Grant was at the office computer when I got back, invoices open in three different tabs, and he didn't try to minimize anything when I told him what I'd seen at the crossing. He just rubbed his eyes and said, "I know it's rough out there. I was going to have Della's crew lay boards before the weekend."
"Boards don't fix rot, Grant, and they don't fix a quarter mile of unmarked path along a drop in the dark with candles instead of flashlights, which is apparently the aesthetic."
He didn't argue, which told me more than an argument would have. Instead he pulled up the bank account on the screen and turned the monitor toward me, something he's never once done voluntarily in six years of running this place together. "Before you say anything else, I need you to see this."
The balance was lower than I expected by a wide margin. He walked me through it: Della's deposit, twenty-two hundred dollars, paid three weeks ago, already spent, mostly on Deb's back wages from January and a truck payment that would've otherwise gone to collections.
"So there's no deposit left to return," I said.
"Not sitting in the account, no. If we cancel, we're refunding money we don't have, which means it comes out of whatever we've got left, which is basically the fund you've been building toward retiring off the bus route."
I sat down across from him, because I needed to, and because standing while hearing that felt like it would make me say something I couldn't take back. "You spent my retirement before you asked me a single question about whether I was comfortable with how we earned it."
"I didn't spend your retirement, I covered payroll with a deposit from a legitimate booking, and I was going to make it back before you ever needed to touch that account. I still can, if the weekend happens the way it's supposed to."
"The weekend as planned ends with strangers walking a rotted crossing in the dark, led there by a brochure using my name as proof of something I never said. There is no version of 'as supposed to' that I'm willing to fund twice."
He was quiet a moment, then reached into a drawer and pulled out a single printed page, an email, he said, forwarded from an address he didn't recognize, dated the week before. "Read this before you decide the whole thing's built on nothing."
It was short. Someone in Concord claimed to have seen a man matching the age progression at a diner off Route 3, ordinary, unremarkable, no name, no callback number, signed only 'a concerned local.' Nothing in it mentioned County Road 18, the service track, or any route at all.
"This doesn't say anything about where he supposedly went, Grant. It's a stranger thinking they recognized a face in a newspaper photo. That's it."
"It's something. It's more than nothing, which is what we had before."
"It's not evidence of a route, and I notice you're showing me a printout, not the actual email. I want to see the original message, the header, the sender, before one more brochure goes out the door citing it as anything."
He didn't move to get it, just sat there with his jaw tight, and that hesitation, more than the empty account, more than the rotted crossing, was what kept me up that night, turning the page over in my hands like it might say something different in better light.