Carol's Knowledge

The air in the Visitors Welcome Center, usually thick with the scent of pine needles and the faint perfume of lavender sachets, felt charged, heavy with unspoken words. Katja stood across the worn oak counter from Carol Lawson Reed, the matriarchal leader of the Logan Canyon Women’s Organization. Sunlight streamed through the tall windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in the stillness, but it did little to dispel the chill that had settled between them. Katja’s heart hammered a nervous rhythm against her ribs, a counterpoint to the steady tick of the grandfather clock in the corner.

“You’re saying,” Katja began, her voice deliberately measured, each syllable a small stone placed carefully on the path of her inquiry, “that you have no idea where they might have gone? Fourteen people, Carol. They didn’t just sprout wings and fly away.”

Carol’s smile, usually as warm and comforting as a worn quilt, seemed to tighten around the edges. Her eyes, the color of a clear mountain lake on a sunny day, held a depth that Katja had always found unsettling, a quiet knowing that hinted at more than just the valley’s mundane gossip. “Logan Canyon is a vast place, Ranger Becker,” Carol said, her voice a gentle murmur, like water flowing over smooth stones. “It has a way of… absorbing things. Things that aren’t meant to be found.”