Maren Voss came into the classroom the next morning before I'd even gotten the space heater going, and she set a folded flyer on the front desk the way you'd set down something you didn't want to touch any longer than necessary.
I'd met Maren twice over the years, once at a community meeting a decade back, once more recently when she'd come asking, politely, whether the driving school had any involvement in what she'd started hearing about around town. She coordinates school lunch programs now, has her brother's same narrow jaw, and carries herself like someone who has spent twenty years being asked questions she can't answer and has run out of patience for being asked them gently.
"Somebody put this through half the mailboxes on Birch Street," she said, nodding at the flyer. "I want you to look at the picture next to the one from Della's brochure."
I unfolded it. On the left was an image I recognized instantly because I'd seen it on the news two weeks earlier, the Northlake Missing Persons Office's newly released age progression of Tobin Voss, rendered to suggest how he might appear at forty-one. On the right, in the Pinewake brochure Grant had handed out at the counter, was the same face, uncredited, under the words RECENT LIKENESS, SEEN IN THE REGION.
"That's not a sighting," I said. "That's the progression image. I saw the release notice."
"I know what it is," Maren said. "I had to look at the release notice too, same day everybody else did, because nobody called our family before they sent it to the papers. And now it's sitting in a brochure for a candlelight weekend like somebody actually saw my brother walking around with a beard they invented for him."
I asked if I could keep the flyer, and she said she'd brought it for exactly that reason. I went and found Grant in the garage, and I didn't raise my voice, because raising my voice has never once made Grant hear something faster.
"This is the age progression," I said, holding it up. "It's an illustration. A guess at a face, made by a computer and an artist, not a photograph, not a sighting, not evidence of anybody seeing him anywhere."
Grant wiped his hands on a rag, slow. "Della said it was a recent photo someone submitted."
"Della's wrong, or Della's lying, and either way we just put our name on a lie about a missing man's face."
"I didn't know that's what it was."
"You didn't ask," I said, "and that's the part I can't get past. You printed RECENT LIKENESS under a stranger's face that his own sister had to find out about from a press release, same as everybody else in this county."
I pulled every brochure off the front counter myself, all forty-some of them, and dropped them in the recycling bin by the door. Grant watched me do it and didn't try to stop me, though I could see the arithmetic running behind his eyes, how many walk-in bookings those brochures might have brought, how much of March that bin full of paper represented.
"We lost the Hendersons' referral because of those," he said quietly. "They were going to send their whole church group."
"Then we lost it honestly," I said, "which is better than keeping it the way we were keeping it."
Maren was still standing by the door when I came back out front, and she thanked me for pulling the brochures, though her voice didn't have much relief in it, just the flat tiredness of someone who's watched this particular fire get lit and put out more times than she can count. "It doesn't stop the lodge part," she said. "Just stops you being part of it."
I told her that was the part I could control today, and I was going to go find out, before the week was over, exactly what the lodge part still was.