The mayor arrived an hour later, pale and accompanied by two state police officers. He was the man who had been sheriff when Daniel disappeared, the man who had looked Roy in the eye and believed his denial, the man who had, when Margaret called him from Route 9 with a Polaroid on her phone, told her not to go to that address. He had done nothing for the forty-eight hours since Kate had mailed him the clippings.
Margaret did not speak to him.
She didn’t have anything she was ready to say to him in a language that would be appropriate for the presence of police officers.
Kate handed over Roy’s cabinet, the clippings, her copy of the letter, and the sealed envelope she had mailed to the mayor’s office two days earlier — the one that had sat unopened on his desk while he decided what to do, while the answer sat eighteen miles from his office being found by a woman on a blown tire on Route 9.
