Last good man

CHAPTER TWO:ARE WE SAFE

Nobody questioned it.

Why would you question warmth? Why would you question safety?

Why would you look a gift town in the mouth?

The woods at the eastern edge of Eldenmoor were a different matter.

Nobody went into the eastern woods. This was not a rule anyone had written down or enforced — it was simply a fact of life in Eldenmoor, absorbed in childhood the way children absorb all the important rules, through atmosphere and implication and the slight tension that entered adult faces when the subject arose. The woods were there. They were acknowledged. They were not entered.

Children who grew up and moved away sometimes tried to explain it to spouses, to friends, to therapists.

“Were you told not to go in?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Were you frightened of them?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

A long pause. A search for the right words.

“It was more like — the woods were someone else’s room. And you don’t go into someone else’s room without being invited. You just don’t.”

At night, sometimes, if you stood on the eastern side of Carpenter Street and looked toward the tree line, you could see the fog moving within the woods — not as weather moves, not drifting and dissipating — but purposefully. Shapes forming and dissolving with something disturbingly close to intention. Long pale suggestions of form. Fingers of mist that reached out toward the streetlights and then, always, withdrew.

As though testing a boundary.

As though reminding itself where the boundary was.

Pastor Daniel Howe’s bedroom window faced the eastern woods. Every morning he opened the curtains, looked out at the trees, and nodded once — the way a man nods at a business partner he neither likes nor trusts, but has chosen to keep.

The eleven photographs were pinned above Mara Voss’s desk in her Chicago apartment for four months before she drove to Eldenmoor.

School portraits, mostly. The particular tragedy of school portraits — the forced smiles, the bad haircuts chosen by adults, the sweaters. Children dressed by people who loved them, photographed by institutions that didn’t, preserved in a specific kind of ordinary that made their subsequent disappearances feel like a rip in the fabric of how things were supposed to go.

Eleven children. Spanning thirty years. Eldenmoor and its two neighboring townships. All classified as runaways by local police, a classification that Mara had learned, in seven years of investigative work, was what law enforcement called children when it didn’t want to look harder. Troubled backgrounds. Prior incidents. Known to be volatile. The language of pre-absolution — getting the paperwork ready to stop looking before the looking had properly begun.

She had a gift, people said, for caring about the cases nobody else cared about.

She thought of it less as a gift and more as an affliction. A inability to let the unsatisfying answer sit. An almost physical discomfort with the incomplete — files left open, doors left ajar, names pinned above desks for four months while everyone else moved on.

She drove into Eldenmoor on a Monday in October and felt immediately, involuntarily, safe.

It was the first thing she noticed. Not the charm of the town — the clean streets, the old church, the amber trees. Not the friendliness of the people, though they were friendly in a way that city-dwellers find initially suspicious and eventually disarming. The first thing she noticed, crossing the town line, was a physical easing. A loosening in her chest and shoulders she hadn’t known was there until it released, like a fist unclenching — the constant low-level vigilance she carried everywhere, the threat-assessment that ran like background software in the mind of every woman who had ever navigated the world alone, simply… quieted.

She gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, because she was Mara Voss, and Mara Voss did not trust feelings that arrived without explanation.

She checked into the Eldenmoor Inn. Unpacked methodically. Sat on the bed and looked at her laptop screen and tried to identify why her hands were very slightly trembling.

Something about this place, she wrote in her notes, is wrong in a way that presents as right. Investigate that feeling.

She went to meet the Pastor.