Since you don't have a phone or a computer, you head for the nearest library. Forbes Library is a sprawling Romanesque building, a 19th century castle located on a hill across from Smith College. Cast iron railings flank a manicured walkway, now dusted with snow, that takes you inside. The interior is spacious, quiet, and cool but not cold. Once you have a library card, a brief self-tour familiarizes you with the circulation desk, the freely available computers, and the media library. You settle into the first open computer.
Then you open up about twenty tabs. Local newspapers, the Northampton-area Nextdoor, local sub-reddits, Facebook pages for the nearby colleges, a few environmental forums, Discords, and IRC channels the Garou use to keep in touch, plus JSTOR and Google Scholar (just in case).
Then you just start pounding keywords, anything that relates even superficially to the Garou, Banes, anything you can think of. You know you're making progress because the word "caern" actually appears (though not in its correct context) after a few Broad Brook searches. This is interesting: when you pull up articles in the Daily Hampshire Gazette (the local newspaper) from around the time the caern went dark, you find an entire article scrubbed, replaced with text from an obscure Victorian novel. Another article's content is full of random letters.
But the Gazette article still has a byline, and after some digging, you find the journalist's phone number and use the library's phone to place a call. His wife picks up. Someone who answers their landline—a miracle! The journalist retired last year, and though his wife can't remember the article in question, she does remember someone calling just after it was placed, and what sounded like a furious and righteous argument from her husband.
"Do you remember the name of the person who called?" you ask, holding your breath.
"Yeah, it was that environmentalist woman," the journalist's wife says. "Daphne Clear."
The next computer search tells you that Daphne Clear works for GRC Media Group, right in town. Some kind of environmental consultancy group; exactly what they do isn't clear from their website. It's a ten-minute walk from the library to their address.
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