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No one.
I pace to the end of the block again, the brick sidewalk slightly uneven under my feet, the houses on both sides of Charles Street all at least as old as the Burdet House, and then I pace back.
I read the plaque again and repeat the whole shebang, because after Sunday, I’m nervous as bees in a blender. I know full well that our conversation — our mutual agreement — didn’t really have a lot to do with us and was about circumstances. I know it had nothing to do with our professional relationship or our attempt to find tree murderers.
I turn, pace, pace back.
Colleagues, I remind myself. People are colleagues all the time and it’s no big deal.
I turn, and there he is, rounding the corner at the end of the block, and I stop in my tracks. I stand still. I wonder what people normally do with their hands when they’re acting perfectly normal and natural, and as he draws closer, I settle on shoving them into my pockets.
“Hi,” I say when he’s ten feet away.
Levi also has his hands shoved in his pocket, his work slacks on along with a plaid button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The man does have a look, and it’s a very good—
Nope.
“Hey,” he says.
There’s a pause.
Then: “Good to see you, June.”
“You too,” I say, and I mean every syllable of it because it is. Even if I can’t and won’t have him, it’s good to see Levi.
“You said you cracked our case wide open?” he says, and he’s got that half-smile on his face, and I relax a little.
This will be fine, I tell myself. You’ll work through your tension issues and everything will be extremely normal.
“I didn’t say that,” I say, heading onto the porch and heaving open the heavy door. “I just said you should see something.”
He takes the door from me before I can open it all the way and holds it for me. Inside is the front hall of the Historical Society, in what was once the foyer of a very nice house.
“Is that you again, June?” a voice calls.
“Yup, just me,” I call back.
A woman comes around a corner, holding a manila folder. She’s got gray hair in a bun, half-moon glasses on a chain, and she’s wearing slacks and a blouse with slightly-too-large poofy bow at the neck.
In other words, she looks exactly like she should be running a historical society.
“Guests need to sign in,” she tells Levi without preamble. “And yes, before you ask, we do require your email address and phone number and please don’t think you’ll be the exception to the rule. The sign-in book is right over here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Levi says, and allows her to guide him to the sign-in sheet, where he dutifully fills everything out as instructed.
“And don’t just let the pen drop when you’re finished,” she says as she walks away. “We just had painters in a few months ago and the ink stains very badly if you’re careless!”
The moment she disappears, Levi turns and looks at me.
Then he holds the pen up, its chain fully extended, and lets it drop.
“Whoops,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “She’s always like that. I’ve been here a thousand times and with every single visit, you’d think I came here specifically to carve my name into a historically accurate fireplace.”
“Well, did you?” he asks, that half-smile on his face.
My heart skips a beat, recovers, and I look away.
“Only the once,” I tell him. “Come on, it’s upstairs.”“Huh,” Levi says, leaning over the table. “I think you might be right.”
Standing off to one side, I smile to myself, then quickly bite it back.
“That’s…” he says, still examining the photo, tilting his head to one side. “You’re right. I think that’s just a stain, not part of the map.”
He looks from the enlarged photo on the right to the smaller photo on his left, both of Obadiah Harte’s infamous napkin map. The enlarged photo is fifty years more recent than the smaller photo, and one of the lines running along it is definitely lighter and has definitely changed color in a way that the rest of the ink hasn’t.
“Right,” I say. “So if you look at it with the knowledge that that line isn’t part of the map, what’s it look like?”
Levi sighs. He lifts his messenger bag over his head and puts it on the floor, then leans over the table again, both hands flat on its surface, and studies the photo. Then he turns his head and studies the map I’ve got laid out to the right, the one with logged areas shaded in.
After a long moment, he finds a spot on the photo with one finger and the map with the other.
“This squiggle looks like the Lantern Range right here,” he says, his finger running down the spine of some mountains. “That could be where Hellbender Creek empties into Marsh Bottom Run, right at the foot of Bareback Peak.”
