Part 3 — Jenna Is Alive
The address on the bank account opened in Jenna Rourkes name in 2021 was a mailbox store in Rutland, a block from Lamars truck repair shop. Monty told me in the dusk of the roadside, and I listened with the engine off and the box on the seat beside me.
Lamar was not a handyman. He was a thief of names. He found lonely, trusting people, offered help, and while he was in their homes he gathered the identity papers of everyone connected with the family. He kept the licenses in a chimney box because no one would think to check a smoke shelf.
The seven women on those licenses were not victims of violence, as I had feared in that firebox. Three were listed as missing only because they had cut ties with relatives and moved away, and Lamar had taken their cards from a flea market bin years before. Four were real customers whose documents he had borrowed.
Montys team worked fast. By morning a detective had called Oregon, and a Portland woman named Jenna Rourke, forty-three, picked up the phone on the second ring. She had been in Oregon for fifteen years, working as a dental hygienist. She said she wrote her father every Christmas.
The cards on the mantel were not forgeries made by a stranger. Lamar had been intercepting her letters. He read them, answered some in a clever hand, and kept her phone calls from reaching the farmhouse. Harlan thought she had gone quiet, and she thought her father no longer wanted to hear from her.
Lamar was arrested in the Rourke driveway the next morning, in his ball cap, as he stepped out of his truck. He faced charges of identity theft, mail fraud, financial exploitation of an elderly person, and forging signatures. The state seized every account tied to the address on that old bank form.
I was there when the Portland flight landed. Harlan insisted on wearing his best cardigan to the airport in Burlington, and he held a bouquet of grocery store carnations in both hands. When Jenna came through the doors, freckles and gap in her teeth just as in the photograph, he dropped the flowers.
She had not stopped writing in fifteen years, and he had not stopped waiting, and between them a man with a ball cap had built a wall of paper. They held each other without a word for nearly a minute.
Back at the farmhouse, I finished the chimney sweep I had been hired for. The flue was clean, the smoke shelf empty, and the damper moved freely. I told Harlan I would not charge him for the job, and he said he would not have it any other way than paying double.
Jenna handed me a mug of coffee at the door. She said her father had not stopped telling people about the chimney man who found the box. I said I was only the man who reached up the flue.
That night, Harlan lit the first fire of the season himself. Father and daughter sat in front of it with the photograph on the mantel, and the smoke went straight up the chimney where it belonged.
