June chose the library because it was the only place in Frosthaven where Helen’s absence still had a shape.
The basement lights buzzed above the long worktable. Boxes of clippings stood open around Ava, their labels facing outward in Helen’s narrow handwriting. Outside the high windows, snow pressed against the glass and turned the morning gray.
Silas sat across from Ava with Wesley’s photograph between them. He had brought Caleb to the motel before sunrise, then returned without explaining why. His coat was still dusted with snow.
June entered last, leaning on her cane. She carried a paper grocery bag and wore the same dark coat she had worn to the church. She looked as though she had slept in a chair, or not slept at all.
“I can give you the station,” she said. “I can give you the bus. I can give you what she said.”
Ava pulled out her recorder. “And what can’t you give me?”
June set the bag on the table. “The part after.”
“That’s the part I need.”
“I know.” June removed a black composition book from the bag. Its cover was swollen with age, the corners softened by handling. “But needing something doesn’t make memory honest.”
Ava did not start the recorder. “You kept notes?”
“Not notes. Names. Dates. Things I was afraid I’d remember incorrectly.”
“Why didn’t you take this to the police?” Silas asked.
June looked at him. “Because the police were in the photograph.”
He glanced down at the image.
Belinda sat beneath the Duluth station’s departure board, her left hand pressed to her ribs. June stood beside her, one gloved hand on the handle of a small suitcase. The red wool glove lay in Belinda’s lap. Behind them, travelers moved through the gray light as if the two women were already ghosts.
Ava had enlarged the photograph on her laptop. She moved the cursor over the background. “Wesley took this from the parking lot?”
“From across the street,” June said. “He didn’t want Belinda to see him.”
“Why photograph her?”
“Because he believed photographs outlived promises.”
That sounded like something Helen would have admired and resented.
June opened the composition book. Most pages contained brief entries in cramped pencil: shelter arrivals, medication doses, addresses that had later been crossed out. Near the back, one page was dated November 21, 2009.
Next
Ava and Silas will follow Bus 418’s route through Fargo and use Wesley’s final recording to identify the roadside stop where Belinda was last seen alive.
9:05 — asks about St. Agnes. Says the boy is not dead.
9:30 — sees Wesley.
The next line had been erased so thoroughly that the paper was thin.
Ava looked up. “What did you write there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what you erased.”
“I know what I was afraid of.”
June turned the page. “She thought someone had followed us from Northstar. She wouldn’t tell me who. She kept asking if I had seen a man with a silver thermos.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Was there one?”
“There were hundreds of men in Duluth with silver thermoses.”
Ava held her gaze until June looked away.
“Belinda wanted to keep moving,” June said. “I wanted to take her to a hospital. She said if she went into another hospital, somebody would make another record disappear. She had learned the lesson already.”
Silas’s hand tightened on the photograph. “She knew about Caleb.”
“She knew there had been a baby. She knew he had been removed. She believed he had seen something, or that the people who removed him had believed he saw something.” June’s voice thinned. “She thought finding him would prove she hadn’t imagined the rest.”
Ava pressed record.
June continued. “The westbound bus was late. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Belinda kept watching the entrance. When the bus finally came, she wouldn’t let me walk her to it.”
“Why?”
“She said I had already done enough.”
“That’s not what she meant.”
“No.” June looked at the photograph. “She meant I had done enough to make myself feel useful.”
The words landed harder because June did not defend herself from them.
“What did you say?” Ava asked.
“I told her I could go with her.”
“And?”
“She said, ‘You don’t get to be Mother only when it’s time to leave.’”
For the first time, June’s face broke. Not dramatically. Her mouth trembled once, then steadied.
“I gave her the suitcase,” she said. “She took the red glove off and tucked it into the side pocket. She said she didn’t want anyone recognizing it.”
“But Wesley saw it.”
“He saw everything.”
Ava zoomed in on the photograph. The glove was visible beneath Belinda’s coat, a bright slash of color against the dull station. Beside her boot sat a paper ticket folded in half.
“Wait.”
Silas leaned closer.
