9. Since The Seventies
Since The Seventies
Janice
The number keeps climbing.
I sit at the table beside Steve with Honor’s notes spread across one screen and decades of missing-person reports Shane and Felicity have managed to recover filling another.
Rose has sent photographs and family records from the community center, and Kai gave us names collected during his own searches over the years.
The records don't match neatly.
Some women have proper missing-person files. Others have little more than an incident number, a handwritten note or a reference buried inside another investigation. Names are misspelled. Dates conflict. Locations are vague.
But when I start plotting them against Lockhart operations, the mess becomes a pattern.
1974: A nineteen-year-old woman disappears after taking temporary work near a Lockhart exploration camp.
1977: A twenty-two-year-old woman is last seen walking toward housing used by mine contractors.
1981: A seventeen-year-old is reported missing by her mother after failing to return from visiting friends near a Lockhart access road.
The files keep coming.
I stop counting when the total passes two hundred.
Steve looks over from his laptop. “How bad?”
“Worse than we thought.”
I turn the screen toward him.
Colored markers cover the map. Active mines. Closed mines. Exploration camps. Worker housing. Haul roads.
And missing women.
Every decade adds more.
Steve studies it without speaking while I open another RCMP report.
The language changes slightly over the years, but the conclusions barely do.
Likely left voluntarily.
Possible runaway.
No evidence of foul play.
Unable to establish current whereabouts.
Investigation concluded pending further information.
“They kept closing them,” I say.
“How quickly?”
“Some within weeks. Others stayed technically open for months, but there’s almost nothing showing anyone actively searched.”
I pull up three reports from different decades.
Different officers. Different communities. Same assumptions.
The names on the reports change. The outcome doesn’t.
Reports stall. Searches end early. Files close.
One woman supposedly ran away despite leaving her paycheck uncollected.
Another abandoned two children and every personal possession she owned.
A third vanished during a January cold snap without taking her winter boots.
Runaways.
I stare at the word until anger burns through me.
“These aren't investigations.”
“No.”
“They're farcical excuses.”
Steve's voice stays quiet. “Keep going.”
So I do.
The pattern spreads beyond activists. Women working at camps. Women visiting relatives. Women traveling between communities. Women whose only obvious connection to Lockhart is that they disappeared close to land the family controlled.
Some may have left voluntarily. Some cases may have explanations we haven't found yet.
But hundreds?
Across more than fifty years?
Around the same family's operations?
No.
I add the latest marker.
Honor St. John. Twenty-five years old. Missing twelve days.
Her name joins all the others on the map.
Except Honor refused to accept the explanation everyone before her had been given.
She started counting.
Names. Dates. Places.
She saw the pattern long before we did.
I look at the screen filled with women the system reduced to closed files.
Honor wasn't investigating history.
She was investigating something that never stopped.
Community Center, Northern Manitoba, Canada. 1430 hours.
Rose reads the evacuation plan twice.
I made it yesterday after Lockhart security drove slowly past the community center and gave us a careful look on their way through. They didn't stop or threaten anyone. They didn't need to.
They wanted us to know they'd seen us.
So last night, after Lockhart security drove past us on the way home, I sat down with Steve at White Pine Lodge and made plans for what happens if watching becomes something worse.
Rose sets the pages on the table. “You think they'll come here?”
“I think we prepare so we don't have to work that out after they arrive.”
I've marked two evacuation routes out of the community, alternate meeting points, vehicles available for anyone without transport, and the names of people responsible for checking homes where Elders or families with young children may need help leaving quickly.
Serenity has emergency accommodation ready farther south if we need it. Victor has people on standby, and everyone gets a satellite contact number in case local communications disappear.
Rose looks at the list. “You did all this yesterday?”
“After our visitors drove by.”
Her mouth straightens. She knows exactly who I mean.
“We've lived with Lockhart watching us for a long time.”
“I know.”
“And we're still here.”
I meet her eyes. “This isn't about frightening anyone into leaving. It's about making sure Lockhart never gets to decide whether you can. It can also be used for other emergencies, like a wildfire.”
She studies me, then nods and folds the plan carefully.
After that comes the harder part. The families are waiting.
We sit around the long tables where photographs covered the surface yesterday. Today I have my tablet open and a new file Felicity has already arranged to replicate across HAVEN's secure servers.
One by one, people give me names.
Mary Campbell. Nineteen. Missing 1978.
Leah Bird. Twenty-three. Missing 1984.
Rebecca Thomas. Thirty-one. Missing 1992.
Some have photographs. Some don't.
Some families know an exact date. Others know only the month, the season, the year a daughter stopped coming home.
I type every detail they give me.
Names of parents. Sisters. Children. Where the woman worked. Where she was last seen. Which police station took the report. Whether anyone searched. Which Lockhart mine, camp, road or contractor was nearby.
Nobody gets reduced to a marker on my map.
Rose sits beside me, filling gaps when memories falter.
A mother tells me her daughter left two little boys behind and the police decided she'd run away.
A brother describes searching frozen roads himself after officers stopped.
An elderly woman places a faded photograph beside my tablet and tells me she's spent forty-three years wondering whether her sister died believing nobody was coming.
That nearly breaks me. I stop typing long enough to steady my hands, then enter her sister's name.
Because she had one. They all did.
