So I knew it happened.
“Do you not want me to find Maggie?” I asked.
She shrugged, an odd gesture, like she wasn’t sure what she thought. “Some things should remain hidden.” A wind stirred up from the water, coiling over the wharf. It caught Mrs. St. James’s scarf and pulled it free from her neck, carrying it softly away from her toward the water. She reached for it but missed, and it tangled itself around the wharf railing. I unwrapped the scarf from the wood post and held it briefly in my hand—a quick glimpse of Mrs. St. James shuddering through me. They were distant, broken images: she was much younger, pregnant with Maggie, and she was standing in a kitchen that was not the one I had seen in her home a half hour earlier.
“You lived somewhere else when you were pregnant with Maggie,” I said aloud.
Her eyes went wide and she took a step closer to me, snatching the scarf from my hand. She coiled it back around her neck and crossed her arms. But she peered at me differently, not warily, but with interest.
“Do you know where Maggie is?” I asked her directly.
She shook her head, but again her eyes swayed out to the bay, like there was something she came to say, but had forgotten how. She had built a wall inside herself, a fortress of hard cheekbones and stiff gazes to protect herself from the grief she’d felt the last five years. It wasn’t uncommon—hell, I did the same thing after Ruth’s death.
“If you know where she is,” I pressed. “You could save your husband a lot of agony.”
“I’ve never been close with my daughter—” Her voice had taken on a plaintive tone, the same airy quality as the fog, not quite solid, flimsy even, like it might collapse under too much weight. “We were two different people. And I won’t pretend I was a good mother. But now she’s gone and I—”
I tried to pick apart the root of what she was trying to say. If I could have touched her scarf again, held it in my palm, I might have been able to steal a glimpse of the truth, of her real past. “If you’re certain your daughter is safe, if you know she doesn’t want to be found, then I won’t go looking for her.”
She winced, a tiny motion, and she uncrossed her arms. “I’m not sure anymore,” she admitted, and it felt like the first truly honest thing she’d said. Not guised in misdirection.
I stepped closer to her and her eyes flinched back to mine. “If any part of you thinks she might be in trouble after all these years, then tell me how to find her. At the very least, I’ll go make sure she’s safe. And if she is, I’ll leave her alone and I won’t bring her back.”
Mrs. St. James’s eyes vibrated, like a tremor was working its way up her spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, uprooting her from where she stood.
“Pastoral,” she finally said. A single word.
At that, she pushed her hands into her coat pockets, lifted her shoulders as if she could escape the damp wind, and turned away from me, walking back to her silver sedan parked at the curb.
She drove away and never looked back.
* * *
I sat in my car on the ferry and pulled out the silver book-charm from the plastic bag and held it in my palm. I closed my eyes and felt the lolling teeter of the ferry as it surged forward across the bay. Flashes of Maggie stuttered through me, broken images: she was driving her car, tall evergreens whirring by out the windows, while the radio thumped loudly from the speakers. Maggie was singing along, belting out the tunes. But then the images splintered apart—I was too far away from her.
I needed to get closer: to the place where the police found her abandoned car.
I slid the silver charm back into the plastic bag and pulled out my cell phone. I typed Pastoral into the web browser and got pages and pages of disjointed links: Pastoral Pizza in Boston, Pastoral Winery in southern Italy, Pastoral Greeting Cards: now hiring. I scrolled the Wikipedia page for pastoral: a lifestyle of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music that depicts such life in an idealized manner. I narrowed down my search to the Klamath National Forest where Maggie’s car was found. I dug through layers of blogger sites and pages that led me nowhere—a deep, unending hole of research. Until I hit on something in a genealogical website for a man named Henry Watson, and his wife, Lily Mae Watson. They had disappeared sometime during 1972, and among the scant information about the Watsons was a newspaper article written on September 5, 1973 in the Sage River Review: a weekly paper for local folks.