Mara Snowveil's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

The shelter two towns over had a chained gate now. Mara stood in front of it with her hands in her coat pockets and read the notice taped behind the iron bars. Closed in September. Residents relocated, records sealed. She had driven three hours through Neverwinter slush to confirm what a phone call could have told her, because a phone call would have made it real too fast. Eight months ago, a stranger had told her a woman with her face had slept here for two nights. Mara had arrived the next morning to an empty cot. Now even the cot was gone. She pulled the locket out of her pocket and held it against her glove. The hinge was iced shut again. Inside was a photograph of her sister at sixteen, the only picture Mara had not lost in the move. She had carried it every day since the tip came in. She had told herself she carried it so she could show people. She knew she carried it so she would not have to print a copy and pin it to the board at the community center, beside the hundreds of faces she had pinned for everyone else. A white fox crossed the road behind her. Its tail was split black down one side. It stopped at the tree line and looked at her the way animals look at something that is not moving correctly. Mara realized she had been standing at the gate for almost an hour. Her feet had gone numb. The fox went into the trees. She got back in the car. She drove to the lighthouse on the way home. It was a brick tower at the edge of the lake, decommissioned, leased to the community center for storage. Mara had a key because she ran the hope board, and the hope board's overflow lived in boxes on the second landing. She climbed the stairs in her wet boots and sat on the top step with the locket in her lap. She thought about the woman who had given her the tip. A volunteer at the shelter, older, kind, gone now along with the records. Mara had her first name and nothing else. The trail ended at a chained gate and a sealed file, and she had been pretending for eight months that it didn't. She took her phone out and photographed the picture inside the locket through the frosted glass. The image came out blurred but usable. She did not post it yet. She drove back to the community center, unlocked the side door, and pinned a blank index card to the hope board in the empty space above the children's section. She wrote her sister's name on it in pencil. Tomorrow she would bring the photo. Tonight she needed the name to be up there, in her own handwriting, where she would have to look at it every morning until she found a fresher lead or admitted there wasn't one coming.