Chapter 21: The small fire in the newspaper archive

The municipal newspaper archive opened an hour before the library, as if the people wanted to keep an eye on their paper dead even before lending novels to the living. Vera entered with her hair still damp from the rain and Celia's name beating on the back of her neck.

The room smelled of old cardboard, cheap bleach, and salt stuck to the window frames. Behind the counter, Aurora Guisande looked up over a pair of gold-chain glasses.

"Today you can't consult the ninety-three press," he said, too quickly. "I haven't asked him if it's possible." Vera left her credential, even though it was no longer of much use in San Telmo.

"I'm just going to see her." Aurora hesitated. He looked at the door, then at the landline.

That gesture was enough. "Who called?" "Everyone here calls for everything." Vera did not wait for permission.

He pushed open the storage room door and entered the narrow hallway of metal filing cabinets. The fluorescent lights hummed with a yellow fatigue.

The boxes from the summer of 1993 were missing labels, but not the order: someone had torn off the July and August spines. It wasn't cleaning.

It was surgery. He found a poorly closed drawer at the back.

Inside, among party supplements and obituaries, were folded, unsealed clippings. The first carried a grainy photo of the old port.

Under the headline, a name that made his pulse tighten: A Serea. He read standing up.

Auxiliary boat seized and returned due to processing defect. Property registered in the name of a maritime company linked to Bértola e Hijos.

Usual skipper: Xoán Barreiro. In another, smaller clipping, there was talk of a nighttime coup against contraband tobacco in front of Punta do Lobo.

No arrests. No load.

No witnesses. However, in the margin someone had written in pencil, with the angular handwriting that Vera remembered from the letter: It was not empty.

Maruxa. Underneath there was a date and an almost erased note: ask about the blue notebook.

Helena did go up. Vera closed her eyes for a second.

Not only Xoán. Helena had also been up there, in or next to the lighthouse, the night Aldara fell.

He took out his cell phone to photograph everything. The screen showed full storage.

He cursed under his breath and began to organize the clippings so he could take them whole. Then he smelled smoke.

It didn't come from the wiring. It was a dry, recent, domestic smell.

Bin. He walked out into the hallway and saw an orange tongue growing in the bucket next to the warehouse door.

Too clean to be an accident. "Aurora!" There was no response.

Just a slam of the door in the main room. Vera grabbed the trash can by the metal edge with her folded sleeve and tipped it over.

The flames bit into the linoleum floor, running toward a pile of newspapers tied with rope. The smoke came down suddenly, thick, black in the throat.

He backed away coughing, looked for a fire extinguisher and found, instead, a notebook half hidden under the radiator, as if someone had pushed it there on the way out. Blue, charred in one corner.

He opened it on instinct. The first page had just three full lines.

If something happens to me, don't look in the sea. Look in the newspaper archives for what they removed from A Serea.

The girl who survived could not return with her name. Maruxa.

The ceiling creaked above. A shower of ash fell on his hand.

Vera stuffed the notebook under her jacket, slammed the door through the smoke, and walked out into the main room almost blindly. Aurora was outside on the steps, screaming for help in a voice too late to be innocent.

"Who came in here?" Vera grabbed her arm. The woman paled, looking not at Vera, but behind her, towards the square.

"I didn't see the face." Vera followed the direction of his eyes. On the other side of the rain, a gray car started slowly.

In the passenger seat, just a profile: a motionless, upright woman with a navy scarf tied around her neck. Helena Bértola.

When the first neighbors arrived with buckets, the fire had already chosen. The filing cabinets in the back were beginning to bend like hot ribs.

The only complete copy of the clippings was going up in smoke in front of the entire town. Vera clutched the charred notebook to her chest.

A loose sheet of paper, blackened on one side, peeked out from between the pages. It wasn't Maruxa's.

It was a municipal card torn off, and on the name line you could still read, under a stain of soot: Sara Lago.

The Girls Who Listened to the Sea

The Girls Who Listened to the Sea