Ava adjusted the contrast. The ticket remained mostly hidden, but a fragment of lettering showed above Belinda’s thumb. Not a name. A route number and three letters.
WES—
“Wesley?” Silas asked.
“No.” Ava enlarged it again. “West.”
Behind Belinda, the departure board listed several destinations. Duluth to Minneapolis. Duluth to Grand Forks. Duluth to Fargo, with a second connection west.
June pointed to the board. “That was her bus.”
“Fargo?”
“North Dakota, then Montana if she stayed on it.”
“You said farther.”
“I said what I knew.”
Ava turned from the screen. “You watched her board.”
“Yes.”
“You watched the bus leave.”
“Yes.”
“Then why do you say you don’t know where she went?”
“Because I don’t know where she got off.”
The distinction was clean and terrible.
June took a folded slip of paper from the grocery bag. “I found this last night in the lining of the suitcase.”
Ava unfolded it. It was a bus-station receipt, browned at the edges. Duluth, November 21, 2009. One adult fare. Cash. The destination line had been stamped so faintly that only half the letters remained.
FAR—
At the bottom, in blue ink, someone had written a number: 418.
“Is that the ticket number?” Silas asked.
“No,” June said. “The bus number.”
Ava studied the receipt. “You kept the suitcase?”
“Belinda left it behind.”
“Where is it?”
June’s eyes shifted toward the shelves of Helen’s records. “Helen took it.”
Ava felt the familiar cold of her mother’s choices settle over the room. “Of course she did.”
“She came to Duluth after I left the station,” June said. “I saw her across the street. She had been following us, or following the trail. I don’t know which. She asked me where Belinda went.”
“And you told her?”
“I told her Belinda was on the bus.”
“Nothing else?”
“I told her the bus number.” June folded her hands over the cane. “Helen said she would find the rest.”
“She didn’t.”
“She found enough to be afraid.”
Ava looked again at the photograph. Helen had hidden the suitcase, the receipt, and whatever name Belinda had used. Not to protect the girl, perhaps. Not entirely. Helen had spent fifteen years turning evidence into a locked room and calling the lock love.
Silas lifted the photograph from the table. “Wesley followed the bus.”
June nodded. “He drove west for a while.”
“How far?”
“Far enough to know Belinda got off before Fargo.”
Ava’s pulse sharpened. “How did he know?”
“Because he saw her at a roadside stop.”
“Where?”
June shook her head. “He never told me.”
“Did he tell you she was alive?”
“He sent me one message.”
June removed a second item from the bag: a small cassette tape in a cracked plastic case. A strip of masking tape bore a date in Wesley’s handwriting.
NOV. 21 — WESTBOUND
Silas stared at it. “Why didn’t you give us this yesterday?”
“Because yesterday I was still trying to decide whether the truth belonged to me.”
Ava took the cassette. “And today?”
“Today I understand that keeping it is another way of choosing the town.”
There was no tape player in the basement. Ava packed the cassette carefully beside the receipt.
“We’re going to Fargo,” she said.
Silas looked at her. “The bus went through Fargo.”
“Then we start there. We find the route for Bus 418. We find the roadside stop. We find out who bought the next ticket.”
June rose, slower than before. “If she used another name, the record may not exist.”
“Then we find the person who remembered her.”
At the stairwell, June stopped. “Ava.”
Ava turned.
“She didn’t leave because she trusted the road. She left because she believed staying anywhere made that place dangerous.”
“Did she say that?”
“No.” June looked toward Helen’s boxes. “But I knew her well enough to hear it.”
Ava slipped the cassette into her coat pocket. Upstairs, the library doors opened onto a white town that had spent fifteen years pretending west was the same thing as gone.
She called Dot from the landing.
“Find every route record for Bus 418,” Ava said. “And get me the names of the stops west of Duluth.”
Dot was silent for half a breath. “You found something.”
“We found a direction.”
Outside, a plow moved down Main Street, exposing the black road beneath the snow. Ava watched it pass and thought of Belinda stepping onto a bus with one glove, a borrowed name, and a reason to keep moving.
This time, Ava would follow the road before Frosthaven could cover it again.