Joel walked down a sidewalk of the business district heading in the direction of the lake, He felt a magnetic pull from the town, and understood he was supposed to be here. He sensed shadows of the past around him, hidden behind building facades, in ashes of long ago fires and buried under 100 years of progress.

The missing woman’s story needed to be told and he had been chosen to tell it. The scarce facts rotated in his mind like wheels of a slot machine, never quite lining up. His gut told him something was wrong. He had virtually no information about the mysterious woman but what he knew did not add up.

He learned early in his career to follow the evidence, it would lead to the truth. He avoided forming opinions or constructing scenarios unless supported by evidence. But therein lies his problem, where would new evidence be obtained after 100 years? He had worked thin cases in the past and had an appreciation for the difficulty of establishing new paths to chase.

Joel also knew there were forces beyond his comprehension which had helped him in the past and he was alert to the threads and clues which sometimes channeled through him.

He reached the end of the street and stood looking across the frozen surface of Detroit Lake. The wind stinging his exposed face. He placed his hands on each side of his face to protect his cheeks and felt the two day growth of stubble. He did not want to look away just yet and stared into the distance, trying to imagine the winter storm conditions which were occurring when Mary left the safety of her Hotel.

The Hotel Minnesota where Mary had stayed in December of 1914 had stood on the opposite corner of where Joel was now standing. The hotel burned to the ground the following summer.

Joel had experienced a recurring vision which had been haunting him since he had arrived of a young woman gazing toward him from a distance. She only appeared for a fraction of a second before disappearing into a curtain of white. The backdrop in which the girl appears is  white and only a partial outline of her figure is discernible.

The vision reminds Joel of overexposed film and he tried to freeze the frames in his mind for closer scrutiny. There are dark rounded shapes down low a short distance beyond her figure he can not identify. Her black cap, dark eyes and lips contrast starkly with her white surroundings and the soft symmetry of her face is both youthful and expressionless.

The girl is too far away for Joel to know if she is looking at him, but he always has a feeling of helplessness when she leaves.