By the time Ava reached Frosthaven, the temporary plate had become a number Dot refused to let her lose.
She had written it on her wrist in black ink. Dot had written it on the back of an envelope, entered it into the newspaper’s old accounting program, and called three people who no longer worked at the county clerk’s office. Silas had photographed it twice. Even Caleb, sitting in the back seat with his hood pulled up, had asked to see it.
The number looked too small to have carried so much of their lives.
Snow had started again over the highway. It came down in a fine, steady veil, blurring Frosthaven’s streetlights and the dark roofs beyond them. Ava parked outside the sheriff’s office just after nine. The windows were lit. Lucas’s truck sat crooked beside the courthouse, one tire nearly touching the curb.
“He knows we’re here,” Silas said.
Ava looked at the building. “Good.”
Caleb opened his door. “I’m coming in.”
“No,” Ava said.
His face tightened. “You don’t get to decide that every time.”
“I’m not deciding for you. I’m deciding what I need from Lucas.”
“What you need is the truth.”
“What I need is for him not to turn this into a performance about saving his daughter.”
Caleb studied her. Then he shut the door again. “Five minutes.”
“Ten.”
“Seven.”
Silas gave a humorless smile. “That’s the most family negotiation I’ve seen all week.”
Ava left them in the car and went inside.
Lucas was in the records room, standing beneath the fluorescent lights with his coat still on. He had aged during the drive west. Or perhaps she had finally learned how to see it: the stoop of his shoulders, the gray at his temples, the hands that never stopped worrying at the edge of a file.
On the table between them lay a photocopy of Harlan Voss’s receipt.
“You sent the plate to Dot,” Lucas said.
“I sent it to everyone who might still be capable of reading a ledger.”
“Dot found the issuing dealer.”
“Who was it?”
Lucas did not answer immediately. That was answer enough to make Ava’s pulse rise.
She took off her gloves. “Say the name.”
“Orrin Rusk.”
Next
Ava, Lucas, Silas, and Caleb will go to St. Anselm looking for Merrick Saye’s original records—and for the trail Orrin Rusk may have followed after taking Belinda west.
The room seemed to contract around the fluorescent hum.
Ava knew the name. Plant security. Elise’s father. The man whose family farm had burned after the 2009 cover-up. The man whose daughter had survived the van, survived Helen’s abandonment, and spent years hidden beneath the reach of the town.
“Is he alive?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know whether the father of the second witness is alive?”
“I know he left Frosthaven in December of 2009. I know he used the temporary plate on a dark sedan. I know he told me he was going to find the people who took his daughter.”
“And you let him go.”
Lucas’s mouth moved once before sound came. “I let a lot of people go.”
Ava placed Belinda’s letter on the table between them. She did not open it. Lucas looked at the folded paper as if it had been left on his grave.
“The man in the brown coat showed Belinda a photograph,” she said. “Caleb, the baby, and you in uniform. He brought her west because he knew about the photograph. Then he asked Harlan whether she left anything for me.”
“I know.”
“No. You know now. You did not know then.”
“I knew someone had taken her from the Prairie Lantern.”
“From Harlan’s statement?”
“From the plate.”
Ava stared at him. “You had this number in 2009.”
Lucas nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“Because Orrin Rusk came to my house three nights after the fire. He had blood on his hands and a photograph in his pocket. He said Elise was alive. He said Helen had left her in the bunker. He said if I arrested him, he would give the photograph to every newspaper in the state.”
Ava’s fingers curled against her palm. “The photograph of Caleb.”
“And you.”
She waited.
Lucas looked down at the receipt. “He had found out who you were. He knew Helen was pregnant. He knew I was the father. He thought if he put the picture in the right hands, the whole thing would come apart.”
“That sounds like what he wanted.”
“It was not the only thing he wanted.”
“What else?”
“He wanted Elise back.”
The answer was so simple it hurt.
Lucas pulled a second file from beneath the first. Its cover was stained brown along one edge, as though it had been stored somewhere damp. He opened it and pushed over a photocopied statement.
*Orrin Rusk entered the sheriff’s office at 2:10 a.m. on November 24, 2009. Subject appeared agitated and possibly injured. Subject claimed daughter Elise had been abducted by persons connected to the former auto plant. Subject refused medical attention. Subject threatened to expose Sheriff Crane, Pastor Greer, and Martha Bell.*
Below that, in Lucas’s handwriting, was a single line: *No formal statement taken.*
“Because you were protecting me,” Ava said.
“Because I was protecting the case.”
“Those are not the same thing.”
“No.” Lucas closed his eyes briefly. “They became the same thing in my head.”
She wanted to hate him cleanly. The old wound had always offered that possibility: Helen’s affair, Lucas’s cowardice, the town’s agreement to call it something else. But there he was with the file open, no excuse prepared, and the ugliness was more ordinary than hatred allowed.
“Where did Orrin go?”
“His farm burned on December sixth. The official report said electrical fault. His truck was found two counties south. He was gone.”
“And you never looked?”
“I looked until looking became another way to pretend I was doing something.”
Ava picked up the photocopy. At the bottom was an address written in pencil, half erased: *Moorhead—Prairie Lantern route—ask about temporary plate.*
“Harlan said the man came back three days later,” she said. “That was November twenty-fourth. The same night Orrin came to your office.”
Lucas’s face changed.
Not surprise. Recognition arriving late enough to be shame.
“You think he was the man in the brown coat.”
“I think I should have known.”
“Did he have a brown coat?”
“Orrin had a black work jacket. But when he came to me, he was wearing a brown wool coat over it. He said he had taken it from a dead man at the bus depot.”
Ava remembered Harlan’s words: *The man told her he was taking her to somebody who could explain the picture.*
“Who was the somebody?”
Lucas reached into the file and removed a small index card. On it, Helen had written an address in Duluth and a name Ava had never seen.
**Merrick Saye. St. Anselm records. Knows where the boy was sent.**
“Helen had this?” Ava asked.
“She gave it to me in December. She said Orrin was looking for the person who could prove Martha signed the transfer.”
“And then?”
“Then Helen told me to burn it.”
Ava laughed once. There was no humor in it. “You did?”
“No.”
That was the first thing he had said that sounded like courage.
The records-room door opened. Silas stood there, Caleb behind him.
“Seven minutes,” Caleb said.
Lucas looked at him. The sheriff’s face went pale, but he did not look away.
Caleb stepped into the room. “You know who my father was.”
“Wesley Vale found you,” Lucas said. “I don’t know who carried you to St. Anselm.”
“But you know who could have told us.”
Lucas looked at Ava. “Merrick Saye was the night registrar at St. Anselm. He signed the first record before Wesley arrived. He disappeared from Duluth in 2010.”
Silas took the index card. “And Orrin was looking for him.”
“He may have found him.”
Ava folded Belinda’s letter and put it back inside her coat. The truth had not ended in this room. It had acquired a face, a motive, and an address that had gone cold fourteen years ago.
She looked at Lucas. “You’re coming with us.”
His expression tightened. “Where?”
“To St. Anselm. Then to wherever Orrin Rusk went after he took Belinda.”
“You think I can help?”
“No,” Ava said. “I think you can stop pretending you don’t know what you owe.”
Outside, Caleb’s car engine started. Snow gathered on the courthouse steps, covering the footprints before anyone could follow them.