This story is reconstructed based on FBI records.
The fifteen-passenger bus still smelled like last winter's road salt when I climbed in to check the heater vents, and that smell, more than anything, has always meant the season is real now, not just a date on a calendar. Bellwether gets its first real snow by Thanksgiving most years, but the driving business doesn't wake up until February, when the roads turn to glass and parents start calling Steady Mile Driver Training asking us to teach their kids what black ice actually looks like before it finds them.
I was running my hand along the defrost line when I found the clipboard wedged behind the driver's seat, and on it was a list of names I didn't recognize, eleven of them, next to a header that read ALDER CROWN WINTER MEMORIAL DRIVE, dated for the twenty-sixth.
I carried it inside to where my son was salting the front steps so nobody's insurance company would have a reason to call us first. It was February nineteenth, 2024, another winter morning in our corner of northern New Hampshire. Grant's thirty-three, built like his father, and he gets a particular look on his face when he knows he's about to be asked something he's already rehearsed an answer for.
"That's the Pinewake booking," he said, not looking up from the salt bag. "Della Kersey wants a guided drive out to the lodge, overnight package, five hundred a head. It's going to cover January's shortfall and then some."
"Eleven people paid five hundred dollars to ride in our bus to a lodge," I said. "What's the other half of that sentence, Grant."
He set the bag down. "It's the Voss anniversary. Twenty years this month since that nursing student went missing off County Road 18. Della's doing a whole weekend around it, candlelight thing at the lodge, and part of the package is we drive the route he would've driven and walk the last stretch out to where the car got found."
I'd heard worse ideas sold as tourism, but this one had my name wrapped around it before I'd agreed to anything, because there was a brochure sitting on the front counter with STEADY MILE DRIVER TRAINING printed under a photo of the Alder Crown Range, and beneath that, smaller: Guided by Lenora Sayer, retired officer, first responder to the original scene.
"I responded to an empty car," I said. "Not to Tobin. Put my old title beside a promised route and people will think I saw which way he went. You know I didn't."
"People don't read that close, Ma."
"People paid five hundred dollars. They'll read exactly that close."
Grant came up the steps wiping his hands on his jeans, and for a second he looked less like a grown man running half of a failing driving school and more like he had at nine, caught having told a teacher I'd be at some fundraiser I'd never agreed to attend. "We need this. January we didn't clear enough to cover Deb's hours, let alone the truck payment. Della's deposit alone gets us through March."
"Then we earn March honestly. I'm not driving anybody anywhere on the strength of a brochure that makes it sound like I know something I don't know."
"You were there, though. You always said if anybody asked you the right questions you'd have had theories."
"Having a theory and having evidence are different animals, Grant, and that brochure doesn't distinguish between them, and neither, apparently, do you."
He didn't answer that. He picked the ice bag back up and started working the next step, and I stood there in the cold doorway with the clipboard still in my hand, eleven names on it, and underneath, in Grant's handwriting, a note: confirm route w/ Mom before Fri.
I hadn't confirmed anything. I hadn't been asked anything. Whatever this was, it had already been printed, priced, and sold before I'd been given the first honest sentence about it, and that, more than the cold, was what put a knot low in my stomach as I walked back to the bus to finish the inspection I'd started an ordinary hour ago.