Page 136 of In the Dark of the Past

“Rand?” I said, by way of greeting.

Libby looked up. “Picked up this morning. The AG’s team. He didn’t resist.” She paused. “Nivea found out he’s been in Maple Ridge for longer than he owned the shop and we’ve known him. Moved here eight months after the Benevolence Fund’s reauthorization cycle. Timing is consistent with a deliberate placement.”

“So, he wasn’t recruited,” I said. “He was assigned.”

“Probably,” Libby said. “Which means he was likely here specifically to monitor the club.” She said it flatly, but I watched her look at the long table and the chairs around it. “He sat at the club tables with us for years.”

“I know.”

“He laughed at Cade’s jokes,” she said. “He brought chili to the Halloween potluck.”

There wasn’t anything useful to say about that. It was the architecture of what the Watchers did—not the masks and red eyes, but the proximity. The normalcy. The long patience of a thing that had always had time on its side.

“The chili was mediocre anyway,” Autumn said without looking up from her map.

Libby almost laughed, though not quite.

Finn went to the corner with Libby to go through the department’s chain-of-custody documentation for the AG. The paperwork that needed to exist before tonight, that needed to be clean and timestamped and unimpeachable. I watched him settle into it with the focus of a man who had found the one thing he could still do usefully while suspended, and I let him do it.

Myra came to sit across from me about twenty minutes later, carrying her laptop and the economical body language of someone who had found a thing they weren’t sure belonged to them.

“So, I’ve been going through the annex photographs,” she said. “The full set, not just the target folders. All of it. The organizational system in that sublevel covered about thirty-seven years and at least six distinct filing categories.”

“I know. We documented what we could.”

“There’s a section in the 1990s files labeled ‘legacy accounts,’” she said. “It’s different from the target folders. Different notation system, different paper stock, different…everything. All of it is slightly off from the rest of the archive. Like it was filed by someone who knew the system but wasn’t the primary archivist.”

She turned the laptop toward me.

The photograph showed a manila folder, the label handwritten rather than typed, Roberts, W. — Family. 1994. Reclassified.

“Reclassified from what?” I asked.

“That’s what I don’t know,” Myra said. “I can see three names inside the folder from the angle of the photograph. William Roberts Senior, William Roberts Junior, and a third I can’t make out. The notation at the top reads ‘Accidental—drowning—county record closed’ with a Fund reference number adjacent.”

I looked at the photograph.

“Three drownings in the same family?” I said.

“Same year. County record shows them as separate incidents across a six-month window. Spring through fall of 1994.” Myra’s voice was professionally level, which for her was a tell in the direction of something troubling her more than she was performing. “The Fund reference number uses the same MR prefix as the target accounts we pulled. But the Roberts file isn’t in the target section. It’s in legacy. Which suggests it predates the formal target documentation system.”

“Or it was moved,” I said. “Reclassified.”

“Or someone didn’t want it in the main archive,” she said. “Because the main archive was the one they were comfortable with the AG eventually finding.”

We looked at each other.

“I don’t have bandwidth for this right now,” I said. It cost something to say.

“I know,” Myra said. “I’m not asking you to. I’m just telling you it exists because you need to know it exists and because—” She stopped. Started again. “I went to medical school with a woman whose grandmother was a Roberts. She was from this county. She mentioned once that her grandmother never talked about the family she grew up with. That there were brothers who died when she was young.” Her jaw was set in the way it got when she was deciding something. “I’m going to keep pulling the thread. On my own time. After this is finished.”

“Myra.”

“I’m not asking for permission,” she said. “I’m telling you. And I’ll tell everyone else in a bit.”

That was Myra. The efficiency that ran all the way down. She’d decided, and the deciding was done.

“Be careful,” I said. “If it’s Fund-adjacent⁠—”