CHAPTER THIRTEEN
What Deloris Carried
I found Deloris Vance by accident, three evenings into the storm, in the small unheated storage room off the pavilion's kitchen where the extra linens were kept, and I would not have found her at all if I hadn't gone looking for a spare blanket for Daisy Pruitt, who had developed a sudden and inconsolable conviction that her stuffed rabbit needed its own proper bed.
I pushed the door open without knocking, the way you did with a supply closet, and found Deloris sitting on an overturned crate in the near dark, her knees drawn up to her chest, her entire body shaking with the certain silent, effortful sobbing of someone who had spent a very long time practicing how to cry without anybody hearing her do it.
"Oh," I said, startled, already half stepping back out. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude, I was just looking for a blanket."
"It's fine," Deloris said, though her voice came out thick and unsteady, entirely unlike the clipped, guarded tone I'd grown used to from her over the past several days. "It's your closet. I'm the one hiding in it."
I hesitated in the doorway, torn between the plain courtesy of leaving her the privacy she'd clearly sought out and some instinct, sharper than courtesy, that told me this moment mattered, that whatever storm was moving through Deloris Vance right now deserved at least the offer of company, even if she refused it.
"Do you want me to go?" I asked, gentle. "I will, if you'd rather be alone. But I'll sit with you a minute, if you'd rather not be."
She was soft a long moment, wiping roughly at her face with the back of one hand, and I watched her decide some part of it, some calculation I couldn't fully read passing behind her sharp, tired eyes.
"You can sit," she said eventually, grudging, though there was less bite in it than there usually was.
"I don't imagine I've got much dignity left to protect at this point anyway. "
I settled onto a stack of folded tablecloths across from her, close enough for company, far enough to leave her whatever space she still wanted, and waited, the particular patient waiting I'd learned, across a great many hard conversations these past few years, tended to draw more out of people than any direct question ever could.
"I didn't expect it to hit me like this," Deloris said finally, staring at some point on the floor between us.
"Everett's death, I mean. I barely knew the man.
Exchanged maybe ten words with him this whole trip.
" She laughed, short and humorless. "And here I am, falling apart in a linen closet over a stranger, like it's got anything to do with me at all. "
"Grief doesn't always wait for you to know somebody well," I said, cautious. "Sometimes a loss just cracks something open that was already sitting close to the surface."
Something flickered across her face at that, quick and startled, the specific look of someone caught seeing more clearly than they expected to be seen. "You're more perceptive than you let on, at the front desk," she said, not quite an accusation.
"I've had practice."
She was quiet another long moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had gone lower, rougher, the words coming slow and reluctant, like a piece of it dragged up from very far down.
"My father used to sit up nights, when I was small, working on figures at the kitchen table.
Land surveys, boundary lines, that sort of thing.
I didn't understand any of it then. I just remember he'd get this look, this tight, frightened look, especially in the last year before he left.
" Her hands, I noticed, had gone white knuckled where they gripped her own knees.
"He left one night and never came back. No note, no explanation, nothing.
My mother told everybody he'd run off, abandoned us, and maybe that's even what she believed.
I was too young to know any better, for a long while. "
I sat very still, my own pulse picking up in a way I tried hard not to let show on my face, understanding, in the space of that single held breath, precisely what she was circling toward without yet saying it plainly.
"This place, this full county, it's got history tied up in mine somehow," she went on, hushed, not quite looking at me.
"I don't know all of it yet. I've spent a long time trying to find out, on my own, quietly, without making myself a target for anybody who might not want an old story dug back up.
I thought maybe, coming out here, I'd find something.
A record, an old name, somebody who remembered.
" She shook her head, bitter. "Instead I got snowed in with a bunch of strangers and watched one of them die in front of me, and now I can't stop thinking about my own father, whether he died just as suddenly, just as alone, somewhere nobody ever found him to grieve him thoroughly. "
"Deloris," I said, gentle, careful not to push too hard against a door only barely cracked open.
"You don't have to tell me more than you're ready to.
But if there's something I can help with, some piece of this old history you're trying to find, I'd like to try.
