Stillwater keeps its histories in a room beneath the courthouse where the walls sweat through the summer. There are ledgers in that room that no one checks out and no one admits to writing in. If you ask about the dust, the clerk will tell you it has always been there.
There are rules in this county, too. Not written rules. The kind handed down in a look from your mother when you say a name at the dinner table.
When people go missing, you let the town call it something else.
But somebody has left three things behind: a census correction, a broken dispatch recording, and a strip of red thread caught in the woods past the old quarry. Choose what you disturb first.