anyone named Paul McGivens?” To which I received the same polite answer every time: “No. Sorry.” After two weeks, I had met just about every client in this empty, rural place. Every time I recognized a face, my hopes would fall a little farther. It seemed Paul McGivens was no longer even a ghost. The echoes of his life reached only me. . It was a month later when a young woman entered First Federal. I had never seen her, and as we discussed her aging grandmother’s financial matters, the question rose unbidden to my mind. As she packed up to leave, I asked, “Sorry if this seems like an odd question… but did you ever hear of anyone from this area named Paul McGivens?” The woman tapped her index finger against her lip. “Paul McGivens… Paul McGivens… hmm… y’know, that sounds a bit familiar. My grandma might’ve mentioned him to me before. Why d’you ask?” “Your grandmother mentioned him? Did she know him?” “Might have.” The woman studied me curiously. “Why?” . The old woman was pushing ninety-four and was half-blind with cataracts, but she could still converse with the best of them. I sat in her cozy little living room, drinking a cup of chamomile tea. We had made small talk for the better part of half an hour, and now she was regarding me with a look of owlish curiosity. “Well, dear, why not just hop to the reason you came now? I’ve loved speaking
with you, but an old lady like me needs to sleep quite a bit. I don’t want to nod off on you.” “Of course not,” I said hurriedly. “Please, Mrs. Ashford, I was curious as to whether you’d ever known anyone named Paul McGivens.” “Paul McGivens?” One of her frosty eyebrows quirked upward. “Well, of course I knew Paul. What of him?” “Do you know what happened to him?” “He’s gone,” she replied without hesitation. There was a sinking feeling in the very bottom of my stomach as I asked, “Dead?” “I would guess so,” she replied, and I must have looked puzzled, for she continued, “One day, Paul just left. He put on his old plaid coat and his worn old hat and he walked straight across his old field and into the woods. A neighbor was plowing his far fields and saw him. Didn’t think anything of it. It was common knowledge that Paul liked to go walking back by the woods. That’s where his wife and son are buried, after all.” “What happened to his son?” I interrupted. “Walter?” Mrs. Ashford rubbed the bridge of her nose with liver-spotted fingers. “Walter drowned when he was little. He fell through the ice in the pond behind Paul’s old house one winter.” “And Marellie?” I continued without thinking. The old woman gave me a look that was not quite suspicious, but somewhere close. “Mary Ellen? Paul’s wife? How did you know that he called her Marellie?” Blushingly, I admitted all—finding the papers, reading them, becoming obsessed with them and obsessed now with knowing how the story ended, with knowing what had finally happened to Paul.
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