Clara Hastings had been in the Festering Depths eleven days, and already three neighbors had stopped answering their doors. She stood on the corner outside the fish market with her green satchel open, notebook out, pen ready. She asked the woman behind the counter about the empty apartment above the bakery. The woman wiped her hands on her apron and turned her back. Clara wrote nothing down. There was nothing to write. She pushed her glasses up her nose and tried the cobbler next. He shut the top half of his door before she finished her sentence. Two men on the bench across the way watched her walk past and went quiet. Clara felt the heat crawl up her neck. She knew how she sounded. A stranger in a white shirt asking who was gone, without a single name to offer. Even to her own ears the questions came out wrong, like accusations dressed up as concern. She had come here to write a piece on the vanishings. Her editor wanted proof, not rumor. Without a list, she had nothing. Without nothing, she was next. That thought had kept her up three nights running. She stopped when she saw the chapel at the end of the lane. The wooden walls leaned a little. A tall board stood by the front steps, and the board was covered in paper. Clara crossed the street. Five flyers. Each one said MISSING above a printed face. She read every name. She copied every date. Her pen shook, but the list grew. A baker's son. A schoolteacher. A dockworker who'd left for a shift and never clocked in. She had names now. Real ones. "You're the new tenant." Clara turned. The old woman from the boarding house stood behind her in fuzzy pink slippers and a floral coat, arms folded tight against the cold. Mildred Kravitz, her landlady, the one who'd cataloged Clara's boxes on move-in day and asked what her father did for work. Clara had been avoiding her for a week. "I'm just reading," Clara said. "You're writing." Mildred's blue eyes went to the notebook. "That's six, if you count the fiddler nobody put up a flyer for. And seven if you count the girl from the laundry. Her mother won't say her name out loud." Clara's pen stopped. "You know all of them." "I know who paid rent and who didn't come back for their mail." Mildred tilted her head. "You've been asking the wrong people, dear. Loudly." "Will you tell me the rest?" Mildred looked at the flyers, then at Clara's shoes. "Come home. I'll put on tea. But once you write it down, you're on the list too. You understand that." Clara closed the notebook. She followed the old woman up the lane. She had her names. She also had a witness who knew hers.

Mildred's tea sat cold on the saucer. Clara had written seven names in her notebook and drawn seven lines beside them, one for each thing she knew. The lines were mostly empty. A baker's son. A schoolteacher. A dockworker. A fiddler. A laundry girl. Two more the landlady had named in a whisper. Clara needed the thing that tied them together, or she was guessing at where the taker would reach next. Guessing, she'd learned, was how a person ended up on a flyer. She went to the police station on the corner with the brick front and the neat white trim. The desk clerk barely looked up. Clara asked for anyone working the disappearances. A young deputy came out from the back, black hair, uniform still stiff at the collar. Four months on the job, she'd heard at the market. The other officers called him something behind his back. "Officer Marsh," he said. "You're the reporter." "Clara Hastings. I have seven names. I need to know what they had in common." He looked at her list. His jaw tightened. "Come around back." He took her to a side room with a folding table. On the table sat a cardboard box of paper the station had pulled from the community chapel's basement, water-stained, half-sorted. "Nobody's had time," he said. "Or nobody wants to." Clara sat and started reading. Church rolls. Utility complaints. A petition about the tunnels. Nothing lined up. She was ready to close the box when Marsh set another page in front of her. "Blood drive," he said. "Two months back. Church basement." She took the sheet. Phone. Email. Donor ID. Check-in time. Signature. She ran her finger down the column of names. The baker's son. The schoolteacher. The dockworker. The fiddler. The laundry girl. All seven. Every single one had signed in on the same afternoon. Her hand went cold. "They all gave blood. On the same day." "Same hour, most of them." Marsh's voice stayed flat, but he pulled a chair closer. "Whoever ran that drive has their names, their phones, their addresses." "Who ran it?" "Sheet doesn't say. Nobody at the chapel remembers signing off on it." The door opened. A young man stood in it, brown hair sticking up, jaw set. Marcus Webb. Clara had seen his flyer taped inside the chapel window. His grandmother. Marcus looked at the sheet in her hand. "She donated in September," he said. "She told me. She was proud of it." Clara turned the sheet toward him. He found the line. His finger stopped. He didn't speak. "Eight," Clara said. Marsh took the page back and slid it into a folder. "I'm keeping this off the log for now. If the wrong person hears we have it, we lose it." Clara had her pattern. She also had a list that named her next, and two men who now knew she was holding it.

