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“We’re really only interested in topics pertaining to the tornado,” I reassure her, then smoothly pick up the thread where she’d left off. “You said the vast majority of people didn’t have cell phones, so everyone was calling you?”

“Yes,” Bailey says, her eyes shooting to the phone again, perhaps making a mental note to watch her mouth. “Dad had them reroute all the calls to the house, since the station was destroyed. Mom was out with the road crews, running a chain saw, so I ended up taking the brunt of everything.”

“People were upset?” I ask.

“Well, yeah,” Bailey says. “I know it’s hard for you kids to imagine, but we didn’t know where everybody was all the time back then. We couldn’t track phones or text somebody or anything like that. If you wanted to find somebody who wasn’t home, you drove around looking for them.”

“And people couldn’t drive into town because the Guard had blocked off the roads?” I repeat. That particular detail hadn’t made it into Swinton’s article, something I make a note of on my pad, underlining it.

“Yeah, so people walked in,” Bailey confirms. “All the good it did them. Even those who lived in town couldn’t find their own homes, or at least, their lots. Trees were down, buildings were gone. We navigate by certain things, you know? When you use the church steeple to tell you where you are on Main Street, and then the steeple’s gone, suddenly Main Street looks real different.”

“Points of reference were lost,” I say, doing my own translation as I jot down some notes.

“What was it like to suddenly be responsible for the concerns of an entire town?”

“Hell,” Bailey says quickly. “It was hell. You know that young mother that died, with her baby? Her mom was out of town when it happened and was flying back from California. I was the one that had to tell her.” Bailey’s face was a carefully held mask of control. “When she got into town she came straight to our house. I’d just found out. Mom and Dad weren’t home. I . . .”

The mask slips, and Bailey’s face falls into a grimace.

“Take your time,” I tell her, dropping my voice low.

“I had a little . . .” She lifts her fingers, tapping the picnic table in front of her. “A little notebook next to the phone, with headings on the pages. I had one for the found, one for the missing, and one for the dead. They’d just uncovered them, that family. So I had their names and their ages listed. I didn’t know what to put for the baby because he wasn’t even a year yet, so I just put baby.”

Her voice quivers, and she takes a deep breath. “When I told her, that woman, she just fell down. Like her body had quit working. It was like watching a light go out.”

I’m nodding empathetically, and while I do genuinely feel for the teenage girl that Bailey had been, forced into the position of informing a woman that two generations of her family were gone, something else has my attention.

“Do you still have that notebook?” I ask her, doodling on my own pad, as if what I’m asking is inconsequential. “It could be a great visual, really tap into the chaos of the day.”

I’m imagining deep ink slashes through the names of the missing, as Bailey transfers them over to found—and one name that never made the trip.

“Back home, somewhere, probably,” Bailey says, her composure back. “I’d have to look through my stuff.”

“The newspaper reported that there were—” Bristal begins, but I step in.

“I think that’s about all we need,” I say, turning off my recording app. “Thank you, Bailey, you’ve really helped capture the mood and the tone of that day.”

Bristal kicks me under the table and gives me a nasty look, but I reply with the barest shake of the head. We say our goodbyes to Bailey, and Bristal lays into me the second she pulls the car door shut.

“What the hell? I thought we were going to ask her about the missing person that wasn’t accounted for.”

“That was my intent,” I tell Bristal. “But did you see how hard she braked when she accidentally mentioned that Mary Jennings hit her kids? She didn’t want to tell us anything we didn’t already know, and she definitely didn’t want to be on record bad-mouthing anyone.”

“But you weren’t asking her for gossip, you were asking about inaccurate data,” Bristal fires back.

“Asking the sheriff’s daughter about inaccurate data,” I tell her. “If there really was a flub and someone went missing and was never recovered, she might not want to implicate her father. And if we can get a name of the missing person, that’s more ammo when we go and talk to David Swinton.”

“The newspaper guy.” Bristal nods. “When’s that?”

“Still waiting on a response to my message,” I say, pulling out onto Main Street. Reflexively, I look at the bell tower on the Methodist church. It could use a coat of fresh paint, but it’s clearly a new build, like everything around it. The Henley of today is blocky and modern, the clay-baked bricks and stone cornices of the past all broken, buried, or turned into shrapnel on June 13, 1994.

“She’s right about the steeple,” I say, idly sharing my thoughts with Bristal as I drive her back to her car. “Everyone in town could probably draw it from memory.”

“Whether they go to church or not,” Bristal agrees. “Which, I don’t. Do you?”

“Go to church? Yeah, I mean—it’s expected. I’m a Chass.”

“I appreciate the irony,” Bristal says.