CHAPTER FIVE
Second Wind
The Wayside sat two blocks over from the coffee shop, its familiar neon sign glowing warm against the darkening afternoon, and I felt the specific fond, proprietary tug I always felt walking through that door, the same one I'd felt since the day I'd first inherited both this diner and the antique shop next to it, back when neither had felt entirely mine yet and both now felt like they'd belonged to me my full life.
Carla spotted us the moment the bell rang, waving from behind the counter where she was ringing up a customer's order with her usual brisk efficiency, and mouthed something at us that I took to mean sit anywhere, we'll get to you, before turning her full attention back to the register.
"Storm crowd," she said, once she'd finished and made her way over, sliding into the booth across from us with a groan of relief.
"Everybody in this town decided today was the day to eat out one last time before they're stuck reheating soup at home for a week straight.
I haven't sat down properly since ten this morning. "
"Business is good, at least," I offered.
"Business is excellent. My feet, considerably less so.
" She waved down Dot, who arrived a moment later with two waters and her own particular brand of no nonsense warmth, setting them down with the ease of a woman who'd worked this counter long enough to move through even the busiest rush without ever quite losing her footing.
"You two heading back out to the lake before this whole thing lands?" Dot asked.
"That's the plan," Sam said. "Just need to swing by Second Wind first, and then we're headed home."
"Good. I don't like the look of that sky one bit.
" Dot glanced toward the window, her own expression going briefly serious before she caught herself and softened it back into her usual easy manner.
"Y'all be careful out there. And tell your father I've still got that pie tin of his he keeps forgetting to collect. "
We ate quick, Carla filling us in between customers on the diner's own storm preparations, extra propane for the stove in case the power went, a standing agreement with Dot's cousin to keep the walk in freezer running off a backup generator if it came to that, and I found myself, listening to her rattle off contingencies with the same brisk confidence she brought to everything, genuinely grateful for how far this complete certain piece of my inherited life had come, from a business I'd once barely known how to run into a piece of it I trusted completely to keep functioning even in weather like this.
"You still thinking about that letter?" Carla asked, catching the particular distant look I must have been wearing over my coffee, since apparently I wasn't fooling anybody in this town today.
"Is it written all over my face?"
"Only to someone who's fed you pie through half your worst weeks," she said, fond. "Any word?"
"Not really. Sam's still chasing paper trails that take weeks to answer.
" I turned my mug slow between my hands.
"I keep thinking about how much of this whole county's history is sitting in boxes nobody's bothered to open in decades.
Feels like the answer's got to be in one of them somewhere, if we could only find the right box. "
"Well, you're standing two doors down from the biggest pile of unopened boxes in town," Carla said, nodding toward the window, toward Second Wind's faded sign visible down the block. "Maybe today's the day one of them eventually talks."
"Maybe," I said, and didn't quite believe it yet, though something in the easy, offhand way she'd said it settled into the back of my mind and stayed there, hushed, the entire rest of the meal.
Dot swung back by as we finished, refilling waters nobody had asked her to refill purely out of long habit, and paused a moment at our booth, studying the window and the darkening sky beyond it with a frown that briefly cracked her usual easy composure.
"That's moving faster than I like," she said, half to herself.
"Feels different than the last few systems we've had blow through. "
"You think it's worse than they're saying?" I asked.
"I think weather does what weather wants, regardless of what any forecaster promises it," Dot said, "and I think it's smart to finish your errands and get home before it decides to prove that specific point.
" She patted my shoulder once, brisk and fond, and moved off toward another table before I could ask her anything further, though her words settled uneasy alongside Emmett's earlier ones, two people who'd spent long enough outdoors in this county to trust their own instincts over any official watch or warning.
Second Wind Antiques sat one storefront further down, and the little bell over its door gave its familiar cheerful jingle as I pushed inside, the shop's warm, dusty smell of old wood and older paper settling over me the way it always did, equal parts comforting and faintly melancholy, a room full of other people's whole lives waiting patiently to be noticed again.
Priya's cousin Anjali, who'd taken over the shop's daily management the previous spring when I'd finally admitted I couldn't run three businesses at once no matter how much I loved each of them, looked up from behind the register with a quick, relieved smile.
"Josie. I was hoping you'd stop by before the storm actually hits. We got a new estate lot in yesterday, more paperwork than I know what to do with, I was going to ask if you wanted first look before I start pricing everything."
"Show me," I said, curious, and followed her back toward the shop's cramped little back room, where several boxes sat stacked and half sorted, old ledgers and letters and the particular assortment of paper ephemera that always seemed to survive longest in these old estate lots, longer even than the furniture and the jewelry that usually fetched the better prices.
I sifted through the top box while Anjali went to help a customer up front, mostly out of habit more than any real expectation of finding much worth noting, old receipts, a few faded photographs of people whose names nobody living remembered anymore, a ledger from what looked like a defunct feed and grain business going back decades.
I flipped it open idly, more out of curiosity than purpose, and something about a name scrawled in the margin near the back caught my eye before I'd fully registered why.
Ashford, the note read, in a cramped, hurried hand, beside a column of figures that meant nothing to me on their own, and just below it, smaller, half smudged with age, a second name I nearly missed fully. Corliss.
I sat with that a long moment, my pulse ticking up slightly despite myself, and told myself it was probably nothing, an old feed store's ordinary business dealings with two families that had, after all, both been prominent enough around this county at one time or another that their names turning up together in an old ledger meant considerably less than my own overactive imagination wanted it to mean.
Still, I found myself photographing the page carefully with my phone before setting the ledger aside, a small, private habit I'd picked up over the past year of chasing a mystery that refused to hand itself over easily.
"Find anything interesting?" Anjali asked, returning.
"Maybe. Probably nothing." I gave her a quick, easy smile, tucking my phone away. "Mind if I hold onto this ledger a little while before you price it out? I'd like to look through it truly when I've got more time."
"Take it. Honestly, half that box is going to end up donated rather than sold, nobody's exactly clamoring for a feed store's fifty year old bookkeeping.
" She waved a hand, unbothered, and I tucked the ledger under my arm, already half convinced I was chasing nothing at all, and half unable to quite let it go regardless.
Sam was waiting by the truck when I came back out, the sky gone properly ominous now, a low, heavy ceiling of cloud that seemed to have dropped considerably closer to the rooftops in just the last half hour, the wind carrying a bite that hadn't been there when we'd first arrived in town that morning.
"Find anything good?" he asked, nodding at the ledger under my arm.
"Maybe nothing. An old feed store ledger, probably not worth the trouble, but there was a name in it that caught my eye." I climbed in beside him, tucking the ledger safely on the seat between us. "Ashford. And right below it, Corliss."
Sam's hands went still on the wheel for a moment, some part of it cautious and alert crossing his face. "Together? In the same entry?"
"Same page, at least. I don't know if it means anything. Probably doesn't." I looked out at the darkening sky, the wind picking up in earnest now, rattling a loose shutter somewhere down the block. "But I photographed it anyway, just in case."
"Good," Sam said, quiet, starting the engine, and I caught something in his voice, some small, careful spark of interest he was clearly trying not to let get ahead of itself, the certain restraint of a man who had learned, across a year of chasing this specific mystery, not to get his hopes up over every small coincidence that crossed his path.
We pulled out of the parking lot with the wind gusting harder now, the first fat, scattered flakes beginning to spiral down out of that low gray sky, and I found myself glancing at the ledger on the seat between us, wondering, not for the first time that year, whether the answer we'd been chasing so long had simply been sitting quietly in a dusty box the full time, waiting for somebody patient enough to at last go looking.