Chapter 3: The Map on the Wall

Nora's mother still lived in the house where Nora had grown up, a clapboard bungalow on Maple Street with a sagging porch and a garden that produced more weeds than tomatoes. Helen Kelsey was not pleased to see her daughter. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and asked if Nora had come to rake up old bones. Nora said she had come to find David Chen. Her mother let her in but made it clear that the visit was conditional. Helen had lived in Ashwood her entire life and understood its ecosystem in ways Nora did not. People here protected each other, not out of malice but out of necessity. When you lived in a place this small, exposure was destruction. One scandal could end a family. One secret, once loose, could poison the water supply for a generation. Over dinner, Nora mentioned the security log from the library. Helen went quiet. Then she stood up, walked to the hallway closet, and pulled out a cardboard box she said had been sitting there since two thousand five. Inside were Ruth Emory's personal effects, returned to Helen by Ruth's sister, who had moved away shortly after the disappearance. Helen and Ruth had been close friends. Among the items was a notebook filled with Ruth's handwriting. Most entries were mundane. Library inventory notes. Reading lists. Quotes from novels she admired. But the last several pages contained something different. Ruth had drawn a map of Ashwood, marking certain properties with small red circles. Beside each circle, she had written initials and dates. Nora counted fourteen marked locations spanning from nineteen eighty-nine to two thousand four. She did not recognize all the initials, but she recognized one pair near the bottom of the list. They belonged to a man who still lived in town, a man everyone in Ashwood trusted, a man who had keys to every public building in the valley. She photographed every page and drove back to the motel with her hands shaking.