Logan got out of the truck. Main Street in Mountain Springs was warm and smelled of the bakery down the road. This wasn’t the tourist hub; it was the regular part of town where no business bothered pretending to be a chalet or a log cabin. Trees were planted along the sidewalk, offering some dappled shade, and in front of the journal’s glass door were two large planters with an abundance of pink and white flowers flowing over the side.
Logan hadn’t submitted an obituary to the Mountain Springs Journal when his mom had passed away, even though she’d lived in this town for thirty years. He’d figured the people who cared had kept up with her.
And there was a significant angry part of him that hadn’t wanted to tell his father about Elise’s death. Harry hadn’t deserved to know. He used to think about his father’s negligent parenting, but his mother had suffered from it, too. She never got a break. She seldom got financial help. He couldn’t remember her buying herself new clothes, although she must have from time to time—for the most part, the money had all gone to other necessities. Harry had moved on with his marriage to Dot and the kids that resulted, and he hadn’t looked back.
Thinking about his mother’s passing now, it might have been wiser to just post the obituary, because now Logan had to break the news to his father himself...and maybe he could see what Caroline had been talking about in those diaries, after all. He was stubborn, jaded and difficult.
Would an obituary have killed him?
Logan pulled open the front door of the newspaper office, and a chime sounded as he came inside. There were some new faux leather visitor chairs, and it looked like the bullpen had been updated a bit. Two local journalists sat at desks facing the wall—one on the phone jotting down information, and the other glued to a game of solitaire on the computer screen. The receptionist was a middle-aged woman with ash-blond hair, and she smiled as he came in.
“Hello,” she called cheerily. “Can I help you with anything?”
“Hi,” Logan said as he came up to her desk. “I’m wondering how I might be able to get a look at your obituaries for the last few years. I checked online, and I couldn’t find anything.”
“If we posted everything online, there’d be no reason for the newspaper,” she replied meaningfully.
“Right...” He squinted at her. “So, obituaries. How would I check the old ones?”
“We used to have most of them backed up on the computer,” she replied. “But we had a virus and we lost a lot. But we do have the old microfiches. You can go back to the fifties on those. Old technology sometimes lasts longer, you know?”
“Yeah...” He smiled faintly. “It can be that way.”
“But I do have some more recent obituaries on our new system that I can check, if you want. They go back three years.”
“That would be great,” he said.
“What’s the name?” she asked.
“Harold Eugene Wilde. It might also be under Harry Wilde. That’s Wilde with an e.”
While the receptionist checked her system, Logan sucked in a deep breath. It felt wrong to be standing here, checking if his father was even alive. This seemed like information a son shouldn’t have to sleuth out. His dad might not have been much of a father in his life, but he’d still been his father. If he were dead—
“Nothing under either of those names for the deceased, but his name does come up as a survivor to another person who passed,” she said, glancing up. “His wife, it says. A Mrs. Dorothy Eleanor Wilde.”
Dot—the stepmother with the distracted smile and limited patience. Logan hadn’t known her well—but he’d resented her a whole lot as a kid. She always had new clothes, and she had a way of saying his father’s name that sounded halfway between an exasperated sigh and a question.
“When was that?” Logan asked.
“November last year,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks...” Logan licked his lips. “Can I see it?”
“Sure.” She turned her screen so he could read the write up. It had the regular information—where she was born, where she went to school, who she left behind... Along with Harry, their children were listed as having survived her. Logan’s half brother was listed as Dr. H. Eugene Wilde Jr. Apparently, he was doing pretty well for himself.
“So if Harry died after his wife did, you should have the obituary.”
“If the family had one posted, yes,” she confirmed.
He felt lighter, somehow. He was glad that Harry was still alive, he realized. He’d lost one parent already. Even if his dad wasn’t much of a parental figure, he didn’t want to lose them both.
He stepped outside into the June warmth and stood there for a moment, deciding what to do next. His father was alive, and it was just a matter of figuring out if he was still in Mountain Springs. He’d thought about what he’d say to his father when he found him, but somehow, all those imagined conversations seemed to fall flat.
Logan looked up the street toward Mountain Drive. He wondered if The Peaks, the café where he used to meet up with Melanie, was still there. They’d sit nursing coffees with too much cream and sugar for a couple of hours while they talked and he’d play with her fingers on the tabletop... He pushed back the memories. Whatever they’d felt all those years ago, they were adults now. He was a dad, and she had stepkids of her own who resented her like crazy. It was funny how life came around in a circle.
He hadn’t been back in town for at least ten years. He’d taken Caroline to Mountain Springs one summer to see his mother before
