I thought about a circled number. About a destination city.
I thought about what I needed from him.
Not to report anything. I needed someone to look at what I'd found and tell me I'd read it wrong. That the numbers meant something professional I didn't have the context for. Thatmedical notationsandphysical descriptionsanddestinationwere the language of some legitimate program I didn't understand.
I needed to be told I was wrong.
I closed my laptop.
“I have some errands,” I told Darlene.
She didn't look up. “Take the afternoon. The Henderson follow-up can wait.”
The Prosperity Inn was a converted Victorian on the edge of the historic district — white paint, black shutters, a porch that wrapped around the front with rocking chairs nobody sat in. A place that charged for charm and delivered drafty windows. I'd driven past it a dozen times without stopping — even if previously I said it was forty. But forty was a lie. It couldn’t have been forty. It had to be more. More than a dozen.
The woman at the front desk looked up when I came in.
“I'm looking for a guest,” I said. “Gerald Hall.”
A pause. She looked at me wrong. I didn’t like it. “I can call up to his room,” she offered, despite it.
“Please.”
She called. A brief exchange. She set the receiver down. “He'll be down in a few minutes. You can wait in the parlor.”
The parlor was four chairs and a coffee table with a bowl of hard candy nobody had touched. I sat and looked at my hands and thought about what I was going to say. I'd been composing it in the car and it still didn't sound right.I found some documents. I think they might mean something bad. Tell me I'm wrong.
That was the truth of it. That was all I had.
Hall came down the stairs five minutes later. He was smaller than I remembered from our first meeting — compact, unhurried —grandfatherly.Gray at his temples. A button-down that had been ironed carefully and had since lost the argument with Louisiana humidity.
He looked at me and something moved behind his eyes. Recognition, and something else.
“Miss Evangeline,” he said.
“I don't know if you remember me—”
“I remember you.” He gestured at the stairs. “Let’s talk in my room.”
He listened without interrupting. That was the first thing I noticed — he was unmoving in a way all professionally trained people were. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it the first time. Maybe he hadn’t been like that the first time. I couldn’t remember.
I told him I'd found some documents. I didn't say where. I didn't say whose handwriting was in the margins. I described the format — the names, the physical descriptions, the medical notations — and I watched his face do nothing while I talked, which was its own kind of answer.
When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.
“How many folders, sweetheart?” he asked.
“Eight. Maybe nine.”
“And the numbers?”
“Various. Mostly the teens. Upper right corner.” I looked at my hands. “They're ages, aren't they?”
He didn't answer right away. That was also an answer.
“Miss Evangeline.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, the same posture Judah used when he wanted to be taken seriously. “How long have you been in St. Francisville?”
“Three months.”
