And worse, what was a school bus driver doing inside an old house in the middle of his route?

I didn’t sleep that night. I stared at the ceiling fan spinning in the dark, my mind running through every terrifying scenario.

At 8:00 AM the next morning, I called the school district’s transportation office.

“Mr. Doyle has a spotless record,” the secretary, Mrs. Gable, told me. She sounded annoyed, like I was just another overprotective mother looking for a fight. “He has driven Route 12 for nearly two decades. Our GPS tracking system shows the bus stays on the state highway the entire time.”

“My daughter is not making this up,” I said, my voice rising. “She described a gray house in the woods past the dairy farm. That is not on the official map.”

“Ma’am, the GPS doesn’t lie. I’m sure the bus was just delayed by farm equipment. Good day.”

She hung up on me.

I sat at my kitchen table, staring at my cold coffee. I knew Lily. She didn’t have the imagination to make up a detail like a gray house and a turned-off engine.

So, at 2:30 PM, I got into my old Chevy Malibu. I parked behind the rusted metal structure of the abandoned feed mill on Highway 4. It was a perfect vantage point. At 2:55 PM, the yellow bus rumbled past, its black tailpipe puffing a small cloud of blue smoke.

I let two cars get between us, and then I pulled out.

We drove past the county line. Past the fields of young corn. At the 4-mile mark, right where Elm Creek runs under the old stone bridge, the bus’s yellow blinker started flashing.

There was no stop scheduled here. The nearest kid lived 2 miles further up.

My heart hammered against my ribs as the bus made a sharp right turn onto Miller’s Lane. It was a narrow, unpaved logging path, almost completely hidden by overgrown chicory and wild mustard. I didn’t want Mr. Doyle to see my car, so I pulled off onto a dirt shoulder behind some thick cedar trees.

I watched through my dusty windshield.

The bus bounced down the rutted lane for about a quarter of a mile before stopping in front of a small, weather-beaten gray ranch house. The yard was completely overgrown with crabgrass, and an old rusted sedan sat on flat tires near a collapsed wooden shed.

Mr. Doyle pulled the handbrake. Even from my distance, I heard the loud hiss of the air brakes.

Then, he got out of the bus. He was carrying his blue metal thermos. He walked up the wooden steps of the gray house, unlocked the front door with a key from his pocket, and vanished inside.

He didn’t look back at the bus once.

I pulled out my phone and started recording. My hand was shaking so badly I had to rest it on the steering wheel to keep the shot steady.

3 minutes passed.

5 minutes.

Through the glass of the bus windows, I could see the kids. One of them, a little boy in a red jacket, was standing up in his seat, leaning against the glass. The keys were in the ignition. The bus was parked on a slight incline. My stomach felt completely liquid.