had been silenced. But my grandmother had kept it safe. Even if it meant keeping secrets buried beneath her bedroom floor for fifty years.

The next morning, I handed the notebook to the police.

A detective called a week later. They’d reopened the case. DNA confirmed the ribbon and the locket belonged to Alice. She was declared legally alive, her case transformed from a missing person to an unsolved abduction.

I didn’t tell them about the letter.

Or the photograph.

Or the fact that, in the journal, Alice mentioned the man’s name once — the same last name as a well-known judge in our town. Still on the bench. Still making decisions.

I kept that page.

Some things aren’t meant to burn.