MARA VANCE's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

The blue thread led Mara to the city hall records, and the records gave her a name. She sat at the archive desk under the tall arched windows and read the coat entry twice. One owner. One address. Her black Labrador, Luna, lay at her feet, chin on her boot. Ten years of dead ends, and now a name on a card. Mara wrote the address in her notebook and stood. Elara Prentiss caught her sleeve before she reached the door. The archivist still wore her ink-stained gray gloves. She had matched the thread to this coat, and now she frowned at the card in Mara's hand. "Wait," Elara said. "Look at the date." Mara looked. The ink on the entry was faded. The catalog date was thirty-one years old. "So it's old," Mara said. "The address is still here." "Addresses move," Elara said. "People die. Records don't update themselves. You go knocking on a thirty-year-old address, you might scare the wrong person." But Mara was already tired of waiting. She had a coat, a thread, a name. She left with Luna at her heel. The house at the address was small and clean. A gray-haired woman answered the door. She had never owned a blue coat. She had lived here nineteen years. The name on Mara's card meant nothing to her. Luna sniffed the doorstep and sat, calm, uninterested. No fear. No hidden thing. Just a stranger, confused, asking why a detective stood on her porch. Mara apologized and walked back to her car. The lead was wrong. The address was a ghost. She had chased a dead entry and frightened an innocent woman. Her hands, steady at the crime scene, shook now on the steering wheel. She drove back to the city hall. Elara had not moved from the desk. She did not say she'd warned her. She slid a second card across the wood. "While you were gone, I pulled the transfer log," Elara said. "The catalog tracks resales. That coat was sold once. Twenty years ago." Her gloved finger tapped a fresh line of ink. "New owner. New address. Recorded, dated, signed." Mara read the second name. It was not the first. This one was recent, real, alive. She pressed her palm flat on the card to stop her hand from shaking. "Don't go alone this time," Elara said. "And don't go tonight." Mara looked at the name for a long moment. Luna stood, sensing the change, ready to move. The first trail had died. But it had shaken a second one loose, and this one led somewhere. Mara folded the card into her pocket, beside the sealed blue thread. She had a person now. A living one. Tomorrow, she would find out if he owned a blue coat.