Steph A Rooni's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Five people had vanished from Coleman since spring, and Steph A Rooni could not name a single one. She knew this because she had tried. Last night she sat at her kitchen table and wrote down every rumor. By morning the page held four crossed-out guesses and one question mark. Coleman talked about the missing all the time, but nobody kept count. The town treated each disappearance like bad weather, then forgot. Steph refused to forget. Her cousin was one of the vanished, and the sheriff had stopped returning her calls. She knew rumors could not catch anyone. She needed real names, in order, with dates. So she drove to the one place that recorded them. The county newspaper office sat inside an old birchwood farmhouse at the edge of town. Its pale timber walls had gone gray with age. A peach tree grew beside the porch, heavy with fruit nobody picked. Steph knocked. No one answered. She tried the green door and found it open. Inside, dust covered the desks. The paper had folded two years back. But the back room held bound stacks of every issue ever printed. Steph pulled a chair to the window for light and began to read. She worked for three hours. She hunted the small print, the two-line notices buried under farm auctions and church suppers. Each time she found one, she wrote the name and the date. Slowly the page filled. A schoolteacher in April. A gas station clerk in May. A farmhand in June. Her cousin in July. A woman who sold peaches by the road in August. Five names. Five dates. Steph lined them up and stared. The pattern hit her like cold water. Each person had vanished during the last week of the month. Every single one. That was not weather. That was a schedule. Somebody was taking one person a month, and taking them careful enough that the town never noticed the rhythm. Steph's hands went still. She checked the calendar on the office wall. It showed the current month, and the last week had already begun. Somewhere in Coleman, the sixth person was living an ordinary day. They did not know they were next. Steph did not know their name yet. But now she knew when. She photographed her list and folded the page into her jacket. Outside, the light had dropped low behind the birchwood walls. As she stepped onto the porch, a shape burst from the peach tree above her head. A bat dropped fast, wings wide, and cut across the yard toward the last gray light. Steph flinched, then watched it go. She had come for a list, and she had it. But the list had told her something worse than she wanted. She had six days to find the killer's next target, and no idea who it was.