CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Two Patient People
I found Otis Rowe sitting alone near the pavilion's frost rimmed window that same afternoon, his notebook closed on his lap for once, his eyes fixed on some middle distance that had nothing to do with the papers spread across the small table beside him, and I recognized, settling into the chair across from him, the particular stillness of a man working through some part of it considerably larger than his usual cautious research.
"Deloris told me she spoke with you," I said. "Told me the important part first, and said the rest of the tangle was yours to explain, if you wanted to."
"I've been trying to work out, most of the day, just how to explain it fully," he admitted, a faint, rueful smile tugging at his mouth.
"It's not often a man spends two years quietly searching for someone, only to discover she's been sitting three cots away from him the complete time, wearing a different name and glaring at him rather effectively whenever he asked too many questions. "
"Start at the beginning," I said, gentle. "I've got the afternoon."
He gathered himself, the careful, deliberate way he gathered anything that mattered to him, and began.
"I told you, when we spoke before, that I've spent three years writing a book about land fraud cases across this region.
That part's totally true, Josie, every word of it, and I'll admit it's given me a certain reputation among the county's older clerks and archivists as the strange, patient man who keeps turning up wanting to look at records nobody's asked after in decades.
" He allowed himself a small, self deprecating laugh.
"What I didn't tell you, because I'd learned, the hard way, early in this research, to hold it close, is that one certain case has occupied considerably more of my attention than any of the others.
The disappearance of a surveyor named Joseph Corliss, twenty five years back, under circumstances that every official record insists were entirely unremarkable, and every unofficial whisper I've managed to gather suggests were anything but. "
"Why him, particularly?" I asked. "Out of however many cases you've studied."
"Because his was the clearest one," Otis said, hushed.
"Most of the others, the paper trail goes cold slowly, ambiguously, easy enough to explain away as ordinary carelessness or ordinary corruption of the mild, forgivable sort every county seems to carry somewhere in its history.
Corliss's trail goes cold all at once, completely, a man who was steadily employed and by every account devoted to his family simply vanishing overnight, leaving behind a wife who changed her name within the year and a daughter nobody in the historical record ever managed to trace past childhood.
" He shook his head, something old and tired in it.
"I became rather convinced, the deeper I dug, that whatever happened to Joseph Corliss sat closer to the true, ugly heart of this whole region's fraud than any of the other cases I'd catalogued, and that if his daughter were still alive somewhere, she might hold pieces of the story no official record ever bothered to keep. "
"So you went looking for her."
"For two years, on and off, whenever my other research allowed it.
County guardianship filings, old school records, the occasional half remembered name from someone old enough to recall the family before they scattered.
" He gestured, faintly helpless, at the papers still spread beside him.
"I'd nearly given up more than once. The trail's thin, Josie, thinner than almost anything else I've chased in this entire project.
And then I ended up snowed into a pavilion at Wren Lake, of all the improbable places, sharing a card table with a sharp tongued, cagey woman who kept deflecting every question about her own past with a precision that struck me, looking back now, as considerably more practiced than simple rudeness. "
"You suspected her," I said, not quite a question.
"I suspected something," Otis admitted. "I couldn't have told you what, not with any confidence, only that her guardedness had a particular shape to it that I'd learned, over three years of this work, to recognize in people carrying old, frightened family history rather than simple bad manners.
I didn't dare ask directly. I've learned, the hard way, that a person circling a wound that old tends to shut the door entirely if you knock on it too eagerly. "
I heard, before I saw her, the specific deliberate footsteps that told me Deloris had come looking for us, and found her standing a few feet off, arms crossed in that same protective posture, watching Otis with an expression caught somewhere between wariness and a piece of it considerably softer trying hard to work its way through.
"You could have just asked me," she said, though there wasn't much heat in it. "Directly, I mean. Instead of circling me with your notebook for four straight days like some kind of very polite hawk."
"I could have," Otis agreed, fully unoffended, rising slightly out of his chair with the deliberate courtesy of a man who'd clearly spent a great deal of his life being underestimated and had learned to make peace with it.
"Though I'll confess, Miss Vance, or Miss Corliss, whichever you'd rather I called you, that four days ago you'd have bitten my head clean off for so much as suggesting I knew your father's name, and I'd rather have kept my head attached a while longer, given how much research I've still got left to finish. "
That startled a real laugh out of her, short and surprised, and I watched something ease between the two of them that had been sitting tight and unresolved since the moment I'd first noticed them both eyeing each other with matching suspicion across the crowded pavilion.
