Mara Snowveil's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Mara pinned the photo above her sister's name the next morning. By noon the first call came in. By the end of the week she had eleven. A man said he'd seen her sister at a bus stop in Neverwinter. A woman said a gas station near the lake. A teenager said the library, but couldn't say which one. Mara wrote each tip on an index card and clipped them to the board with the others. The cards crowded out the children's section. She moved the children's section down. She needed a way to sort the calls before she drove herself broke chasing them. The community center had no budget for a second board, so she hauled the overflow boxes out of the brick storage tower at the lake and used the tower itself. She tacked cloth strips down the spiral stairwell, one strip per sighting, marked with date, caller, and place. Red for this week. Blue for last. She climbed the stairs and read them in order. From the landing she could see which neighborhoods repeated and which callers had called twice with different stories. The pattern she wanted did not appear. Three callers placed her sister downtown on the same Tuesday at three different hours. One described a coat her sister had never owned. Another described the locket, in detail, and Mara's hands shook until she realized the caller had seen the photo on the board and was repeating it back. She drove out anyway, twice. The first address was a coffee shop that had closed at noon. The second was a chained gate at a storage lot, snow packed hard along the path as if people walked there often, though no one was inside. She stood at the gate for a long time. A white fox with a black-streaked tail watched her from the lot's far corner, then slipped under the fence. She got back in the car with nothing. That night she sat on the tower's top step with her father's old compass in her lap. The glass was cracked. The needle had frozen pointing somewhere between north and west and would not move when she turned the case. She had carried it on the shelter drive eight months ago. She had carried it today. She understood, holding it, that every tip on the stairwell pointed the way the needle pointed: somewhere, nowhere, the same. She went back to the community center before dawn. She pulled every clipped card off the hope board and put them in a shoebox. She left her sister's photo and name on the wall and nothing else. From now on she would log calls, not chase them, and wait for one that named something only her sister would know. The board was quiet again. The waiting was worse than the chasing, and she had chosen it on purpose.