The barrier came into view through a scrim of fine rain, two sawhorses lashed together with orange surveyor's tape snapping in the wind. Cade Verren killed the engine of the borrowed Subaru and sat for a moment, listening to the tick of cooling metal and the distant, broken sound of water still moving through town.
The windshield was filmed with road dust. Beyond it, the road he'd been following simply stopped.
Where asphalt had been, there was now a tongue of grey silt, thirty feet wide, still wet and gleaming in the grey morning light. Telephone poles leaned at angles that looked almost deliberate, their guy-wires slack in the mud. A dumpster had ridden the floodwaters halfway down the block and come to rest against the front steps of a church, its green paint scraped down to bare metal in long parallel gouges. The church's front door hung open, and through it Cade could see pews piled in a drift against the far wall, varnished wood dark with water-stain.
He reached for the door handle and stopped.
Six days. The river had crested six days ago, and Ashford, Oregon, still looked like a wound that hadn't learned how to close.
He got out. The silt came over his boots before he'd taken three steps. It was cold, and it sucked at his heels with a wet, sucking sound. The smell hit him then: river mud, diesel, the sweet-sour undertone of things that had been alive and weren't anymore. He pulled the collar of his jacket up and started walking.
The Subaru belonged to a hydrologist named Petros up in Portland. Owen Petros. Cade had called in a favor, or what passed for a favor when you hadn't spoken to someone in seven years and your opening line was I need to borrow your car and possibly your credentials. Owen had asked two questions. Where, and how long. Then he had said yes before Cade could explain, which meant Owen still trusted him, which meant Cade owed him more than a tank of gas.
Cade didn't want to think about that. He kept walking.
Main Street had been a two-lane strip of clapboard storefronts, the kind that survives because nobody ever bothered to tear it down. Now the storefronts stood in a shallow lake of their own making, their plate-glass windows blown out and replaced with plywood sheets marked in spray paint: FAMILY, STRUCTURAL, UNKNOWN. A grocery, a hardware, a diner with a hand-lettered sign that read KATHYS. The K had come loose from its bracket and hung by one nail, swinging in a breeze Cade couldn't feel at ground level.
He passed a man in chest waders pressure-washing the sidewalk in front of what had been a bank. The man didn't look up. A woman in a rain jacket was photographing a stop sign that had been uprooted and deposited, intact, in the bed of a pickup truck parked two blocks from any intersection. Nobody spoke.
The flood had been the kind that makes the national news for half a day and then disappears under the next one. Atmospheric river, the meteorologists had called it. Pineapple Express, the old-timers. The river that ran through Ashford had come up fourteen feet in twenty-six hours. It had taken out two bridges, a stretch of Highway 30, and most of the downtown's ground floor. Three people had died in Oregon, four in Washington, and the rest of the country had moved on by the weekend.
Cade hadn't moved on. He had been moving toward this for twenty years, and the river had only changed the route.
He stopped at the foot of what had been the Main Street Bridge. There was no bridge now. Just the concrete pilings, four of them, still rooted in the riverbed, and between them a slow brown current that moved with the patience of something that knew it had already won. A rusted guardrail curved up out of the water like a question mark, its bolts sheared clean.
He stood there for a long time. The rain had stopped without his noticing. The clouds had thinned to a pale gauze, and through them the sun came down without warmth, the kind of light that shows you everything and forgives nothing.
Somewhere up the bank, a dog was barking. He couldn't see it. The sound came and went in the wet air, lonely and persistent, and Cade thought of Jonah Vance, who had owned a dog like that, who had stood on a bridge very much like this one thirty-eight years ago and watched the same brown water and not jumped.
Or had jumped. That was the question he had come to answer.
He unzipped his jacket and took out the photograph. He had memorized it, but he looked at it anyway. A young woman in a high-collared blouse, hair pinned back, standing on the railing of a different bridge with one hand on a wooden post. The photograph was black and white, and the woman's face was turned three-quarters from the camera, so you could see the line of her jaw and the soft fall of her hair but not her eyes. On the back, in ink that had gone brown with age, two words: Elsie Mott.
