My neighbor’s son came to my window at midnight and said, “You need to see my dad’s shed.”

A Midnight Visitor and the Secret in the Backyard

My neighbor’s son came to my window at midnight and said, “I need you to see what’s in my dad’s shed.”

So I followed him. The tapping on my bedroom window jolted me out of sleep so suddenly I knocked my phone off the nightstand reaching for it.

When I pulled back the curtain, Dylan Reeves was crouched on the roof overhang outside my second-floor window. His face was pressed against the glass, eyes wild with something that looked like terror.

He was twelve years old, lived three houses down, and had never spoken more than five words to me in the two years his family had been in the neighborhood. Now he was mouthing words I couldn’t hear through the glass, his breath fogging the pane.

I opened the window, and cold November air rushed in along with his whispered voice. “Ethan, please, I need you to come with me right now.” “I need someone to see what’s in my dad’s shed before I lose my nerve.”

His hands were shaking so badly he had to grip the window frame to steady himself. “There’s something really wrong, and I don’t know what to do, and you’re the only person I could think of who might believe me.”

I should have asked more questions, should have woken up my parents, or called the police, or done literally anything other than what I did. But something in Dylan’s voice—that edge of desperation mixed with determination—made me grab my jacket and climb out onto the roof with him.

We scaled down using the trellis my mom had been asking my dad to reinforce for months. I was grateful for its shakiness because it meant I had something to focus on besides the pounding of my heart.

Dylan moved through the darkness between houses with the practiced ease of someone who’d done this before, keeping to shadows and avoiding street lights. November in Oregon meant everything was wet and cold, the kind of damp that seeps into your bones, and I could see my breath in small clouds as we moved.

When we reached his backyard, Dylan stopped at the fence line and turned to me with an expression I’d never seen on a kid’s face before: pure dread mixed with resolve. Dylan whispered, his voice barely audible over the sound of wind in the trees, “My dad keeps the shed locked all the time.”

“He’s the only one with a key, and he told me and my mom that it’s just where he keeps lawn equipment and tools and we’re not allowed in there because everything’s organized and he doesn’t want us messing it up.”

“But tonight I couldn’t sleep, and I heard noises coming from the backyard—not animal noises, human noises, someone crying or moaning or something.”

“And I looked out my window and I saw my dad going into the shed at midnight, which made no sense because why would you need to check on lawn equipment in the middle of the night?”

“So I snuck downstairs and I found where he hides the spare key taped under the workbench in the garage, and I went to look and I saw something that I can’t unsee, and I need another person to confirm I’m not crazy before I figure out what to do about it.”

We crossed his backyard, and I could see the shed at the far end, maybe twenty feet from the house. It was larger than a normal storage shed, more like a small workshop with windows that had been covered from the inside with what looked like blackout curtains.

There was a padlock on the door, heavy duty, the kind you’d use to secure something valuable. Dylan pulled a key from his pocket, and his hands shook so badly it took him three tries to get it in the lock.

The click when it opened sounded impossibly loud in the quiet night. He pushed the door open, and the smell hit me first: sweat and fear and something chemical, maybe cleaning products, all mixed together in a way that made my stomach turn.

Dylan found a flashlight hanging by the door and clicked it on. The beam of light swept across the interior, and I saw what had brought him to my window.

In the back corner, chained to a support beam, was a woman, maybe twenty years old, gagged and bound. Her eyes were huge with terror when the light hit her face.

Every instinct screamed at me to run, to get help, to do anything other than stand there frozen. But Dylan was already moving forward, his face set in grim determination. He said quietly, gesturing to a card table set up against the opposite wall, “There’s more.”

I forced my legs to move and followed him, keeping the flashlight trained on the woman who was making desperate sounds behind her gag. On the table were file folders, dozens of them, each one labeled with a woman’s name and containing photographs.

I opened the top folder with shaking hands and found surveillance photos of a young woman going about her daily life: walking to her car, entering her apartment building, shopping at a grocery store. There were notes in handwriting I didn’t recognize detailing her schedule, her habits, her routine.

The next folder contained similar content for a different woman, and the next, and the next. I counted fifteen folders total, each one a detailed dossier on a different target.

Dylan whispered, his voice hollow, “My dad’s a truck driver.”

“He’s gone for days at a time, sometimes a whole week, driving routes up and down the West Coast.”

“I never thought anything of it because that’s just what he does for work, but now I’m thinking about all those trips and all these folders and I’m realizing he wasn’t just driving trucks.”

He picked up a notebook that was sitting next to the folders and handed it to me. Inside were dates and locations and dollar amounts, entries going back at least three years.

Next to each entry was a notation, either “delivered,” “pending,” or “failed.” The handwriting matched the notes in the surveillance folders.

I felt bile rising in my throat as I understood what I was looking at; this wasn’t just one kidnapping, this was a business. Dylan’s father was trafficking women, and this woman chained in his shed was either his next victim or one he hadn’t managed to deliver yet.

The woman made a desperate sound behind her gag, and Dylan turned to her, his young face twisted with anguish. He said, his voice cracking, “I’m going to get you out of here.” “I’m so sorry this happened, and I’m going to fix it.”