"I'm sorry," Deloris said, quieter now, sitting slowly in the chair beside Otis rather than standing over him.
"For assuming the worst of you. I've spent so long assuming the worst of anybody who takes an interest in my family's history, it didn't occur to me you might simply be another person who'd lost something to the same old, ugly business. "
"I haven't lost anything nearly so personal as what you carry," Otis said, gentle.
"I've only lost a great deal of sleep and considerably more patience than I'd like to admit to, chasing a story I believed mattered.
But I'd like very much, if you're willing, to hear the rest of it properly, from you, rather than piecing it together secondhand out of old filings the way I've been forced to do this entire time. "
"I think I owe you that much," Deloris said, "given how long you've apparently been looking for me without either of us knowing it.
" She glanced at me, some part of it wry at last surfacing through the exhaustion still etched plain across her face.
"Two years, Josie. The man spent two years looking for me, and I spent that whole time thinking I was the only one carrying any of this.
Feels almost funny, now that I've had a minute to sit with it. Almost."
"I imagine it'll feel entirely funny eventually," I said, smiling. "Give it time."
"He also," Deloris added, dry, "apparently thought I was hiding something sinister rather than simply grieving quietly, which I'm choosing to take as a professional compliment to my acting rather than an insult to my personality."
"It was never an insult," Otis said, earnest, and something in the careful, honest way he said it made Deloris's guarded expression soften another measured degree.
"I've admired your discretion for two years without ever having met you truly.
I find I admire it considerably more, now that I finally have. "
"Tell me about the book," Deloris said, settling deeper into her chair with the particular loosened posture of somebody who had eventually set a heavy thing down.
"The one you're writing. I want to know what twenty five years of my family's quiet misery is going to look like, printed and bound and sitting on someone's shelf. "
"It won't be your misery on the page," Otis said, careful.
"Not the way you mean it. I've spent this full project trying to write it as a history of the land, of the paperwork, of the men who signed their names to things they shouldn't have and the men who refused and paid for it.
But I think, if you're willing, I'd like your father's chapter to be different from the others.
I'd like it told properly, with his daughter's voice in it somewhere, rather than just my own dry accounting of dates and filings.
" He glanced at her, a piece of it almost shy in it, an expression that sat oddly on a man I'd only ever seen composed and cautious.
"I don't want to presume. It's your history to decide what's done with, not mine. "
"I might like that," Deloris said, slow, turning the idea over visibly.
"Somebody finally writing it down thoroughly, instead of the town's version, the one where he simply ran off and left us.
I think my mother would have liked that too, wherever she is now.
She spent her whole life ashamed of a story that was never hers to be ashamed of. "
"Then we'll do it properly," Otis said, and something in the plain, still certainty of it seemed to settle something in Deloris that had been unsettled a very long while.
I watched them a moment longer, the two of them falling into an easy back and forth about old filing systems and courthouse fires and which county archive still held records nobody had fully catalogued, the certain delighted shorthand of two people who had each spent years alone with the same obscure obsession and were only now discovering someone else in the world who spoke the language fluently, and felt a small, private smile tug at my own mouth, watching it.
"You know," I said, unable to help myself, "for two people who spent four days suspecting each other of some part of it sinister, you're getting along awfully well now."
"I never suspected her of anything sinister," Otis protested, mild. "I suspected her of being interesting, which turned out to be considerably more accurate."
"He's going to say things like that a great deal, I imagine," Deloris said to me, dry, though there was warmth threaded all through it now, warmth I hadn't heard from her once in the complete time I'd known her. "I suppose I'll have to get used to it."
"I suppose you will," I agreed, delighted, and left the two of them there eventually, deep in a conversation that had shifted, by slow degrees, from wary explanation into something that looked, from a small distance, remarkably like the easy, curious warmth of two careful, guarded people discovering, with no small surprise, that they'd been walking toward each other for years without either one realizing it, and thought, making my way back across the crowded pavilion, that this whole long, hard storm seemed determined to keep handing us exactly this, unexpected kindnesses and unexpected connections rising up out of grief and suspicion in equal, generous measure.