Amaia Salazar’s search for the house described by Elena Ochoa brings her to Argi Beltz, a secluded property whose present-day appearance conceals a history of violence, communal life, and a child’s death. The discovery turns an uncertain resemblance into an investigative lead: the house’s owners knew Doctor Berasategui, and their daughter Ainara died in infancy.

Locating the House and Recovering Its History

After searching roads and tracks through the morning, Amaia spots a broad, unusually level meadow around a modern house. An old, overgrown wall hides much of the entrance; a green iron mailbox bears the name Martínez Bayón, and a security camera watches the gate beneath a sign identifying the property as Argi Beltz. Elena’s description of a similar meadow makes the place seem promising, but the new house does not match the old one she had in mind. Amaia considers whether the original building might have been rebuilt or the ground reshaped, and continues along the road rather than treating the first resemblance as proof.

A woman at the neighboring property, Lau Haizeta, supplies the confirmation Amaia needs. She produces an old photograph kept in a tin cocoa box: taken roughly fifty years earlier, it shows the farmhouse behind a man standing on a roof beside a large chimney. The old building stands in a flat meadow matching Elena’s description. Although the house has since been extensively altered, the neighbor is certain it is the same one.

The woman’s account gives the house a longer and darker past. According to stories passed down by her grandmother, the original owners were two brothers and their sister. After their mother died, their father became mentally ill and was chained to a bed in the attic. The brothers mistreated their sister and prevented her from marrying, until she became involved with a horse trader. When he came to take her away, one brother showed him her dismembered body in a barrel. A fight followed; one brother died from a knife wound, the other hanged himself, and the father’s mummified corpse was found upstairs. The farmhouse was shut up for more than seventy years, while local people said the family’s spirits remained trapped inside.

In the 1970s, the abandoned house became a gathering place for a loosely organized community. The neighbor recalls as many as twenty young men and women living there, with visitors coming and going, and describes cultural and spiritual meetings. Their way of life seemed disorderly to her: the garden was neglected, animals roamed freely, and the property was filthy. She declined invitations to join them, but her testimony establishes that the house Elena remembered had later served as a communal home before its present owners arrived.

The neighbor also remembers the couple’s young daughter, who died at about a year old. She says the child appeared neglected: once, after wandering across the field, the little girl was dirty, in a soiled diaper, and desperately hungry. The neighbor and her daughter washed her and fed her softened anise pastry. Later, the neighbor saw her outside the house, poorly clothed and alone among the animals. When she went to offer the child some used clothes, the father told her that the girl had died. The neighbor says the child had not been baptized and had no funeral; decades later, she still grieved that she had never learned the girl’s name.

When Amaia returns to Argi Beltz, a BMW enters through the concealed approach. She follows it to the gate and identifies herself, with one hand instinctively near her Glock. The man and woman inside are visibly surprised when she tells them that their friend Doctor Berasategui is dead. Their exchanged glance suggests that they are deciding whether to acknowledge knowing him; the man then accepts the connection and asks whether Berasategui died in an accident. Amaia conceals that the cause has not been established and questions them about their relationship with him.

The conversation sharpens the connection between the house’s past and the investigation. Amaia raises the couple’s daughter’s death while asking about infant deaths in the valley. The woman reacts with alarm, and the man answers that Ainara died of a cerebral stroke when she was fourteen months old. The name and age give the previously unnamed child in the neighbor’s account a specific identity. The encounter does not by itself establish the cause of Ainara’s death, but it places her story, the old communal house, and Berasategui within the same line of inquiry.

The Question of Ainara’s Death

Amaia’s question to the couple is framed as part of a broader inquiry: the police are compiling statistics on infant deaths in the valley and checking whether deaths attributed to sudden infant death syndrome fit that pattern. She asks specifically whether their daughter’s death might have been sudden infant death. The wife reacts with alarm, reaching toward her husband; he replies tersely that Ainara died of a cerebral stroke at fourteen months. The exchange gives Amaia a definite age and an asserted cause of death, but it does not independently verify that explanation.

The two accounts now stand beside one another without resolving into proof. The neighbor remembers a hungry, poorly cared-for child and says the father later announced her death; the parents provide a name and a medical explanation. Their answer narrows the inquiry, while their alarm and guarded manner make the exchange consequential without establishing wrongdoing. In this scene, Argi Beltz becomes more than a recovered location or a house with a disturbing past: it is a place where testimony about an unnamed child meets a family’s account of her death, and where Amaia must distinguish an investigative lead from a conclusion.

Fear, Recognition, and the Limits of a Clue

Before she found the meadow, the search had already unsettled Amaia. A shadow she mistook for an invisible guardian retreated into the darkness when she drew her weapon; she ran to her car, drove until she reached another cluster of farmhouses, and stopped with her hands still trembling. She tried to explain the disturbance away as a wild boar and a shepherd calling his dog, but her reflection seemed to reject the reassurance. That moment of fear did not identify the house or prove anything about it. It does, however, frame the search as an encounter with uncertainty: Amaia has to keep moving through a landscape where apprehension can suggest danger without serving as evidence.