She had been twenty-three when the picture was taken. She had been twenty-three, according to the file, when she walked into the Blackwater Creek drainage on the north side of town and did not come back out. Her body had never been found. The sheriff at the time had ruled it a probable accident, a woman who had slipped on wet rocks and been taken by the current. The case had been closed in a single afternoon. The file had gathered dust in the county records room for twenty years, and then for eighteen more, and then a flood had come along and opened everything back up.
Because the flood had done something the sheriff in 1986 had not had the resources to do. It had moved the river. It had stripped the banks down to bedrock in places, had rerouted channels, had carved new paths through soil that had not been disturbed since the last ice age. And in one of those new cuts, on a section of creek bank that had been twelve feet underground before the water got to it, a hiker had found a bone.
Cade put the photograph away. He started walking again, up the bank, following a path that was more suggested than actual, his boots sinking and releasing, sinking and releasing. At the top of the rise he stopped and looked back. The Subaru looked very small down there. The road behind him was a grey thread, and beyond it the hills rose in layers of pine and fir, the trees still dark with rain, the air above them moving in slow, transparent columns.
He turned north. The drainage where Elsie Mott had last been seen was a mile and a half up the valley. He had a flashlight, a folding shovel, a pair of rubber gloves, and a county map that showed the old creek bed in dashed lines and the new one in solid. He had also, in the inside pocket of his jacket, the original case file, copied and certified, seventy-three pages of statements and diagrams and photographs that Delroy Crane, the current sheriff, had handed over without a word three days ago in his office in town.
Crane had been the deputy on duty the night Elsie Mott was reported missing. He had been twenty-six years old. He had taken the call himself, had walked the creek bank with a flashlight until two in the morning, had come back the next day with dogs, had come back the day after that with volunteers. He had not found her. He had, according to one of the statements in the file, written a single line in his own report at the end of the second day: Search suspended pending further evidence. He had signed it, initialed it, and the case had gone into a drawer. Twenty years later he had become sheriff, and he had kept that drawer locked.
Cade had asked him, three days ago, if he wanted to come along. Crane had looked at him for a long time across the metal desk, the kind of look that measures a man down to the studs, and then he had said, You do what you have to do, son. I'll be here when you get back.
That had been enough. It had not been an endorsement. It had been a door left unlocked, which in Crane's vocabulary was the same thing as an engraved invitation.
Cade walked.
The trail, such as it was, followed an old logging road that switchbacked up through alder and bigleaf maple. The leaves were still coming down, brown and water-heavy, and they made a soft, continuous sound underfoot like someone turning the pages of a very large book. The air here smelled different than the town: green, resinous, the faint metallic tang of running water over stone. He could hear the creek before he could see it, a sound that had shifted in the last six days from a roar to a murmur.
He came around a bend and stopped.
The bank had been peeled open. That was the only word for it. Where there had been a slope of moss and fern and second-growth fir, there was now a raw face of grey clay, twenty feet high, sloping down to the new creek channel. Roots stuck out of it like the bones of something enormous. And at the base of the cut, half in the water and half out, lay a piece of cloth.
It was dark, waterlogged, folded over itself. It was the color of old tea. It might have been a blanket, or a shawl, or the sleeve of a coat. It might have been nothing.
Cade crouched at the edge of the cut and looked at it for a long time. The water moved past it in small, patient eddies. A leaf came down, settled on the cloth for a moment, was pulled away.
He set down his pack. He took out the gloves. He pulled them on, one finger at a time, and sat there on his heels at the edge of the cut, not yet reaching down, because he had learned, in twenty years of doing this, that the moment before you touch something is the last moment you have it the way it was.
He reached down.
The cloth was heavier than it looked. Water had soaked into the fibers until it felt almost mineral, like something that had been waiting to become part of the creekbed. He drew it up slowly, letting the water drain from it in a long curtain, and laid it on the flat ground beside his pack. It unfolded as he set it down. It was not a blanket, and it was not a shawl.