Marcus called four times before noon. Clara let the phone buzz on the boarding house table and watched her landlady's shadow pass the door twice. On the fifth call she picked up. Marcus was breathing hard. He said he was going to the station to make them search the tunnels today. Clara told him to meet her at the shuttered diner off the old highway instead, the one with the striped awning and the boarded windows. She said she had something to show him. She said if he walked into the station shouting, they would both lose the list. She got there first. The front door was chained, but the side door gave when she leaned on it. Inside smelled like old grease and rain. She sat in a booth with cracked red vinyl and set her satchel on the table. She took out her notepad and the folded photocopy Marsh had slipped her that morning. Her hands were not steady. She pressed them flat until they were. Marcus came in fast. His jaw was set the way it had been at the station. He did not sit. "They think she wandered," he said. "She didn't wander." "I know." "Then why are we in a dead diner." "Because every time you call me, someone hears. Because the officer helping us is one bad day from being pulled off this. Because your grandmother's name is on a piece of paper three people are trying to keep alive." He stared at her. She turned the photocopy around. It was a rough portrait, drawn from a witness description Marsh had pulled from an old vagrancy file — a bald man with a long, dirty beard and a plaid shirt. Marsh had matched the description to a groundskeeper who had keys to the chapel basement two months ago. "This is who ran the blood drive," Clara said. "Marsh is pulling his address tonight. Quietly. If you go to the front desk this afternoon, that address disappears into a file cabinet and we never see it." Marcus sat down. He looked at the portrait for a long time. He touched the edge of the paper. "Six months ago a key went missing from her drawer," he said. "Spare key. Nobody could tell me who took it." "Then help me find him before he uses it again." He was quiet. Then he nodded once. He gave her his grandmother's Tuesday card game address, her medication log, the name of the neighbor who watched her mail. He said he would stop calling. He said he would wait. Clara walked back to the boarding house with the portrait in her satchel and a list of new leads in her notepad. Her landlady was on the porch, teacup in hand, watching the road. She smiled at Clara the way a person smiles at a window they mean to close.

Clara came up the porch steps at dusk. Mildred was still in the same chair, teacup empty, watching the road like she had all afternoon. The screen door creaked when Clara pulled it open. "Long day at the library?" Mildred said. She did not look up. "You left before six. You came back at noon. You left again. Now it's dark." "Deadline week." "Third deadline this month, then." Mildred set the cup on the rail. "Look. The man in unit four kept those same hours. In and out. Wouldn't say where. He's not in unit four anymore." Clara's hand tightened on the satchel strap. She made herself smile. "Come inside. I'll show you." She led Mildred to the kitchen table and unbuckled the satchel. She took out a folded sheet and flattened it under the lamp. A handwritten note. Daily Journal at the top. Market Trends. Due Friday, five o'clock. Two arrows in the margin. Research stats. Add quotes. Check sources. She had written it that morning at the diner, before Marcus arrived. "Market piece," Clara said. "It's boring work. I've been hitting the county records office and the chamber of commerce. Old ledgers. Nobody keeps those files past four, so I go early and stay late." Mildred picked up the note. She read it twice. She turned it over. "Daily Journal pays on delivery?" "Half on delivery. That's why the hours." Mildred set the note down. Her mouth moved like she was tasting something. "Honestly, I thought you were seeing somebody. Or worse." "Just the deadline." "You should have said. I've been telling the woman across the street you were up to something." She frowned at her own hands. "I'll walk that back tomorrow. She talks." Clara kept her face still. "I'd appreciate that." Mildred pushed the note back across the table. "Bring me a copy when it prints. I want to see my tenant's name in the paper for once." "I will." Mildred went to the sink and rinsed her cup. Clara folded the note and slid it back into the satchel. Her hands were steady this time. Upstairs, she sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the pipes. Mildred had bought it. Mildred would also tell the woman across the street, and the baker, and whoever else she had already told. The story would spread the way Mildred's stories spread. Clara had a week, maybe less, before someone with real reason to check called the Daily Journal and asked which market piece she was writing. She opened her notepad to a clean page. She wrote: Friday. Marsh has the address by Wednesday. Move on the groundskeeper before the cover breaks. She packed a change of clothes and the sketch into a smaller bag. Tomorrow night she would not come home. There was a run-down hotel out by the airstrip that took cash.

Clara left the house before Mildred woke. She drove past the airstrip and paid cash for two nights at a hotel with a broken ice machine in the lobby. Then she called Marsh from the room phone. He gave her the groundskeeper's address and one more thing. A homicide detective from the city was already asking questions about the missing eight. Off duty. Off the books. Marsh had passed him her name. They met at a laundromat that stayed open all night. Clara picked it because nobody watches a woman folding shirts at two in the morning. She took a dryer in the back and waited. A man came in with an empty duffel and no laundry. Gray in the beard. Hooded sweatshirt. He sat two chairs down and read a flyer taped to the wall. "You're the reporter," he said. He did not look at her. "Marsh says you have a sketch." She slid the photocopy across the plastic seat between them. Marcus Chen picked it up, folded it once, and put it in his sweatshirt pocket. "I've been on this three weeks," he said. "My sister's boy lived here. He donated at that drive. Now he doesn't answer his phone." Clara felt her stomach drop. Nine, then. Not eight. "I have the groundskeeper's address," she said. "I can't sit on the street in front of his house. Half this town knows my face by now." "I rented a van this morning." He pulled a key from his pocket and set it on the seat. "Tinted glass in the cargo box. Parked two blocks from the address. I already ran the plates through a friend. Nothing on him. Not even a ticket." "Clean is its own kind of dirty." "That's what I thought." She took the key. "When?" "Tonight. He works a shift at the cemetery until nine. I'll drive. You watch from the back. If he comes home alone, we log it. If he brings someone with him, we call it in and we're done pretending." "Marsh gets pulled if we call it in." "Marsh knows." She folded a shirt she had not washed. "Why me? You could do this alone." He looked at her then. Tired eyes. Not unkind. "Because you've got the names and I've got the badge, and neither one of us has enough on our own." At ten past nine they were parked in the cargo box. Clara sat on a milk crate with her notepad open. Marcus watched the mirror from the driver's seat through a gap in the curtain. The groundskeeper's truck pulled into the driveway at nine forty. He got out alone. He walked to the passenger side and opened the door. He lifted a woman from the seat. She was not moving. He carried her to the house and shut the door with his foot. Clara wrote the time down. Her hand shook. The lead was alive, and so was the woman, maybe, for now.