At the concealed gate, the name Argi Beltz gives Elena Ochoa’s remembered description a sharper, but still provisional, force. Amaia understands the name as black light and recalls that Elena had described a black house. Yet the modern property does not look like the place in Elena’s account, and the echo of a name cannot settle whether the building is the same one. Amaia rings repeatedly, hears what may be a small click from the intercom, and leaves feeling watched and irritated rather than reassured. The house thus enters the investigation twice over: first as a possible match assembled from a name and a landscape, then as a question that demands corroboration. The photograph from the neighboring farmhouse supplies that confirmation; the older building visible in it occupies the meadow Elena described.

From a Hidden Property to the Wider Case

The eventual significance of Amaia’s visit to Argi Beltz lies not in the house alone, but in how its history and the account of Ainara’s death enlarge an inquiry already shaped by Elena Ochoa’s warning. The evidence at the property remains uneven: an old photograph confirms the farmhouse’s location, a neighbor recalls the child’s neglect and death, and Ainara’s parents give a different, specific account of her final illness. Those details create a lead, not a verdict. The distinction matters because the neighbor’s painful memories, the parents’ guarded response, and the house’s violent reputation carry very different evidentiary weight.

The investigation’s later outcome shows how consequential Elena’s warning proved. After returning home, Amaia calls Elena’s daughter to tell her that Elena had not taken her own life; the letter she left had helped bring down members of a dangerous sect of child killers, a case then dominating the news. The novel does not make the Argi Beltz encounter, by itself, the cause of that dismantling. Instead, the visit gives the larger investigation a concrete setting where a vanished communal past, an infant’s death, and a present-day connection to Doctor Berasategui can be examined together. A secluded house first recognized through a meadow and an old photograph thus becomes one point in a case whose consequences reach far beyond its walls.

The Neighbor as a Witness

Before confronting the owners, Amaia tested what the neighbor could recognize. Shown photographs of Doctor Berasategui’s car and Rosario, the woman identified the car, which she had seen on the road to Argi Beltz a couple of times; its doctor’s sticker, she noted, made it conspicuous. She had never seen Rosario. The distinction gives Amaia a limited but concrete connection between Berasategui and the property while setting a boundary around the neighbor’s knowledge: she can place his vehicle there, but cannot place Rosario there or confirm who traveled in it.

The Present Occupants and the House’s Successive Lives

The neighbor placed the couple’s arrival around the period when the communal group was living at Argi Beltz, but she did not establish that they belonged to it. She was careful about what she knew: she would not call them husband and wife, and took their absence from church as a sign that they were not Christian. Her account therefore traces successive lives at the farmhouse without proving a continuous association between its occupants.

The neighbor’s attempt to help the couple’s daughter brought her to the threshold of the house. After gathering used clothes from her own children, she found a crowd inside celebrating; the father did not invite her in, and she had no wish to enter. Instead, he told her that the child had died. The scene sharpens the limits of her testimony: she had witnessed the girl’s neglect and later learned of her death from her father, but did not see what happened inside the house. Her recollection of the child’s unbaptized status and lack of a funeral gives the loss a further local and religious dimension, without settling its cause.

Protection, Reputation, and Evidence

The neighbor’s certainty about Argi Beltz was not only a judgment on its occupants. She said that nothing good had ever come from the house, yet insisted she was not afraid: this was her land, and she was protected there. As she spoke, Amaia thought of the great crosses standing guard at the entrance. The contrast makes the landscape part of the testimony without turning local belief into proof. The crosses register a felt boundary around the property; the neighbor’s stories of trapped spirits and successive unsettling residents explain its reputation, but Amaia still has to test what can be established.

That distinction shapes the discovery. A remembered meadow and the name Argi Beltz first offer suggestive correspondences; the old photograph confirms the house’s identity, while the neighbor’s recollections and the owners’ guarded answers supply separate, uneven strands of testimony. The site gathers legend, visible traces, and personal memory in one place, but none can simply stand in for another. Its significance in the investigation lies precisely in that tension: the house feels burdened by its past, yet the case must proceed through what witnesses saw, what they were told, and what Amaia can corroborate.

Later Confirmation and the Weight of Maternal Testimony

The uncertainty surrounding Ainara’s death belongs to a wider pattern in which a mother’s account can be dismissed as grief or confusion before the evidence is understood. Later, Yolanda Berrueta insists that her children’s bodies are missing from their grave, despite a priest’s certainty that he witnessed their coffins being buried. After Amaia’s mistake delays the inspection, Yolanda explains that opening the tomb could have confirmed that her children were there while leaving another missing child undiscovered; the woman from Elizondo might otherwise have continued to be treated as delusional. Yolanda then states that her own baby’s body was stolen and that she intends to search for her. This later case does not establish what happened to Ainara, but it gives the Argi Beltz encounter added resonance: accounts of infant death and maternal alarm are not interchangeable with proof, yet dismissing them can keep an actual disappearance hidden.