It was the back panel of a woman's coat. Wool, lined, the kind of tailor work you did not see anymore outside of a few old shops in Portland or Seattle. The color was a deep oxblood, almost black where the water had darkened it. There was a maker's label inside the collar, but it had bled to illegibility. The buttons were bone. Four of them still sewn to the panel. The fifth was missing.
He did not move for a long time. The creek spoke to itself. A kingfisher went over in a blue blur, too fast to follow.
Then he folded the panel, the way the water had folded it, and put it in a clean bag in his pack, and he zipped the bag, and he stood up, and he brushed the clay from his knees, and he walked back up the trail toward town.
By the time he reached the bridge at the foot of Main, the light had thinned to that particular grey that comes in mountain towns in late autumn, where the sky and the water seem to be made of the same stuff and the day ends not in a sunset but in a slow erasure. The bridge was open to one lane. A man in a yellow slicker was standing at the far end with a clipboard, and when Cade approached, the man looked at him the way people in small towns look at strangers who arrive in the wrong week, with the weather and the news both bad.
The man did not speak. Cade nodded and passed.
Ashford had been a logging town, then a mill town, then a town that tried to be something else and never quite arrived. The Main Street was two blocks long. The fronts of the buildings were mostly intact, but behind them you could see the work that had been done in a hurry: stacked sandbags, plywood over windows, the smell of wet plaster. A banner strung across the street said ASHFORD STRONG in stenciled letters, and someone had already stolen one of the letters, so the sign now read ASHFORD STRON.
He walked to the end of Main where the road widened into a gravel lot behind a low brick building with a faded sign that read VFW POST 4107. He had been told, on the phone two days ago, that this was where they had set up the morgue. He had been told it in a voice that did not want to tell him, and that had been enough.
He pushed it open. The door stuck on the swollen frame, and he had to put his shoulder into it. The smell came out first: cold, chemical, faintly sweet, the smell of preservation in a building that had not been built for it. Then the chill. Then the light, which was wrong, which was bluer than any October light had a right to be, because someone had strung construction lights from the ceiling and forgotten to dim them.
There were five bodies on folding tables in the center of the hall. They were covered with white sheets, but not tucked, because there was nothing ceremonial about this. The sheets were damp at the edges where they touched the tables. Two of the bodies were clearly older, the work of the flood. The third was younger. The fourth and fifth were still partly in their boots.
At the far end of the hall, behind a card table that had been set up as a desk, sat a man in a brown coat. The coat was the kind of brown that came from being worn for forty years and not from being bought that color. He had a ledger open in front of him, and a pen in his hand, and a cup of coffee that he was not drinking. He was writing something slowly, the way a man writes when he does not want to look up.
He looked up.
The face was the color of old putty, weathered into deep lines that ran from the corners of his eyes down past the corners of his mouth. The eyes were small and very dark and did not blink. There was a sheriff's star pinned to the coat, but the pin was old, the kind that had been his father's and his father's before him. He set down the pen without hurrying.
"Cade Verren," the sheriff said. The name came out flat, not a question. He had been expecting him.
"Sheriff Crane," Cade said.
"You came up through the cut, didn't you," Crane said. It was not a question either. "You came in on 14 and then you took the trail by the creek. People do that when they don't want to be seen at the bridge. They think the bridge is where I watch. The bridge is not where I watch."
"I came in the way I came in," Cade said.
"You came in the way you came in," Crane agreed. He did not invite him to sit. There was nowhere to sit. He put both hands flat on the ledger and looked at Cade for a long time. "You want to tell me what you're doing in my town."
"No," Cade said.
The sheriff's mouth moved a little at the corner. It was not a smile. "You were the one who called the Carver County Sheriff's Office last March. You were the one who identified that girl off I-90 in May. You were the one who sat in that room in Helena for nine hours last August and walked out with a confession and no statement. You want me to keep going."
