Part 3 — Rosalind Wrote Back
The name on the salvage papers was Hannah Lavoie, the very neighbor whose telephone I had used. She was seventy, a church trustee and a retired librarian, and she had been walking past that little white church every Sunday since she was a girl. The trooper read it, closed his notebook, and walked across the lawn to her door with me trailing behind.
Hannah met us on her porch with her hands folded. She did not look surprised. She looked tired, the way a person looks after carrying something heavy for a very long time. She said, Please come in. I have been expecting somebody to ask me about locker number nine since the day the auction was announced.
The story she told us was not the one Windham County had told itself for thirty-seven years. Rosalind Avery had not been taken from the church. She had walked out of choir practice on her own, on a Thursday in May of 1987, at sixteen years old. She had just learned that she was adopted, and her adoptive father, a hard man, had forbidden her to ask about her birth family.
Rosalind and Hannah were best friends. They built the secret panel together, in the choir room, with a butter knife and a jar of paint, to pass notes and keep each others secrets. That Thursday, Rosalind left a letter for Hannah in locker nine, said she was going to find her real mother in Maine, and asked her to say nothing until she was safe.
Hannah kept that promise out of loyalty and fear. She was sixteen and terrified, and by the time she was old enough to know better, the search had gone cold and the town had its own story. The Polaroid with the words Easter 1987, Dont tell was a picture of Rosalind that Hannah had taken, and kept, until she could not bear to look at it.
Some secrets are kept so long out of love that nobody remembers how to set them down.
Rosalind did find her mother, in a small town outside Portland. She lived with her for a year, then went on to nursing school, and eventually settled in Nova Scotia, where she has worked as a hospice nurse for thirty years. She wrote to Hannah every few months, through the church, in letters addressed to a name that only the two of them knew. The 1991 letter on top of the stack was one of those.
When the church closed, Hannah did the only thing she could think of. She signed the salvage papers herself and made sure the lockers went to an antiques picker, not a dump. Part of her hoped someone would find the panel at last. She was too frightened to say it herself, and she had not known I would be the one.
The state police verified everything in a week. Records from the Maine adoption agency, Rosalinds nursing license, and a phone call all matched. The 1987 file was reclassified, and the missing person notice withdrawn. No one was charged. A runaway who becomes an adult is not a crime, and Hannahs silence, however long, was not one either.
Rosalind flew to Vermont in June. Her adoptive father had died long since, but her adoptive mother, Lillian, was ninety-one and living in a care home in Brattleboro. I was in the hallway when they met. Lillian looked up from her chair, said, There you are, and held out both hands. They sat together for four hours.
The choir lockers now stand in a corner of my shop, number nine slid open, and a framed copy of the Polaroid on the back panel. I gave the chestnut ladder to the town historical society, who hung it in the old church, now a community hall. On the first Thursday of every month, Hannah and Rosalind sing there together, off key, and everybody joins in.