CHAPTER NINE
Before the Lines Went Down
Sam's radio and the pavilion's one remaining landline had both grown increasingly unreliable through the second day, the storm apparently doing its level best to sever every last thread connecting us to the rest of the county, and it was midmorning on the third day, the snow still falling thick and steady outside though the wind had eased into a piece of it slightly less violent than the howling gale of the night before, when Sam found me near the makeshift kitchen with a look on his face I recognized immediately, the specific alert stillness he wore whenever something in his cold case work had at last shifted.
"I got through to the clerk's office," he said, low, drawing me a little apart from the general bustle of the room. "Barely. Line dropped twice before I finished, and I don't know if I'll get it back again before everything goes down for good, but I got enough."
"Enough for what?"
"Remember that ledger you found at Second Wind?
The Ashford and Corliss names on the same page?
" He pulled a small notebook from his jacket, his own handwriting cramped and hurried across the page, the marks of a man who'd been racing a dying connection to get down everything he could before it failed him fully.
"I asked the clerk to check something specific while I had her, whether there'd ever been a formal complaint or witness statement filed under the Corliss name, anything at all connected to the old Ashford surveys.
Most of what's left from that era's a mess, half of it lost in the courthouse fire like we already knew, but she found one thing.
A guardianship filing, decades back, listing a minor child under the surname Corliss. "
Some part of it in my chest went very still. "A child?"
"A daughter. No first name recorded in what survived, just the surname and a filing date that lines up almost exactly with when J.
Corliss disappeared from every other record we've been able to find.
" Sam's voice stayed carefully even, the particular controlled calm he brought to anything that mattered enough to risk getting his hopes up over.
"If Corliss had a daughter, and that daughter's still alive somewhere, she'd be the first living person we've found with any direct connection to him at all.
Everyone else in this whole mess has been paper and rumor.
She'd be a person who might actually remember something, or have something of his. "
"That's real, Sam. That's an actual thread." I felt my own pulse pick up despite a year's worth of learning not to get ahead of myself over every small break. "Did she have a name for the mother? Anything that might tell us where the daughter ended up?"
"Nothing yet. The clerk was still digging when the line dropped the second time, and I couldn't get it back after that.
" He glanced toward the window, toward the storm still raging steady and unbothered outside, cutting us off from the rest of the world with an efficiency that felt, for the first time since it started, genuinely frustrating rather than merely inconvenient.
"It's not much. I know it's not much. But it's the first new name this case has handed us in months, and I didn't want to sit on it without telling you. "
"It's not nothing," I said, firm, and meant it, feeling a piece of it loosen in my chest that had been wound tight for longer than I'd quite realized, the certain relief of watching a year's worth of patient, frustrating work finally produce something solid enough to hold onto.
"A daughter. Somewhere out there, maybe still carrying whatever her father knew before he vanished. "
"If she's still alive. If she's even still using that name.
If she knows anything at all, which she might not, if she was young enough when it happened.
" Sam ticked through the caveats with the measured, deliberate honesty of a man who had learned the hard way not to let hope outrun what the evidence actually supported, though I noticed he said it all with considerably more energy than his usual cautious tone carried, the small, unmistakable spark of a man who believed, for the first time in a long while, that he might actually be closing in on something real.
"What happens now? Once the roads clear?"
"Now I try to raise the clerk's office again, soon as this weather lets us have a signal back, and see if she found anything more before the line went.
Failing that, I put in a formal request the moment we're not snowed in anymore, guardianship records, adoption filings, anything that might tell us where a Corliss daughter ended up after her father disappeared.
" He tucked the notebook carefully back into his jacket, protecting it the way I imagined he'd protect very little else in a genuine emergency.
"It's slow, Josie. It's always going to be slow.
But this is the kind of slow that's actually moving somewhere, instead of just moving in circles. "
I thought, standing there with the storm still churning outside and the complete crowded pavilion humming with its own small dramas behind us, of Deloris Vance's sharp, guarded watchfulness, her curt refusal to explain her interest in the campground's history, her sat alone posture and her searching eyes, and felt a small, strange prickle move up the back of my neck, the particular instinct I'd learned, across four winters of stumbling into mysteries I hadn't gone looking for, never quite to ignore even when it hadn't yet assembled itself into anything I could properly name.
"Sam," I said, slow, turning the thought over even as I said it aloud. "What if the daughter's not somewhere out there. What if she's already here."
Sam went very still, following the direction of my gaze across the room to where Deloris sat apart from the others near the window, watching the snow with the same sharp, unreadable attention she brought to everything, and I watched him weigh the thought, careful and deliberate, the way he weighed everything that mattered.
"That's a considerable leap, Josie."
"I know it is. It's probably nothing. Coincidence, and my own imagination running ahead of the actual facts, same as always.
" I kept my voice low, mindful of how easily sound carried in the crowded room.
"But she asked me, the day she checked in, how long the campground had been in my family.
Nobody asks that unless they're already curious about some part of it specific. "
"Plenty of people are curious about local history without it meaning anything," Sam said, though I noticed he didn't look away from Deloris while he said it, his own cautious instincts clearly turning the same thought over regardless of his caution.
"I don't want to go pushing at her with a half formed guess and no actual evidence behind it.
That's the kind of thing that scares a person off for good, if we're wrong, or if we're right and she's not ready to be found out yet. "
"I won't push," I promised, and meant it, though I found my gaze drifting back toward Deloris more than once over the rest of that morning, watching her watch the room the way she always did, and wondered, not for the first time since she'd first walked into my office with her chin set stubborn against the world, just what hushed, private storm of her own she might be carrying alongside the one currently battering the whole county from the outside in.
There was one more small mercy tucked into that last hour before the silence became total.
Maggie had wandered into the pavilion sometime after breakfast, having been swept up in the same caravan of headlights that brought Carla and Dot out from town, and she found me near the window not long after Sam's call with the clerk's office, her own phone held up with a kind of cautious hope on her face.
"I got one bar," she said, low, urgent. "Just enough to call Juno before it was gone again. I don't know how, with everything else down, but it held long enough."
"How is she?"
"Worried about the storm, mostly, once she heard where I was.
But good, Josie. Really good." Maggie's eyes had gone bright in the specific way they always did lately, hope and old grief still tangled together but leaning, more and more these days, toward the hope.
"She said she finished a entire new drawing.
A wren landing on an open hand this time, not just a branch.
She said she wanted me to know that before the lines went, in case it took a while to reach me again.
" She tucked the phone away, careful, as though it might still hold some fragile warmth worth protecting.
"I don't know exactly what she means by it yet.
But I think I've got a guess, and I think it's a good one. "
I squeezed her hand, glad all the way through for that one small, hopeful thread reaching us even as every other line into the outside world quietly went dark around us, and thought that whatever the coming days demanded of the rest of us, it was good to know that somewhere out past the storm, something gentle and slow and entirely separate from Idella Marsh or Curtis Pratt or any of the rest of it was still, patiently, healing.
By early afternoon, the last working line in the pavilion had gone totally silent, the radio producing nothing but static no matter how patiently Denny worked its dial, and the phones, one by one, lost what little signal they'd been clinging to, until the whole building sat as thoroughly cut off from the outside world as if the storm had simply reached in and severed every thread connecting us to it on purpose.
It was, I told myself, watching Denny eventually give up on the radio with a resigned shrug, likely only temporary, the same kind of inconvenient blackout the county had weathered plenty of times before and always eventually recovered from, and yet something about the particular, total silence of it settled uneasy in my chest regardless, a small, quiet unease I couldn't quite name and didn't much care for, watching the storm outside show no sign whatsoever of loosening its grip on us anytime soon.