"I know who I am," Cade said.
"Good," Crane said. "Then you know I know who you are. And you know that what I think of that is not what your editor thinks of it."
Cade said nothing.
Crane turned a page in the ledger. He did it the way he did everything, without hurry, as if the page had asked to be turned. "You are here," he said, "because of Maren Halliday."
The name came into the room like a draft.
"Thirty-four years old," Crane said. "Librarian. Last of her line in town except for her aunt, who is in a care home in Bellingham and has not spoken since February. Maren has been missing since the night the levee broke. That was six days ago. She was last seen at the library at nine-seventeen in the evening, by Mrs. Lottie Crane, who is no relation to me but is a woman I trust, and who says Maren told her she was going home because the rain had started to come in under the front door of her house on Birch Street. Mrs. Crane watched her walk up the hill. Mrs. Crane saw her go around the corner. Mrs. Crane did not see her after that."
Crane closed the ledger. He set the pen on top of it, lined up with the spine. He folded his hands.
"I have walked that hill," he said. "I have walked it twice. I have the dogs out. I have the river rescue out. I have called in the state. The state sent two men and a sonar unit and they have found four vehicles and a cat and no person. Maren Halliday is not in the water. I will tell you that right now, because I want you to hear it from me and not have to ask. She is not in the water."
"Then where is she," Cade said.
"That," Crane said, "is what I am paying you to find out. Except I am not paying you. Because I did not ask you here."
"You did not ask me here," Cade agreed.
"No," Crane said. "The Halliday family did. The aunt in Bellingham did, through her lawyer, who is also dead, so I do not know who I am talking to on that end. What I know is that I got a call last Tuesday from a man in Tacoma who said the Halliday family wanted a particular kind of person to come look at the file, and that particular kind of person was you, and that they had the money, and that I should not stand in the way. And what I told that man was that I would not stand in the way, but I would also not be made a fool of in my own county, and that if you came into Ashford I would give you twelve hours to do what you came to do and then I would run you out of town myself."
He let the words settle.
"Twelve hours," he said again, as if he wanted to be sure Cade had heard. "Starting now."
"Starting now," Cade said.
"Starting now," Crane said. He opened the ledger again and wrote something in it, the date and the time, and then he looked up. "You have questions. I will answer three of them. Then you will leave this building and you will not come back to it. I do not want you in here with the bodies. I do not want you talking to anyone in this building. You want to talk to me, you come to my office on Pine Street, and you knock, and you wait, and I will decide whether to let you in."
Cade looked at the five tables. He looked at the damp sheets. He looked at the blue light.
"Three questions," he said.
"Three," Crane said.
"What was Maren Halliday doing at the library at nine at night in the rain," Cade said.
"She was working," Crane said. "She was always working. The library is in the old Dement building on the corner of Main and Cedar, and it had taken on water in the basement, and she was moving the archive boxes up to the second floor. There were ninety-one of them. She had moved seventy-three of them. There are eighteen boxes still on pallets in the basement. I can show you the order she wrote on the clipboard. I can show you the boxes. The clipboard is in an evidence bag."
"Who else knew she was there," Cade said.
"Mrs. Crane. Me. And the night janitor at the library, a man named Owen Petros, who came in at eight and left at nine-fifteen and has a key and an alibi that I have checked twice. He is not your man, if you are thinking along those lines. Owen has been in Ashford forty-one years and has never once been in trouble, and he cried for twenty minutes in my office when I told him she was missing."
Crane watched Cade's face. He did not blink.
"Your third question," he said.
Cade was quiet for a moment. The hall was quiet except for the drip of a pipe somewhere behind the wall, a slow and patient sound.
"What was in the eighteen boxes," he said.
Crane's hand went to the pen on the ledger. He did not pick it up. He rested his fingers on it.
"That," he said, "is not the question you want to ask."
"It is the question I am asking," Cade said.
