Chapter 6

Rowan didn't tell anyone about the note.

She tucked it into an old dictionary on the shelf, between the W pages, pressed flat. She didn't know why. She just knew she needed to put it somewhere safe until she understood what it meant.

The next day, she went to the historical society.

It was in a converted side room off the old church. Shelves held yearbooks, family histories, and yellowed bound volumes of the town newspaper. The room smelled like old paper and camphor. The window faced north, so the light was soft, as if it had been filtered through years. Ruth Patterson was polishing a glass display case and looked up, her eyes bright behind her glasses.

"Rowan," Ruth said. "I knew you'd come."

Rowan sat at the table. "Ruth, I want to ask you about the Hollow Creek Community Music Scholarship."

Ruth's polishing cloth stopped. She was quiet for a moment, folded it, set it by the bucket, and sat down across from her, her voice softer than usual. "That business… it's been twenty years."

"I heard the money was 'postponed for reasons undisclosed,'" Rowan said. "What happened after that?"

"After that, there was no after," Ruth said. "Postponed. And then it was gone. The account was closed. They said the money was returned to the donors. But whether it was returned, or to whom—nobody in town asked." She paused, choosing her words. "Rowan, that was a lot of money. Enough to put a girl through four years of school and feed her whole family."

"Sarah West," Rowan said.

Ruth nodded, her expression complicated. "Sarah was a good kid. She had a voice that made the hair stand up on your arms. Mr. Hale was proudest of her. Said she was the best thing to come out of Hollow Creek in decades. That scholarship—it was made to send her to school."

"But she never went," Rowan said.

"Never went." Ruth repeated it softly. "The scholarship fell through. The next year, she left town. Nobody saw her go. Her mother, Nora, still lives in that little house at the edge of town. Never leaves. Never sees anybody."

Ruth looked out the window, toward the gray line of pines at the edge of town. Her voice dropped. "The girl didn't have an easy time after. I heard she waited tables in Portland, sang in bars. And then… she was gone. Officially, an overdose." She looked back at Rowan. "How much pain do you think a person has to be in, to choose that?"

Rowan said nothing. She thought of Sarah's shy smile in the black-and-white photo. She thought of Toby's line—overdose, officially. She wanted to ask Ruth a hundred things, but she asked only one.

"Ruth, who handled the money?"

Ruth opened her mouth, and for a long moment, didn't speak. "The treasurer back then was Leonard Pritchard."

Leonard Pritchard. Rowan knew him. Owned Pritchard's Hardware on Main Street. President of the chamber of commerce. On the church board. The man who always smiled at town council meetings, who spoke in careful, measured sentences, whom everybody respected. His house was the biggest in town. His pickup was always spotless.

"Leonard handled the money?" Rowan asked.

"He was treasurer for several years," Ruth said. "Then his books came out clean, his reputation was good, and he moved up. She paused, and there was a careful hesitation in her voice. "Rowan, I'm old. I talk in circles. But some things, if I don't say them, you'll find out on your own anyway."

"Go ahead."

Ruth leaned in. "They say the money was 'returned.' But the donors—you won't find a single signature, a single receipt, showing who got it back." She looked at Rowan. "The books were clean because the books were clean. Whether the actual money went where it was supposed to—Rowan, in my age, the thing I've learned to fear most is a clean set of books."

She picked up the cloth again and went back to polishing the display case, as if the words had been nothing more than a mote of dust rising and settling in the room.

Rowan sat there, letting it sink in. She thought of the funeral line about the apology. She thought of how do you expect me to pretend I didn't see that money. She thought of the circled letter on the invoice.

"Ruth," she said, "what was Mr. Hale's role with the scholarship?"

Ruth thought about it. "He was the advisor. He ran the music auditions—who was qualified, who got the money. He didn't handle the money. The treasurer did." She paused. "But I remember—every scholarship matter, big or small, needed both signatures. Treasurer and advisor. Both."

Both signatures.

A possibility moved through Rowan, cold on her back: when the money "disappeared," it hadn't been a one-person job. It needed the treasurer's books. It needed the advisor's signature.

She thought of the last line in the blue notebook—five thousand dollars, it wasn't your fault, it was mine.

She sat for a while longer. Then she said, "Ruth, do you remember what the old ledger looked like?"

"I remember," Ruth said. "Dark brown leather, worn at the corners. Gold lettering on the cover: Hollow Creek Community Music Scholarship. Every time Mr. Hale came in, he'd take it off the shelf and open to a few middle pages, and read for a long time." She paused. "I peeked at those pages once, after he'd left. They were the income and expense records around 2003. I remember them because the ledger disappeared later, and I've always wondered what was in those pages."

Rowan's heart beat faster. "What did they say?"

Ruth shook her head. "Just numbers. I couldn't make sense of them. But I remember one page had a small pencil mark in the margin—not a word, a symbol. Like a circled letter." She tried to recall. "The letter… looked like a P."

"P," Rowan repeated.

"That's right," Ruth said. "I remember wondering why a P was in the ledger. Then I forgot about it."

P. Pritchard.

Rowan's hand tightened on her bag strap. She didn't ask anything else. She stood up, thanked Ruth, and walked to the door. At the door, Ruth called after her.

"Rowan."

She turned.

Ruth wasn't looking at her. She was looking at the glass in her hands, speaking almost to herself. "Mr. Hale came here a lot, the last few years. He wasn't looking at the exhibits. He'd stand in front of the old ledgers on the shelf for a long time, flipping through a very old book." She paused. "He said he was looking for something. Something he should have looked for decades ago, but never dared to."

Rowan stood there.

"Did he find it?" she asked.

Ruth finally looked up and studied her through her glasses for a long moment. "I don't know if he found it. I only know the old ledger disappeared. And nobody ever knew where it went."

Outside, the wind moved through the pines. Rowan gripped her bag strap—inside were the old newspaper clippings Toby had copied from the library, every page pointing toward a name she could less and less see clearly.

Leonard Pritchard.

She walked out of the historical society and stood in the bright autumn sunlight, but she felt cold on her back. Behind her, the old church bell rang once more, slow and deliberate.

She thought of Ruth's line—what I fear most is a clean set of books. She thought that maybe all of Hollow Creek was sitting on a book like that: clean on top, something pressed underneath.

And she was, inch by inch, reaching down toward it.