The words made Walter put down his coffee. The old Mill Creek Bridge was three miles outside town, and nobody had used its official name for years. Trucks still crossed it, though the county had closed the lower pedestrian road after a retaining wall slipped during spring flooding. Elena Ward was not a name he recognized. He asked Naomi whether her mother had explained the note. She shook her head. Elena had been working temporary shifts as a school bus mechanic. Two days earlier she had taken photographs beneath the bridge and become frightened when someone noticed her there.
"She said we had to leave before the storm," Naomi explained. "But she didn't say why."
Walter called his former rescue partner, Ruth Alvarez, who now supervised the county's overnight shelter. Ruth told him the highway was closed and a school gym was being opened as an emergency warming center. She also said that no report of a missing woman named Elena had reached her desk. Walter repeated the information carefully, then telephoned the sheriff's nonemergency line and provided a description. He did not tell the children that he was already imagining their mother stranded in her car.
The diner had a narrow stockroom with an old sofa. Walter offered the three children blankets and a place to rest, keeping the dining room door unlocked for emergency workers. Naomi insisted on staying by the front window. Walter let her, as long as she drank tea and kept a dry blanket around her shoulders. Caleb fell asleep sitting upright; Lucy asked whether Walter had grandchildren. He said he had a son who lived two states away and called too seldom. Lucy accepted that answer with the serious expression of a child who understood absence.
Near midnight, a road worker in orange waterproof clothing stopped for coffee. When Walter described Elena, the man looked toward the snow-covered highway. He had seen a woman walking alone near Mill Creek Bridge just before dusk. She appeared to be carrying a large document envelope. A pickup truck had been following at a distance.
Denise's name was not written in any public rescue announcement, and Walter did not understand why the omission troubled him. He remembered how steadily the injured woman had answered questions despite her pain. Years later, that ordinary decision to write things down would matter more than anyone could have guessed. Now.
Walter telephoned the sheriff again. This time, before the dispatcher could finish taking the report, the lights across town went dark. The generator in Walter's diner caught with a groan, and the neon sign flickered back to life. Out beyond its circle of light, someone began pounding on the locked delivery door.