Crane looked at him for a long time. The light in the hall hummed on its own frequency, a thin high sound like a wire under tension.
"The eighteen boxes," Crane said, "are the archive of this town. The whole history of it. The deeds, the births, the deaths, the marriages, the flood records, the mill records, the photos, the letters. Maren Halliday had been the librarian for nine years, and in those nine years she had been the only person in Ashford who had read every page of that archive. She had read it twice. She knew what was in those boxes better than anyone alive, including me, and I have been here longer than most of the people in those boxes have been dead."
He paused.
"There was one box," he said, "that she kept in the reading room. Not in the basement. Not with the rest. She kept it on the desk by the window. I do not know what was in it. She did not tell me. She did not tell the mayor. She did not tell the family. She did not tell Mrs. Crane. She kept it on that desk and she read it every Wednesday at four in the afternoon and she put it back in the locked drawer and she went home. And on the night the levee broke, that box was on the desk when Mrs. Crane came in at nine. And it was not on the desk when I came in at eleven."
The hall was very quiet.
"Three questions," Crane said. He picked up the pen. "You are out of questions. You are out of time, in a manner of speaking. You have twelve hours. I suggest you start with the library. The library is still standing. The library is also full of water in the basement, and I would not go down there alone, and I would not go down there at night, and I would not go down there without telling me first. The lock on the front door is a Master 141. The key is under the mat, which I am telling you because I have decided to tell you, and which I will deny telling you if it becomes necessary."
He wrote something else in the ledger. He did not look up.
"Good day to you, Mr. Verren," he said.
Cade stood there for a moment. He looked once more at the five tables. He looked at the sheriff's bowed head. Then he turned and walked back to the door and put his shoulder into it again, and the door gave, and the grey light of the street came in, and he stepped out into it, and the door swung shut behind him with a sound that was not quite a slam and not quite a close.
The street smelled of wet asphalt and something frying somewhere down the block. Cade stood for a moment on the courthouse steps, blinking at the light, his shoulder still tender where he had driven it into the sheriff's door. The town of Ashford arranged itself around him in a way that felt deliberate, like a stage set someone had left up after the play was done. Two-story brick buildings, their awnings sagging. A hardware store with a bell above the door. A barber pole that did not turn. The sky overhead was the color of old paper, and the air had that particular October bite that turned the inside of his nose cold.
He walked.
His boots found the pavement without his having to think about it. His body knew the rhythm of a town like this one, the half-block between buildings, the way the sidewalk widened in front of the bank, the way it narrowed again at the alley. He passed a woman in a yellow coat who was sweeping the steps of what looked to be a real estate office. She looked up at him, then looked down again, then looked up at him a second time, longer, and he tipped his hat because that was what you did in a town like this when a woman looked at you twice, and she went on sweeping.
Moretti's Diner occupied a corner lot at the intersection of Main and Mulberry. The sign was old, the kind of sign that had been repainted so many times that the original lettering showed through in faint, ghostly strokes beneath the current one. A bell chimed when he pushed the door open, and the smell that came out was coffee and bacon grease and something sweet he could not place, maybe cinnamon, maybe just old wallpaper beginning to let go of the plaster.
The counter ran the length of the room, red vinyl stools bolted to the floor, their seats cracked in patterns that resembled river deltas. Booths lined the windows, their red leather cracked the same way. A pie case stood near the register, three pies in it, all of them looking as though they had been there since the previous administration. Behind the counter, a short man with a salt-and-pepper mustache was pouring coffee for a customer in a feed cap. The customer nodded at Cade when he came in. The short man looked at him once, then went on pouring.
Cade sat at the counter, third stool from the door. He ordered coffee and a slice of whatever pie was freshest, and the short man set the coffee in front of him and cut him a slice of cherry that had clearly been there since at least the previous weekend. Cade ate it anyway. It was good in the way that diner pie was always good, sweet and a little too thick and tasting faintly of somebody's grandmother's kitchen, which was, he supposed, the whole point.
"You passing through?" the short man asked.
