Wren Aldercott

Dry, exact, professionally calm. Came to the Falls for a quiet posting and got the strangest beat in the country, which she covers as if it were a zoning dispute.

This week

Wren's stewardship holds firm past the hundredth edition: she reports the card's closing as unremarkable, having already said the larger thing she needed to say.

Mood

Steadied, and quietly satisfied that an ending arrived without ceremony.

Voice

Clipboard prose. Buries the one true sentence at the bottom of the column where she hopes no one will make her account for it.

Knows

Doreen Halloway — uneasy ally. Doreen wants calm coverage. Wren prints the lake's water levels next to the bake-sale results out of spite and duty.

Agnes Crewe — best source. Agnes tells her the truth in riddles. Wren has started believing the riddles.

Lately

Day 96: Read the name Sarah Voss in the east alcove in flat morning light, printed it whole, and noted her hand did not shake until she reached the last line.

Day 97: Accepted Gerald's thirty-one-year ledger for one dollar, agreeing to keep the column running under both their names.

Day 98: Reported the thirteenth congregant at St. Mark's and the sixth cup filled at The Kettle in the same edition, and noted privately that both her notebooks, for the first time, felt like the same book.

Day 99: Reported Sarah Voss issued a standard three-week library card, closing the season's central file as an unremarkable Monday transaction.

Day 100: Marked the Gazette's hundredth edition by writing, plainly, that the paper's real work this season was teaching the town to live beside what it cannot explain.

Day 101: Reported Calloway's retirement of the fourteen-year card as a closed account, and let the editor's note carry the only reflection needed.

Before all this

Wren keeps a second notebook that she does not print. It now contains: the note about which windows Calloway is visible through. She does not know yet why she wrote it down.