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The theory fit with something that had always worried the family: Julián was an experienced hiker. It didn’t make sense for him to disappear on a moderately difficult trail. But if for some reason he’d chosen an alternative route, perhaps to shelter from a sudden storm, it would have been plausible for him to have tried to orient himself using the trail markers.
Twenty feet away, they found the second clue: a small metal container with an expiration date two years after his disappearance. This puzzled them. It seemed to indicate that someone, not necessarily Julián, had brought food there after 2020.
“Is it possible someone used this crack as a hiding place?” asked one of the technicians.
“Or that someone found Julián and Clara,” replied Morel. “And didn’t report it.”
From that point, the descent became more difficult. The crack widened on one side, forming an irregular cavity. Shining a flashlight around the area, they saw what appeared to be a small makeshift camp: the remains of an electric blanket, an empty can, a short rope, and, at the bottom, a partially wet notebook.
Morel carefully opened it. Many pages were illegible, but a few words were discernible: “not coming up,” “wait,” “injured,” “we hear voices.” There were no names, but the handwriting appeared to be Julián’s.
The most disturbing sentence appeared on a central page:
“I can’t move. She must stay…”
The sentence ended there, truncated, as if Julián had abruptly stopped writing.
“Something serious happened here,” Morel said. “Julian was injured, but Clara is still alive.”
The most likely hypothesis was that they had been trapped after a partial fall. But one crucial piece of information was missing: none of the bodies were present. And given the depth of the cave, it was unlikely they had managed to escape on their own without leaving a trace.
While exploring the cave, one of the rescuers found markings on the wall: three vertical lines repeated several times, like a rudimentary code, perhaps used to count the days.
“There are at least thirty marks,” he reported.
Thirty days. A month trapped.
Media pressure increased, and the police expanded the search area. For the first time, a previously unthinkable hypothesis emerged: the involvement of another person.
And this theory was strengthened when, at the end of the day, a rescuer found a modern and relatively new rope, which belonged neither to Julián, nor to Clara, nor to the teams working in the area.
“Someone has been here,” said Morel, looking at the mountain as if it might answer him.
But the mountain remained silent.
What they found the next day, however, would speak volumes for her.
The third day of searching proved crucial. The exploration extended to the upper part of the fissure, where the rock formed a sort of vertical corridor dotted with ledges and small platforms. Experts said a person could have barely crossed it… but not a nine-year-old girl alone.
Twenty meters from the cave, they found traces of recent human activity: faint footprints, as if someone had climbed on tiptoe. The strange thing was that they seemed too recent to correspond to the time of the disappearance.
The turning point came when one of the rescuers found a star-shaped metal pendant among the scattered stones. The family immediately confirmed that it belonged to Clara. It was her favorite amulet, the one she had worn since she was five.
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