My family's been tangled up in a piece of this county's old, buried business too, longer than I'd like.
It's possible we're chasing pieces of the same thread. "
She looked at me a long moment, some part of it wary and something else, something almost hopeful, warring plainly behind her tired eyes, and I could see her weighing, the way I imagined she'd been weighing it for days now, exactly how much of herself she could afford to hand over to strangers who might, in the end, turn out to be nothing more than strangers after all.
"Not tonight," she said at last, quiet but not unkind.
"I'm not ready tonight. I've spent a long time keeping this close, and it doesn't come loose easy, even after everything.
" She wiped her face again, steadier now, some of her usual guarded composure creeping back over her features.
"But maybe. Soon. If this storm ever lets us all breathe properly again. "
"There's no rush on my end," I told her, and meant it, watching her shoulders ease down another deliberate notch, some of the armor she wore loosening if not falling away totally.
"Whatever it is, it'll keep however long you need it to keep.
I've learned that much, chasing an old mystery of my own this past year.
Some truths only come loose when a person's finally ready to let them go, not a moment before, no matter how much anybody else might wish it were faster. "
"An old mystery of your own," Deloris repeated, a piece of it careful in it, not quite a question.
"My great aunt. Idella Marsh. She died a few years back, and everybody assumed it was simply her time, until a letter arrived claiming otherwise.
" I said it plain, watching Deloris's face for whatever reaction it might draw, and found only a kind of tired, guarded curiosity there, nothing sharper.
"I don't know yet just how it connects to whatever you're carrying.
Maybe it doesn't, and I'm only seeing shapes in the dark because I've spent too long looking for them.
But I've got a feeling, Deloris, and my feelings about this particular thing have gotten fairly reliable over the past twelve months. "
"Feelings," Deloris said, faint, almost amused despite everything, "are a dangerous thing to build a case on."
"They are. Which is why I'm not building anything yet. Just noticing, the way a certain ten year old detective in this pavilion has been teaching all of us to notice things fully, before we ever try to make them into something more."
"Whenever you're ready," I told her. "I'm not going anywhere, and neither is anybody else in this building, unfortunately, until the roads clear."
That startled a small, surprised laugh out of her, brief and genuine, the first real warmth I'd seen from her since she'd first walked into my office days ago.
"No, I suppose none of us are." She stood, brushing dust from her jeans, gathering herself back into the measured, guarded posture she wore like armor most hours of most days.
"Thank you, Josie. For not pushing. Most people push. "
"I've learned it rarely gets you anywhere worth going," I said, and found her offering me, for just a moment, something close to a real smile before she slipped back out into the crowded pavilion, leaving me alone in the small, cold closet with a blanket I'd nearly forgotten I'd come looking for and a fresh, urgent tangle of questions I couldn't yet begin to answer.
I found Sam later, near the stove, and told him what little Deloris had shared, careful to keep her confidence as intact as I could while still handing him the pieces that mattered.
"A father who worked on land surveys. Frightened, in the last year before he vanished.
No note, no explanation." Sam's expression had gone very still, very focused, the certain alert stillness I'd learned meant some part of it important had just clicked into place behind his cautious, patient mind.
"Josie, that guardianship filing. The Corliss daughter. "
"I know," I said, still, feeling the same cold, careful thrill move through me that I could see moving through him. "I think we might have just been sitting across the pavilion from her for three days."
"We can't push her," Sam said, though I could hear how badly he wanted to, the year's worth of patient, frustrated searching eventually handed something that felt real and close enough to touch.
"Not after what you just described. She'll tell us when she's ready, or she won't, and either way I won't be the reason she shuts down entirely rather than telling us anything at all. "
"No," I agreed, watching the equipment shed's far door through the window, thinking of Everett Boyle wrapped and waiting in the cold, of Deloris Vance's deliberate, guarded grief, of a father who'd vanished decades ago leaving nothing behind but frightened eyes and unanswered questions.
"We wait. She'll come to it, in her own time.
I think she's closer to it than she even realizes herself. "