Cade looked up. The man was drying a glass with a towel that had seen better decades.
"Looking for a room for the night," Cade said. "Heard there might be one upstairs."
"Might be." The man set the glass down. "I'm Sal. Sal Moretti. My sister runs the rooming house on Birch, but she closes up at four on account of her knees. You want the room, you talk to my niece. She's here Wednesdays and Fridays."
Cade looked at the clock above the register. The minute hand sat on the nine. The hour hand sat just past the two. He thought about the question he had not asked Crane, the question that had formed in his mind as the sheriff was closing the ledger and reaching for his hat. He let the thought go. It would keep.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"Two fifteen," Sal said. "She'll be in around three. You want coffee while you wait, I got coffee. You want anything else, I got a bathroom in the back and a telephone that works on Tuesdays and Saturdays and not always then."
Cade nodded. Sal went back to drying glasses.
The bell above the door chimed again at ten minutes past three. A young woman came in carrying a canvas bag that was bulging at the seams and a coat that was too big for her, the kind of coat that had belonged to somebody larger and been inherited rather than purchased. She had dark hair pulled back in a knot at the nape of her neck, and her cheeks were pink from the walk, and her eyes were the color of creek water in late afternoon. She saw Cade at the counter and she saw Sal and she set the bag down behind the register and hung the coat on a hook by the kitchen door, and she came around the counter and stood at the register with her hands on her hips, looking at him.
"You the one wanting the room," she said. It was not a question.
Cade set his coffee down. "If you've got one."
"We've got one." She said it without inflection, the way you said things when you had said them many times before. "Top of the stairs, second door on the left. It has a bed and a dresser and a window that faces the alley, which is not as romantic as it sounds, but the bed is clean and the lock works and the radiator knocks in the night but it heats the room by morning. Six dollars for the night, twelve if you want breakfast. My uncle makes the breakfast, and he is better at it than he lets on."
"Mira," Sal said, from somewhere behind the pie case.
"I'm describing the room, Uncle Sal."
"You are giving away the radiator."
"I am being honest about the radiator. People like honesty."
Cade took six dollars from his wallet and set it on the counter. Mira picked it up and counted it with the practiced motion of someone who had counted many small sums of money before, and she put it in the register and tore off a receipt and slid it across to him.
"Name," she said.
"Verren. Cade Verren."
She wrote it in a small leather-bound book that she kept under the register. He watched her hand move across the page, the loops of her letters, the way she pressed the pen harder on the downstrokes. When she was done she closed the book and looked up at him again, and this time her expression had changed. It was not unfriendly, but it was watchful, the way you looked at a dog you had not met before, assessing.
"You are the one from the newspaper," she said.
Cade did not ask which newspaper. He knew which newspaper. He had been the subject of an article in the Sentinel three months ago, a long piece about the cold case in Hart County and the investigator who had finally closed it after eleven years, and the article had included a photograph that was not a particularly good likeness, and it had mentioned, in the third paragraph, that the investigator had come from a place called Ashford and had not been back in twenty years.
"I am," he said.
"My grandmother knew your family," she said. She did not say which grandmother. She did not say which family member. She turned and pointed toward the ceiling, toward the stairs behind the kitchen door. "Your room is up there. Breakfast is from six to nine. If you need anything after nine, you bang on the wall and Uncle Sal will yell at you from the kitchen. That is the system. We have found it works."
Cade thanked her. He picked up his bag from the floor. He went up the stairs.
The stairs were narrow and uncarpeted and they creaked in a pattern that he memorized as he climbed, the third step from the bottom the loudest, the seventh the softest, the landing the most treacherous of all. The room was as she had described it, the bed, the dresser, the window that faced the alley, which gave onto a view of brick and a fire escape and a patch of sky that was already beginning to lose its color. He set his bag on the bed. He sat on the bed. He looked at the ceiling.
