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“Good night,” I call after him, watching as the final sparks settle into coals, and thinking about the cracks of the world, which the unlucky few could fall through.

Thirteen

David Swinton hasn’t aged much since I approached him as a third grader and told him that I was going to be a journalist. On that day, he bent down to look me in the eye and said, “I believe you.” Now, I’m a full six inches taller than him, but I still feel slightly intimidated when he stands to greet me and Bristal when we walk into the library. This man kept the Hometown Henley Headlines running all by himself for years, right up until a news conglomerate bought him out in in the early 2000s. David knows every man, woman, and child in Henley by name, and is friendly with all the right people in Markham County as a whole.

If anybody is going to know the name Denise Halverson, it’s him. Which is why I need to execute this meeting perfectly.

“Lydia, it’s good to see you,” David says, giving my hand a quick, professional handshake. “How’s your dad doing? Still defending the despicable?”

“He prefers to think of it as being a beacon of hope for the downtrodden,” I say easily, settling into a folding chair while he greets Bristal, who eyes him dubiously and responds in monosyllables.

We have the library basement all to ourselves; decorations from last years’ summer reading program—which had been luau themed—are stacked in the corner, along with boxes that are marked for recycling. The librarians had borrowed produce boxes from the food pantry for storage, and I can see a row of yellowed, cracked spines through the air holes. Books that are irrelevant, obsolete, or falling apart have been culled, awaiting their new lives as fresh paper, with different words printed on them. I think about Bailey Foxglove’s notations in her journal, and wonder if someone else’s thoughts are captured in the margins of those books, a phone number, a grocery list, or underlined passages and some brief flash of illumination as the reader made a discovery or got excited about an idea.

Now those ideas are collecting dust and waiting to be pulped.

“Nice spread,” Bristal says, drawing my attention to the tables that David has set up. They’re strewn with newspaper clippings and photos, all of them pertaining to the tornado. She begins taking pictures of everything, double-tapping her phone and moving hastily around the tables, barely pausing. She downed two energy drinks and drained her vape pen in the parking lot, and I imagine her camera roll as a modern impressionist masterpiece: everything blurry, nothing to hold on to.

“This is great!” I say, plastering a smile on my face as I try to summon some enthusiasm. It’s a treasure trove, but I’m focused on the name Denise Halverson, and the ominous question mark that followed it.

“This is the front-desk bell from the old Fairlawn Hotel,” David says, lifting a brass bell. “It was recovered from the creek in 1997, when a few kids who were searching for crawdads found it. I cleaned it up and gave it to the historical society.”

He rings it, the clapper hitting the sides with a high-pitched tone that might have sent bellhops running in the 1920s but makes me want to make a break for the emergency exit.

“That’s so cool!” I say, keeping my smile in place.

“If you ring that again, I’m going to break your nose with it,” Bristal says.

“Fair enough,” David says, resting the bell back on the table. “It’s got a certain edge to it, I know.” He takes a seat, and we arrange ourselves opposite him, Bristal tapping one finger nervously against her hip.

I start recording, and we get the known stories, the old facts. I already have microfiche copies of the issues of the newspapers that David brought, but I listen politely as he walks me through each page, pointing out a familiar face here or an interesting angle there.

“A lot of people like to talk about the things we lost that day,” Swinton says. “But we forget it could have been worse. If the tornado had come through two days earlier—on the eleventh, during the Sweet Corn Festival—there would’ve been a lot more casualties. I took a lot of pictures the day of the festival, and they make for great before and after shots.

“I pulled this one aside in particular,” David says, fishing a picture out of a stack and handing it to me. I try to keep my face politely interested as I scan it, not sure what it is I’m supposed to be reacting to.

It’s a wide shot near the railroad tracks, where uprooted pine trees lay on their sides, hopelessly horizontal, while a car is balanced neatly on its nose in the background. A dog with its tail between its legs is sniffing at something, and a child’s bike hangs from the sagging electric lines. Nothing is as it should be, and everything speaks of chaos and danger, but I don’t know why David Swinton wanted me to see this until he hands me another one.

“Before,” he says. It’s the same shot, but taken during the Sweet Corn Festival, with food trucks and vendors lined up along the tracks. Still, I don’t understand why he thinks it will be of particular significance to me—then my eyes land on a group of teenagers standing together. I pull it closer, squinting, but this photo was taken before the digital age, and the harder I try to look for details, the more things blur together.

“Is that my dad?” I ask.

“Bingo!” David snaps his fingers, and I hold the photo at an angle, trying to decipher more. My dad is standing with another boy with his back to the camera, and a girl with black hair holds a cigarette, her mouth a dark, round blur as she exhales smoke.

“I didn’t know my mom used to smoke,” I say, flipping the photo over to look at the back. David’s clear, precise handwriting indicates the date and location.

June 11, 1994, Henley, Ohio N/S Railroad Tracks, Sweet Corn Festival

“Don’t tell her I ratted her out,” David says. “It was the nineties. A lot of people smoked.”

Bristal takes the photo from me, gives it a curious glance, then snaps a pic of it, this time zooming in and concentrating on holding her phone as still as possible in her shaky hands. Leave it to Bristal to carefully document my mom’s bad habits from decades ago while brushing over actual historical importance with disdain.

“Anything else I can help you with?” David asks, leaning back in his chair. I double-check that my recording app is running and make a show of giving everything on the tables another glance.

“Actually, there is one thing I was curious about,” I say, tapping my index finger against an issue of the Hometown Henley Headlines, forever embalmed in lamination. “The June sixteenth article said the remaining two townspeople that were MIA had been found. But the June fifteenth issue said there were three.”

“Huh . . . ,” David says, pushing his glasses up his nose and leaning in over the paper. “Must’ve been a typo. Everything was bananas for a couple of days, and I was my own editor. This is exactly why a pair of fresh eyes is so important. Sometimes we can’t spot the problems in our own work.”

“Right,” I agree, turning the issue of the Henley Hometown Headlines so that I can read directly from it. “‘The Hometown Headlines is happy to report that at this time, the number of missing people has been drastically reduced to only three.’”