The Unwitnessed: The Absent Line

By W. M. Chase

In 1590, John White returned to Roanoke Island after three lost years to find the colony he had founded, and the family he loved, gone. No bodies. No battle. Only a single word carved into a post: CROATOAN.
Dr. Emory Voss has learned to live with what history cannot explain. His night terrors have followed him since childhood, growing sharper and more specific with every case he takes, and he has always assumed the fault was something private, something wrong with him alone. He has never once let himself consider that it might be something passed down.

When an excavation team invites him to consult on new evidence recovered from Hatteras Island, an old favor to his sister, a family genealogy project taken on almost as a joke, comes back with a discovery he cannot rationalize away: a name on the Roanoke colonists' own roster, four centuries old, that matches his.

For the first time, the mystery is not something Emory is investigating from the outside. It is something running in his blood.
Now he has to choose between the answer the archaeology is building, hopeful, quiet, a story of survival and belonging, and the colder truth his own nightmares keep insisting on.

The second case in the Unwitnessed series; a novella of inheritance, silence, and the names history never finished carving.

He came to study the past. He found himself in it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8ZDJYMK
• ISBN13: 9798187432493
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"