By the time we finish, the file holds hundreds of women gathered from RCMP reports, family records, Honor's research and the stories shared around this table.
Rose watches me save the final entry.
“What happens to them now?”
I upload the file.
Within seconds, encrypted copies begin replicating to HAVEN servers beyond Canada.
“They stay open.”
Rose looks at the photographs spread between us.
I do too.
This time, nobody gets to close the file.
Community Center, Northern Manitoba, Canada. 1715 hours.
By the time the last family leaves, I can't look at another photograph.
I sit at the end of the table with my tablet dark beneath my hands and hundreds of names stored in the new file.
Hundreds.
I knew the number before I came here today. I'd seen it building through the RCMP records, watched the markers spread across the map until statistics became impossible to dismiss.
But statistics don't tell you a woman loved strawberry jam on toast.
They don't tell you she sang while she cooked, hated having her photograph taken, wanted to become a teacher or called her mother every Sunday.
Families tell you those things.
Rose told me some. Mothers told me others. Sisters, brothers, daughters, grandchildren.
People who carried memories because official records couldn't be bothered carrying the women.
The door opens behind me. I don't turn.
Steve's footsteps cross the room before he pulls out the chair beside mine.
“Hey, darls.”
That's all it takes. I close my eyes. Sometimes I really don’t like being an empath.
His arm goes around me, and I turn into him, pressing my face against his shoulder as everything I've held together since this morning finally gives way.
He doesn't tell me it'll be okay. It won't. Nothing makes forty or fifty years of unanswered grief okay.
He doesn't tell me we can't save everyone or remind me how many women HAVEN has already brought home.
He simply holds me.
“I typed them all in,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“Every name they gave me.”
His hand moves slowly over my back.
“One woman waited forty-three years to tell someone what happened to her sister. Forty-three years, Steve.”
“I know, darlin'.”
“She still doesn't know where she is.”
My voice breaks.
Neither do hundreds of other families.
Some of the women may have died. Some may have escaped and built lives somewhere else. Some may have been moved through Lockhart operations into places their families never knew to search.
We don't know yet.
That's the cruelty of it.
There aren't answers, only names and photographs and people who've learned to live around an empty place at the family table.
I cry for them. For the nineteen-year-old whose mother was told she'd run away. For the woman who disappeared without her winter boots. For Kai's sister. For Honor, twelve days missing while her grandmother waits to learn whether she's going to become another photograph on that table.
Steve holds me through all of it. Eventually, I lift my head and wipe my face.
He passes me a tissue from the box on the table.
“Romantic.”
“Only the best for my girl.”
A laugh slips through the tears.
There he is. My husband.
I take a slow breath and look at the tablet. The grief hasn't gone anywhere. Neither has the anger.
But Steve is beside me, solid and patient, carrying some of the weight until I can take my share back.
I switch the tablet on.
Hundreds of names fill the file.
I look at Steve.
“Let's find out what happened to them.”
His hand closes around mine.
“Yeah, Jan. We will.”
White Pine Lodge, Northern Manitoba, Canada. 1930 hours.
The last name stays on my tablet all the way back to White Pine Lodge.
I could close the file. Felicity has already backed everything up, and there are copies in enough places now that Lockhart can't make hundreds of women disappear with a deleted record and a convenient police report.
But I leave it open.
Steve sits beside me on the edge of the bed while I scroll to the final entry.
Elaine Sutherland. Twenty-one years old when she disappeared in 1976.
Her younger sister brought the photograph in this afternoon. Two girls standing beside a battered pickup, Elaine laughing at something outside the frame, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun.
“She would've been seventy-one this year,” I say.
Steve stays quiet.
I look at the name again.
“Elaine Sutherland.”
Saying it aloud shouldn't matter.
It does.
For decades, too many of these women existed inside records written by people already preparing to dismiss them. Runaway. Left voluntarily. No evidence of foul play. File closed.
Elaine gets her name spoken in this room.
So did every woman whose family sat across from me today.
I lock the tablet and set it on the bedside table.
That's as far as I get.
Steve reaches for me and draws me down beside him without asking me to explain anything else. The mattress shifts beneath us, and a thick furry blanket comes over my shoulders, warm from where it'd been folded at the end of the bed.
I turn toward him, and his arms close around me. No questions. No reassurance that everything will work out, because he knows better than to offer promises neither of us can make.
He kisses my hair, then my forehead, lingering there before settling back against the pillows. One hand moves slowly along my arm beneath the blanket, from shoulder to wrist and back again.
I listen to his breathing.
Outside, wind pushes snow against the lodge windows. Somewhere beyond those walls, Kai, Angus and Jax are still following Honor's trail through the wilderness.
Twelve days.
I think of Rose waiting.
Then Elaine.
Then all the names between them.
Steve kisses my temple.
“Sleep, Jan.”
“I don't know if I can.”
“Don't have to. Just lie here.”
So I do.
His hand keeps moving along my arm, slow and warm, never asking anything from me. My breathing gradually matches his, and the noise inside my head starts thinning until the names stop arriving all at once.
They're still there. They should be.
I don't want to forget a single one. But I can stop carrying them alone for a few hours.
My eyes close.
The last thing I feel is Steve pulling the blanket higher around my shoulder and pressing another soft kiss into my hair.
Tomorrow, we keep looking.
Tonight, he lets me sleep.