Page 146 of In the Dark of the Past

The weight of it was the same. That was the strange thing. I’d expected it to feel different, heavier or lighter, charged somehow with everything that had happened in the weeks it had been in someone else’s drawer. It was just the badge. Same heft, same scratch on the lower right corner from when I’d dropped it on the gravel. Same everything.

But I clipped it back on, and the weight settled against me where it had always sat, and that was the whole of the ceremony.

Atlas looked at me.

“You good?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Because I have seventeen things on my desk that have been waiting for a signature that technically requires a real badge.”

I sat down and started signing.

It was Libby who suggested it. Not as an emergency or as a strategy session, just as what it was. A meeting. The regular kind. Same table in the basement, same night of the week, bring something to share about a case you’ve been reading.

The turnout was the same as it had always been, minus Rand, of course, plus the texture of people who had been through something together and were now on the other side of it and weren’t quite sure yet what normal looked like but were willing to find out.

Cade brought a box of microbrew without being asked. Nivea had a new episode dropping, something she’d recorded before all of this, a cold case from a county three states over, and the relief of having work that was just work again was visible on her face. Andra had a piece running in the Ledger’s weekend edition, a long-form account of the Benevolence Fund’s history, co-bylined with Courtland Holt, actually, which had taken some negotiating I hadn’t been party to and which seemed to have landed somewhere both of them could live with. Autumn had a map. Seemed she always had a map or some kind of historical account.

Myra was at the far end of the table with a folder I recognized. It wasn’t the annex photographs but something smaller, something she’d organized herself. She wasn’t talking about it much. She was just present with it, the way she was with things she was still deciding on.

Libby was reading something on her phone, and I caught the name Roberts in the header before she turned the screen. She and Myra exchanged a look across the table. It was brief, the look of two people who had identified a thread and agreed without words on who would pull it.

I filed that away. Not my case. At least, not yet. Maybe not ever, depending on how things went.

River arrived at 7:15, slightly late, carrying two coffees and the unhurried expression of someone whose evening had been good and who wasn’t apologizing for it. She handed one coffee to Libby, who accepted it as though she’d been expecting it, which she probably had. Then she slid into the seat beside me.

“What’d I miss?”

“Nivea’s new episode is about a drowning in Idaho,” I said. “Autumn’s map is for something I haven’t asked about. Cade told us about burning the first batch of the new white-bean chili recipe he’s apparently been workshopping.”

She looked at Cade. He shrugged.

She turned back to me. Her shoulder was against mine the way it had been in the booth when we were waiting for everything to fall into place, easy and without announcement. Under the table, her knee pressed briefly against mine, a small, private punctuation mark. I pressed back.

Across the table, Myra looked at us with the expression of a woman who had been watching two people be idiots about each other for weeks and was satisfied, in the dry, unsentimental way that was her version of warmth, that the idiocy was over.

I didn’t acknowledge the expression.

She didn’t require acknowledgment.

The meeting ran until 10:00. Nothing urgent. We discussed a cold case from 1998 that Libby had flagged—a missing person in the next county, family still looking for answers, the kind of thing the club had been built for. They assigned roles the way they always did. Methodically, using each person’s actual strengths, with the pleasure of a group that had learned to trust what the other people in the room were good at.

I watched it happen and thought about how it had started. A social club that had evolved into something else, civilians who had decided that cold cases deserved warmer attention. I thought about what it had cost all of them to stay in this investigation when it got dangerous. None of them had been required to. None of them had left.

Libby locked up at 10:15. The street outside was quiet and cold, the kind of night that smelled like wood smoke and coming frost.

River was beside me on the sidewalk. The others had filtered off in their various directions—Nivea and Libby together toward the parking lot, Autumn with her rolled map under her arm, Myra alone and unhurried in the direction of her car, her phone pressed to her ear.

Atlas fell into step beside me for half a block, which was his version of a debrief.

“You going to be okay?” he said.

I thought about the badge on my belt, and the seventeen signatures, and Evan’s statement on the record, and Eleanor’s case with a perpetrator named in it now, and Sean in Portland, and Grant in federal custody, and a town that was doing the slow, necessary work of learning what it had been.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

He nodded once, the gesture of a man who believed that and was also keeping an eye on it, and turned off toward his truck.