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“She hit him?” I repeat, my pen going lax in my hand.

“Assault on an officer,” David confirms. “I guess she had a few drinks in her already, but the friendly warning didn’t sit so well with her, and things escalated. She got a free ride home in a cop car. Erin and Paul weren’t too happy, and they grounded her. Which didn’t last long. Denise went out her bedroom window the next day.”

“They reported this?” I ask, my pen back at work.

“They did,” David says. “On the morning of June thirteenth.”

“The day the tornado hit,” I say. “And she just got lost in the shuffle, didn’t she?”

“Completely lost,” David agrees. “By the time we’d accounted for everyone, a couple of days had passed, and one of those days was Denise Halverson’s eighteenth birthday.”

“So she became an adult,” Bristal says. “Not a runaway.”

“Not a runaway, not a missing child,” David says. “Legally, there were no grounds to go after her, and we hardly had the resources as it was.”

“Not with the murder of Randall Boggs and the flood on top of it,” I say. “So she was just gone? Did anybody ever see her again? Did she have any friends looking for her?”

“Like I said, she palled around with a Jamison,” he says, nodding at Bristal. “But I can’t say I remember which one. There are a lot of you.”

“Yeah we’re good at existing,” she says.

“And nobody looked for her?” I ask, pushing. “Nobody cared about this lost teenaged girl?”

“She didn’t care to be cared about,” David says, his voice taking on an edge. “Paul and Erin tried—they did. But everything was upside down for a while after the long stretch. I mean, you should’ve seen the telephone poles in town. They were covered with missing posters for dogs and cats, people looking for their wallets or the wedding ring they’d taken off to mow the yard before the storm rolled in. We didn’t have—”

“The internet. Phones. Compassion,” Bristal supplies, twirling her finger in the air.

He ignores her last jab. “Back then you lost something, you had to make a poster and hang it up in the town square, hope somebody found it, hope they knew you were looking for it, and hope they would give it back to you.”

“The Hendrixes put up posters?” I ask.

“Sure, all the good it did,” David says. “Denise Halverson was gone.”

“And everyone assumed she ran away?”

“It wasn’t just an assumption,” David says. “She’d been telling everyone as soon as she was eighteen she was gone. So she did exactly that, and we had our hands full here in Henley, taking care of our own.”

“Which she wasn’t,” Bristal tacks on.

“And you changed the number of missing in the paper?” I ask, coming back around.

David falls silent, his fingers toying with the edge of the laminate covering the June 15 issue of the Hometown Henley Headlines. “I didn’t feel right about that, exactly,” he admits. “But at first Erin was hoping the girl would come home, and Denise was supposed to be under an unofficial type of house arrest, on account of hitting Foxglove. She was trying to keep her out of trouble, still looking out for her.”

The three of us fall silent, and the library’s heater kicks in, rumbling to life in the closet behind me. The vent above us pushes hot air onto the table, sending a few loose photos to the floor. I bend to pick them up, careful to only touch the edges.

“Thanks for talking to us,” I say.

“I didn’t talk to you,” David says. “Not about Denise Halverson.”

“Understood.”

We skip the handshakes as we say goodbye, and Bristal whips out her vape pen the second we’re in the parking lot, shaking it in irritation once she realizes it’s empty.

“What’d you think?” she asks, jerking her chin toward the library.

“I think it’s messed up,” I admit as she leans against her car. “But I don’t know if there’s any wrongdoing, exactly. It makes me think about something my dad said last night.”

“What’s that?”