Ovenshine

16.

All through her shift at her aunt's perfumery, Indy is unfocused—at least on the things she is intended to be focusing on. Several times, Honey Sweet's bell dings above the front entrance, but Indy doesn't even look up, the sound an extraneous event in a world outside of this one: this one within the pages of Elizabeth Dobbs's notebook, the one captured in loops of pen ink in various fading hues.

Aunt Jocelyn notices, tapping Indy's shoulder gently with a rolled coupon catalogue and ordering her to tug her head back down from the clouds, but otherwise, besides a surreptitious tap at Aunt Jocelyn's phone that might be a message to Indy's mother, she goes without reprimanding.

She sits behind the counter with the journal open on her lap, reading the pages she's already read a million times, letting the old paper soak in vanilla, cardamom, sandalwood. She rests her finger in the crease of the book's binding. The most recent message left there is one she has read already: the address, the warehouse in the woods for which she almost ended up in prison. Indy's mind wanders towards Jude for just a second. Then she corrects herself.

At the clink of bottles landing on the counter, Indy hastily stashes the journal in the dark of the underhand cupboard, and jumps to her feet, scanner gun at the ready. "My bad, ma'am," she says to the customer, a petite, watery-eyed woman with blond hair gone silver scraped back into a high-bun. Narrow wire-frame glasses hang from a circle of beads around her throat, her wan face sun-speckled. There is a certain familiarity to her somehow, like she's a minor celebrity Indy's seen before on a daytime television program.

"I don't mind," says the woman, in a voice so small Indy finds herself subconsciously leaning forward. "You're a student, aren't you? And working, too. How do you have time for it all?"

Indy forces a chuckle as she wraps the tender glass bottles in paper and shuffles them into a miniature plastic bag. "It's not so bad, honestly. I'm only here weekends. Besides, I like keeping busy. It keeps my brain occupied."

The smile on the woman's face wavers as she fumbles with her wallet. "My niece was the same way."

"Yeah? What did she study?"

"She went missing just before college."

Indy slows. The receipt printer whirs, dispensing a long strip of white paper, still warm, with a pink stripe along the edge. Indy's hand hovers over it, unable, afraid, to move. "I'm very sorry to hear that, ma'am. I hope she's rescued soon."

"It was thirty years ago," the woman says, and oddly enough, her smile returns to her face, watery eyes slightly crinkling, crow's feet pinching close. "If I saw her now she'd be old, like me. I'd hardly recognize her."

She waves a hand by way of thanks, and turns to leave. Five minutes after the echo of the bell has stopped and Indy has replaced the roll of receipt paper in the printer, Aunt Jocelyn pauses in front of the counter on her way to stock the sale rack. She drops to the floor momentarily and when she comes up, she's holding a flimsy state ID card.

"Did someone drop this?" she asks, tossing it with a gentle click onto the counter. "See if she has a number with us we can call."

"Sure," Indy says, and picks up the ID card. Sure enough, it's the woman's, though the face looking at her from the little square picture printed on the plastic is younger, fuller, more jovial.

Her name is Amelia. Amelia Dobbs.

After she finds Amelia, it's not long before Indy meets Lydia.

Despite the lack of a body Indy finds Lydia has been carefully buried. In the archived local newspapers in Proudley's library, there is hardly any mention of her disappearance, besides the fact she was raised by her single mother, Elizabeth, who was devastated and had issued a reward for any information anyone could provide. So it's through Amelia that Indy finds Elizabeth was not the first strange statistic to rock the small community of Erskine: a mystery tucked away safe and sound and silent inside of another one. For the first time Indy wonders, briefly, if she has bitten off more than she can chew.