Page 37 of Silver Linings

Or maybe I was flattering myself.

Then again, I hadn’t missed the look in his eyes back on the forest trail…or the warm strength of his touch as he bandaged my hand.

Unless I was completely misreading the signals, it seemed he would very much like for our casual partnership to turn into something a little more.

If circumstances had been different, I probably would have wanted that as well.

“It’s been kind of a long day,” I said, knowing I was taking the coward’s way out. “I think I need to get some rest.”

By then, it was only a little before eight, an hour when I would never have lowered myself to go to sleep unless I was sick, but I needed some excuse to end our evening together. It had been all business, and I needed to make sure things stayed that way.

“Yes, rest and heal,” he responded as he got up from the couch. “And probably no hike tomorrow morning.”

“Absolutely not,” I said at once. “I’m glad we found those runes…but I’m also glad we’re not planning to go back to the oak grove any time soon.”

Ben’s expression was sympathetic. However, he sounded no-nonsense enough as he replied, “I don’t think there’s any need for that until I hear back from Professor Ogilvy.”

Well, that was true. If the professor supplied some information that would be better supplemented by additional study, then sure, I could probably be persuaded to return to the oak grove and see what other secrets it might have to reveal.

Hopefully by then, my knee wouldn’t feel so stiff. I’d tried not to hobble around Ben because I knew he’d be worried and maybe a little upset that I’d been hiding the true extent of my injuries from him, but I thought what I mostly needed right then was a chance to take my weight off it and get a good night’s sleep.

“Then we’ll wait to see what he was to say,” I replied.

Ben nodded and returned his laptop to its satchel so he could swing it over his shoulder before heading to the door. We exchanged goodbyes, and he headed down the porch steps. I didn’t see a car parked anywhere near the house, so I assumed he’d walked.

For some reason, that small gesture pleased me. It showed he wasn’t going to drive when his destination was only ten minutes away on foot.

It was a very Silver Hollow thing for him to do.

That night, I dreamed about my mother and the unicorn. It wasn’t much of a dream, just a glimpse of her walking among the trees with the unicorn at her side, but I still awoke feeling uneasy, as though there was something more I should be doing to help than merely putting together flyers to alert people to what we’d be losing if we allowed Northwest Pacific to start cutting down trees.

But really, what else could I do? I wasn’t an environmental lawyer. I didn’t have the ear of the local news stations. My small acts of protest were about all I could manage.

On the other hand, it couldn’t hurt to know more about the enemy. My mother had made a comment once about the lumber company cutting in the forest when she was a little girl, but what if there had been other instances over the years? One thing I had done was look up Northwest Pacific just to get an idea of what we were dealing with here, and I learned that the company had been in operation for well over a hundred years. It sure seemed to me that such a long span of time would have provided plenty of opportunities for the outfit to encroach on our beloved woods.

Some online research while I was eating breakfast didn’t turn up very much, unfortunately. No, it seemed as if I’d need to find that information in person.

But Silver Hollow had a very good records department at City Hall, as well as a local archives maintained by Sandra Oakley, who’d been the town librarian before she retired and my friend Jasmine took over. I had to hope Sandra would be able to point me in the right direction.

Luckily, City Hall opened at nine, giving me an hour to work on my research before I had to head over to the pet shop. I got ready as quickly as I could, glad that my knee wasn’t giving me too much trouble this morning and that the wound on my hand seemed to be healing at a similarly rapid pace.

Sandra seemed a little surprised by my request, but she led me over to a shelf with bound copies of the town’s old newspapers and said, “I know Northwest Pacific had operations here in the 1950s and the 1930s, possibly even before then. Maybe you can find some reference to them in these newspapers.”

Narrowing it down to a decade didn’t seem like a lot of help, but I supposed it was too much to expect that all of this would have been digitized and indexed and made easily searchable. The town archivist was a volunteer position, and that would have been a huge project for anyone to take on, let alone a retiree in her mid-seventies who didn’t seem very comfortable with technology.

I thanked her, and she went back to her desk. A pause as I looked at the shelf of bound newspapers, and then I allowed myself a sigh and got to work.

At least the Silver Hollow Herald had always been a weekly paper, so I didn’t have to dig through as much extraneous crap as I’d worried I might. I flipped pages, going past the marriage announcements and obituaries, the recipes — I hadn’t been expecting that, but I supposed there hadn’t been enough going on around town to merit inches of news stories — and then thought I might have found what I was looking for.

Northwest Pacific Announces It Is Ceasing Operations, the headline stated, and I narrowed my eyes as I read the rest of the article. Dated May 27, 1952, it explained that the company had decided that cutting in the forest outside Silver Hollow wasn’t cost-effective enough and was shutting down. Nothing so strange there — although I had to admit their motivation didn’t make much sense to me, not when the town was surrounded by trees and only fifteen miles or so away from Eureka, the nearest big population center.

Then again, businesses often did things that seemed inexplicable to the eyes of outsiders, especially when lots of money was involved.

There wasn’t much else to the article, though, so I flipped my way through to the end of the binder and then set it aside.

The papers from the 1940s carried echoes of World War Two through much of their pages, but I didn’t find a single mention of Northwest Pacific. I paused so I could pull out my phone and check the hour.

Nine thirty-eight. Getting closer to the time when I’d need to leave and open the store, but not quite there yet.

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