The lodge's great room had thirty folding chairs set up for Sunday's briefing. Eleven people were attending: the three who'd transferred from us, Della's four direct walk bookings, and four overnight guests she'd persuaded to join since Friday. The number was back where our original bus list had started, though the names weren't all the same. Pulling our vehicle had not emptied the road.
Maren arrived a few minutes after I did, no coat yet off, holding a manila envelope against her chest like it might wander away. "I called Della this morning and told her I wanted five minutes before anybody laces up their boots. She agreed because she couldn't think of a way to say no in front of a room full of paying guests."
Della stood near the fireplace when we walked in together, and I watched her face do the math on whether stopping us would look worse than letting us speak, and land, correctly, on the second option.
"I'm Tobin's sister," Maren said, once the room had settled, no introduction needed beyond that, and I watched eleven strangers rearrange their attention around those four words. "I asked to say a few things before anyone drives out there tomorrow."
She opened the envelope and laid two pages on the table at the front, side by side, the way she'd shown me three days earlier. "This is the actual release notice from Northlake Missing Persons. It says, in their words, that this image is a computer-generated age progression, not a photograph, not a sighting, not evidence of current location."
She laid the laminated route card beside it. "This is what's been handed out at your check-in table. Same face. Different claim. It says 'recent likeness, seen in the region,' and credits a direction of travel to a responding officer's assessment like it's a fact instead of a guess made under pressure twenty years ago."
"I'm that officer," I said, when a man near the back asked who'd made the assessment. "I floated a hypothesis to a search coordinator in 2004 because the track led toward higher ground and Tobin liked to hike. I never saw him near it. I want every person in this room to hear that distinction before you decide whether tomorrow's walk means what the card implies it means."
A woman in the second row, one of the three who'd transferred from us, asked if that meant there was no chance he'd actually gone that way. "It means nobody knows," Maren said, before I could answer. "Not me, not her, not the card. Twenty years of not knowing doesn't turn into knowing because somebody printed a sentence that sounds like it."
Della stepped in at that point, color rising in her face. "The lodge isn't claiming to solve anything. We're honoring an anniversary and offering a walk along a public route. People can draw their own conclusions."
"People can't draw honest conclusions from a card that's already drawn one for them," Maren said, and something in her voice had gone very even, very tired, the voice of someone who'd had this exact argument with different furniture many times before.
A man near the front asked Maren directly whether she wanted the walk stopped. She considered it longer than I expected. "I want my brother to stay a person, not a theme for a weekend. If you walk that road tomorrow and think of him as a man who went missing and whose family still doesn't know why, that's fine by me. If you walk it looking for a route to a man who might be sitting in a diner in Concord, you're looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place, and I won't stand up here and be your proof that you're not."
Four of the eleven asked Della for refunds before the briefing ended, folding chairs scraping back one at a time. The remaining seven, including all three transferred school customers, stayed, some out of stubbornness, one man saying plainly that he'd come for the walk regardless of whose guess started it. Grant stood near the fireplace, listening without looking at me.
Maren folded the release notice back into its envelope, watching the room thin out. "I did what I came to do," she said quietly, to me, not to the room. "I'm not doing a second show tomorrow at the trailhead. If people still want to walk after hearing this, that's theirs to carry, not mine."
I told her I understood, and meant it, though driving home that night I counted seven people still intending to walk a track whose damaged crossing I'd inspected four days earlier. Nothing in that room had changed the timber. Being heard and being stopped were not, after all, the same thing.