Page 38 of Silver Linings

In the binder from 1937, I thought I might have hit pay dirt.

The basic story was mainly the same — namely, that Northwest Pacific was packing up and leaving — but this article included some tantalizing tidbits.

Workers complaining of hearing strange sounds in the woods, and having their chainsaws and other equipment vandalized. There also seemed to have been inexplicable failures of the other machinery kept nearby to process the lumber and get it ready for transport. I also found mentions of people outright quitting and leaving, claiming the woods were haunted and that they weren’t going to stay there for a moment longer.

Those claims were dismissed as the ravings of men who’d dipped into too much gin after their shifts, but I knew that wasn’t what had really happened.

No, it sure sounded to me as if the forest had fought back somehow, making conditions so uncomfortable that Northwest Pacific couldn’t sustain its operations with so many of its workers walking off the job. And even though my knowledge of twentieth-century history was a little shaky, I thought I remembered that the 1930s had been the time of the Great Depression, an era when people certainly wouldn’t have passed up a steady paycheck without a damn good reason to do so.

Was that what had happened in the 1950s…in the 1970s, when my mother was a little girl?

Quite possibly.

It seemed as if Northwest Pacific returned to Silver Hollow every twenty years or so — or at least, they had up until 1975, when they supposedly had given up for good. What had changed then?

I had no idea. And although I went and looked through the Silver Hollow Herald papers from the mid-70s, I couldn’t find any mention as to why the lumber company had left. Maybe by then the cycle was so predictable that no one saw the need to comment on it.

Anyway, I couldn’t spend any more time here. As it was, I’d probably be a couple of minutes late getting to the shop and opening for business.

There seemed to be some kind of mystery at work here, but I’d have to figure it out later.

Chapter Twelve

Even though Ben had been able to identify the letters as Ogham, an ancient Irish alphabet that had been in common use more than fifteen hundred years ago, its angular shapes inspired by the Roman alphabet, he knew he was a long way away from truly being able to decipher what those carvings meant. Each of the letters in Ogham corresponded to a particular tree, and Ben hadn’t been too surprised to learn that the one which figured most prominently in the carvings was Daír, symbolizing oak.

However, he’d also realized when he tried to do a straight translation of the letters that whoever had put those symbols there hadn’t simply been writing out English in the Ogham alphabet. No, what he came up with seemed like complete gibberish, a language that Google Translate certainly didn’t recognize.

He supposed it was possible that the letters had been scratched into the tree by someone who didn’t really know what they were doing and had been mostly messing around with an alphabet they’d found online but didn’t understand in the slightest.

That seemed the simplest explanation, anyway. Or possibly the ancient Irish letters and the supposed gibberish they represented were part of a far more elaborate code, even though he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to go to that kind of trouble with something hardly anyone would ever see. It wasn’t as if the code had been carved into a telephone pole on Main Street or one of the birch trees that shaded the walkway into City Hall.

For now, he had more pressing business to attend to, namely, going to the stationery store and having the flyer/posters printed out so he could hand them off to Sidney. It had been good to go to her house for dinner the night before, even though she’d been extremely casual the whole time and had done everything she could to let him know it wasn’t a date or anything even in the general neighborhood of one.

He’d respected her wishes and played it cool. Sure, it had been frustrating to have her sitting so close to him on the couch as they looked at his laptop’s screen together, to see the way her warm brown hair slipped over her shoulder as she leaned forward…to smell the sweet scent of her shampoo…but he wasn’t stupid enough to actually try anything.

For now, he needed to be glad that she viewed him as an ally — and to leave anything else off the table until she decided whether she was all right with being something more than just partners in an effort to let the citizens of Silver Hollow know that allowing Northwest Pacific to tear up chunks of the forest wasn’t in anyone’s best interest.

Like every other establishment on the town’s main street, Paper and Quill was a charming place, with racks of cards and fancy papers and fountain pens and all sorts of fascinating items that, if not strictly necessary, seemed to be perfect for impulse purchases. Behind the counter, though, was the sort of big, professional printer you might expect to see at Kinko’s, and the woman who worked there had a bit brisker manner than he was used to from the town’s denizens.

“Four copies of each of these files, got it,” she said as she took the thumb drive from him. “Full color, I assume?”

“Yes,” Ben replied, even as he hoped the cost of the printing wouldn’t be too high. The night before, he hadn’t been thinking about that — and neither had Sidney, he guessed, or he was pretty sure she would have offered to pay for it. He had no real idea as to her finances, but since it seemed clear she was living in the house her mother and grandmother owned and she didn’t appear to have any real burden of debt…well, except for student loans, he assumed…she quite possibly might have more spare cash on hand than he did.

But it seemed that Paper and Quill didn’t charge big-city prices, since the entire order only cost him around ten bucks. He happily handed over a couple of fives, thanked the woman for her help, and then headed outside. Today, the clouds had descended again, but they were patchy and thin, promising at least a bit of sunshine as the day wore on.

He figured he’d take it.

Package of flyers in hand, he headed over to the pet shop. Sidney was helping a client as he came in, an older woman with a tiny chihuahua peeking out of the oversized purse she carried. Ben hung back, pretending to study a display of hand-tooled leather collars, until their business was concluded.

But then the woman left, and Sidney immediately came out from behind the counter.

“Are those the flyers?”

“Yep,” he replied. “How many do you want?”

“Most of them,” she said promptly. “I’ll put one in my window, and then I’ll hand out the others to business owners I know will be sympathetic. I was thinking you could put one up on the bulletin boards in the library and at City Hall? Those are public spaces, so you don’t have to get permission to post flyers there.”

He could tell she was doing her best to make this easy for him, and it made sense. She was the one with connections in town, after all, and would probably do a much better job of persuading those who might be reluctant to get involved that this was a cause that affected all of Silver Hollow.

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