“I think there are a couple photos, but Jane was just a girl when her mother died and she disappeared, so I’m not sure we’ll be able to recognize her,” Riley said. “Let’s plan to meet at the historical society at three. We’ll see what we can find.”

“See you at three.”

. . .

It amazed Helen how little could be left when a person was gone. A human being lived an entire life full of family and friends, dinner parties, work, church, and what was left? A couple of photos, a line or two in a town newspaper, an obituary usually, a tombstone with a name and dates and little else. Unless you kept digging. This is what she loved about history: the thrill of filling in the blanks, digging for and finding the hard evidence—birth and death records, marriage licenses, census data, photographs, diaries, and letters—and then using hunches and intuition to put it all together into a cohesive narrative. Studying a person or an event from long ago was like trying to solve a mystery: following clues, piecing things together.

There was no gravestone or obituary for Hattie Breckenridge. No mention of her or what had happened to her in the local paper. Very little proof that she had existed at all.

“It’s like she was a ghost even back when she was alive,” Helen said. She sat across from Riley at a big table in the center of the historical society. The space was in a disheveled state because of the flood—boxes and plastic totes were piled up on desks and shelves, files and documents haphazardly thrown in to save them from water damage.

Riley had arrived earlier to attempt to start putting things in some semblance of order, and she’d pulled what little she’d found on the Breckenridge family aside, started making notes. Helen had her own little notebook out now, hoping for a chance to jot down some solid facts about Hattie and Jane, something that might tell her where to go from here, how to find out more. Seeing them together in her house last night had made her more determined than ever to learn their stories, to follow the family tree and see if there might be more information, living relatives even.

“I know, it’s crazy,” Riley said. “We have whole boxes full of stuff on some families in town: letters, diaries, photographs. But there really isn’t much on the Breckenridge family.”

She pulled down another box and opened it up.

“Like I said, you’ve gotta bear with me here. Things aren’t usually in such disarray.”

“How’d you get involved with the historical society?” Helen asked.