He thought about Crane's voice saying, I would not go down there alone, and I would not go down there at night, and I would not go down there without telling me first. He thought about the box on the desk that had been on the desk at nine and had not been on the desk at eleven. He thought about Mrs. Crane and the locked drawer and the Wednesday at four in the afternoon. He thought about the fact that Crane had used the word "scoured" three times in five minutes, and that Crane had not once, in the entire interview, mentioned the name Vance, and that Crane had mentioned the name Halliday exactly once, and that Crane had mentioned Maren Halliday by name when he had not mentioned anyone else by name at all, and that this, in Cade's experience, was not an accident.
He went back downstairs.
Sal was wiping down the counter. The bell above the door chimed as Cade came through the kitchen door, and Mira was standing on a stepladder behind the counter with her arms full of coffee cups, sliding them into the cabinet above the register. She looked at him when he came in. She set the last cup in its place and came down off the ladder and stood on the floor and brushed her hands against her apron.
"Did the radiator knock already," she said.
"I didn't go in the room yet. I came back down."
She looked at him for a moment. Her expression had not changed but something behind it had. "Can I get you something else? More coffee? Some of the pie? Uncle Sal made a buttermilk yesterday and it's better than the cherry."
"I'm fine," Cade said. "I'm looking."
Mira tilted her head slightly. "Looking for what."
Cade did not answer at once. He looked at the walls of the diner. They were covered, the way diner walls were often covered, with the artifacts of a life that had been lived in this room for a long time. A framed photograph of a baseball team from a year that he could not read at this distance. A calendar from three years ago, its page still turned to October. A hand-lettered sign that said "Special Today: Whatever You Want, So Long As You Want Meatloaf." A yellowed newspaper clipping in a frame that he could not read from where he stood. And above the counter, pinned to the wall directly behind the register, slightly crooked, its corners curling, a piece of paper that was not a picture and not a sign and not a clipping. It was a map.
Cade crossed the room. He stood at the counter and looked up.
The map was old. It was a topographic survey of the area around Ashford, printed on that thin, brittle paper that the government used to print things on before it stopped printing them in this way. The contours of the land were drawn in fine brown lines, the elevation numbers printed at the intersections, the waterways traced in blue. The towns were marked in black. Ashford was a small black dot in the center of the map, and around it, in a rough ring, were the names of smaller places that he did not recognize. Some of them had been crossed out, faintly, in pencil. Some of them had been circled, also faintly, in pencil. And there, on the map, in three places, drawn in red ink that had faded but had not disappeared, were three X marks.
The first X was on a bend of a river that he did not recognize, east of town. The second X was in a wooded area north of town, near a small symbol that he thought might be a cemetery. The third X was in town, on Main Street, directly over the dot that marked the location of the diner itself.
Cade looked at the map. He looked at the map. He looked at the map.
"That thing been there long," he said to Mira.
Mira did not answer immediately. She was watching him. Her eyes moved from his face to the map and back again, and the color in her cheeks, which had been high when she came in from the cold, had settled into something less pink and more even.
"As long as I can remember," she said. "It was there when I was a little girl. My grandmother put it up. She said it was a picture of where we came from."
"Your grandmother," Cade said.
"Margaret Vance," Mira said. "She was born in this town. She lived here all her life. She died four years ago this December."
Cade looked at the X marks again. He looked at Mira again.
"Did she ever tell you what the X marks meant?"
Mira shook her head. "No," she said. "She said it was a thing she was keeping for somebody, and that when the somebody came, the somebody would know what it was, and that I should leave it where it was and not ask any more questions about it."
Cade looked at the map. He looked at the door. He looked back at Mira.
"Is your grandmother's maiden name Halliday," he said.
Mira's expression did not change. But her hand, which had been resting on the counter, moved a fraction of an inch, as though she were about to take hold of something that was not there.
"Yes," she said. "It was. How did you know that."
Cade looked at the map. He looked at the three X marks in their faded red ink. He looked at Mira's hand on the counter. He looked at the door.
"Because," he said, "I have been looking for that map for twenty years."