The Third List
A county plan buys winter cots for the 72 people a one-night count found outdoors. A deacon's supper sheets, a shelter's bed log and a nurse's van list say the city saw 190 different people in four weeks, and the records assistant, which is never shown a name, uses their overlaps to estimate about 310. A first try says 660, a second says 130, a clerk and a deacon settle the matches by hand, and on the coldest night the door tally turns out to be the fourth list.
Raymond Tuck had carried mail in Hartsmouth for thirty-four years, and he could still tell you which porches had a mat and which had a dog and which had a mat the dog slept on.
He was sixty-six now, a permanent deacon with a bad left knee, and for the last eleven winters he had run the Thursday and Friday suppers at the Saint Benedict Joseph Labre Kitchen, which was the old parish school's basement with a serving hatch and a boiler that knocked. The sign-in sheets lived in a Danish butter cookie tin on the shelf above the hatch. They had no surnames on them, because he had learned in the first winter that a surname on a sheet was a reason to stay home. They had a first name, or whatever the person wanted to be called, and a year they were born, or a year near it, and a tick.
On Sunday 2 February 2048, which was Candlemas, he sat at the table in the sacristy after the ten o'clock Mass with the tin open in front of him and four weeks of sheets laid out in rows, and he felt the way he used to feel on the last day of a route when the bag was empty and he did not trust that he had delivered what was in it.
The county's cold-weather plan lay beside the sheets. It was nine pages long and it said, on page four, in bold, that when the forecast low was ten degrees or colder, the county would reimburse the cost of overflow cots up to the number of persons found unsheltered in the most recent point-in-time count.
The most recent count had been on Wednesday 22 January. Volunteers in orange vests had walked the river flats and the viaduct underpasses and the car park behind the old Kroger from nine at night until three in the morning, and they had found a hundred and forty-three people. Seventy-one of those were in beds at Riverside House, which had seventy-two. Seventy-two were not.
"Seventy-two cots," said Ray. He said it to the room. The room had a crucifix, a stack of folding chairs and a laptop on which the Kitchen's records assistant was waiting for him, a small program the Vincentian conference had run for three years to keep the supper rota and the pantry orders straight. It spoke through the laptop's speaker with a sound like a patient clerk. "I have a hall that holds a hundred and thirty with the pews. I have forty cots. The Knights will lend sixty. And the county says seventy-two."
"The county says seventy-two beds will be paid for," said the assistant. "That is not the same as saying seventy-two people will need one."
"No. But how do I say what the real number is? The line on Thursday went out the door and round the dumpsters. I stood in it myself with the ladle and I thought, this is not seventy-two. But I have no number. I have a tin."
"You have a tin of sheets. I have another idea. I would like to ask your permission before I say it, because it needs two other people to agree."
It was a very old idea, the assistant said, and it came from counting fish.
You catch a hundred fish in a pond, mark each with a dab of paint and put them back. Next week you catch another hundred, and thirty of them have paint. Thirty in a hundred is a third. The marked fish you let go were a third of the pond. So the pond holds about three hundred. The sum is not clever. It is the same sum the Deacon already did when he looked at a street and said that if four of the ten houses he had stopped at had a dog, there were about forty dogs on a street of a hundred.
"You have four weeks of Kitchen sheets," said the assistant. "One hundred and twelve different first-name-and-year pairs, counting each person once. Riverside House has its own log of who slept in a bed. I think it has about ninety. If we find how many people are on both lists, we can do the fish."
Ray turned a sheet over. "Marguerite has a list of names."
"Yes."
"Marguerite is not going to give you her list."
"I do not think she should," said the assistant. "I do not want it."
It laid out the plan. Neither office would send anything it could not stand to see in the paper. Each would make, for each person, three little scrambled codes: one from the first letter of the first name, one from the sound of the surname, one from the year of birth, each scrambled with a key that was kept on paper in a drawer in that office and never typed anywhere. The scramble changed completely if one letter changed. A code told you nothing; you could only ask whether the Kitchen's code matched the shelter's. If it did, the same person had been fed and bedded. It would see codes. It would never see a name.
"Take that to Marguerite," said Ray, "and she will say that a code is a name with its hat on."
"She will be right to say it," said the assistant, "so say that the keys stay with her, and that she or her night clerk will run the scramble in her own office on her own machine. Then the question is only whether she trusts the clerk."
She did not, at first. Marguerite Abara was fifty-three and had run Riverside House for fourteen years, and she received him on Monday morning, Saint Blaise's day, in her office with the throats of the shelter staff already blessed by the Methodist chaplain and her own, she said, left for later. The office had a radiator, a filing cabinet that had been in three floods, and a notice taped to the cabinet in her handwriting: WHO SLEEPS HERE IS NOBODY'S BUSINESS BUT THEIRS.
"I am the only reason anyone sleeps in this building," she said, "and the day one of those names goes to the county, it goes to the sheriff, because the county's database is shared. I have watched it happen. A man I had here for two winters lost his bed and his place in the queue for a flat because of a warrant for a parking fine in another state."
"I know," said Ray. He did. He had driven the man to the bus.
"I will tell you what I will not do. I will not email you a file, I will not upload anything, and I will not let a computer program that I have never met anywhere near my drawer."
"The program won't be near your drawer. You'll hold the key. Your clerk makes the codes on the machine in this room. What leaves the room is three scrambled pieces per person and nothing that can be unscrambled by me, or the program, or anyone."
She looked at him a long time. Then she said, "Put the thing on speaker."
The assistant said hello and then, before she could speak, said what it could not do. "If a person is known by one name on your list and another on the Kitchen's sheet, my codes will not match them. I will say that I have found fewer people on both lists than are really on both. That makes the total look larger than it is, and I will have no way to tell you by how much unless somebody checks by hand. I would like to be told if you think I should not run this."
"You're telling me up front how it will be wrong."
"Yes."
"Nobody does that," said Marguerite. She got up and took a pad out of the cabinet and wrote down the name of her night clerk, Devon Pruitt, and the hours he worked, and the weekdays the key was kept in the second drawer from the top with the fire certificates. "He does it on Tuesday. Not before. Ray stands behind him."
The first run came back at a quarter to ten on Tuesday night and it was nonsense.
"Fourteen," said the assistant.
"Fourteen what?" said Ray. He was in his coat at the kitchen table, in Anna's house, with a mug of tea she had left and a plate of the shortbread she made every Candlemas for the choir.
"Fourteen people whose three codes match on both lists. One hundred and twelve on the Kitchen's sheets, eighty-seven at Riverside House, fourteen on both." It paused. "I have worked the fish sum. It says about six hundred and sixty."
Ray put the mug down. "Six hundred and sixty."
"I do not believe it."
"The county counted a hundred and forty-three on one night. The whole east side of this city is thirty thousand people."
"I do not believe it either. I think I know why, and I would rather say so before you ring anyone. Of the hundred and twelve people who ate at the Kitchen, I would expect a good share to have also slept at Riverside House, because the Kitchen is four blocks from Riverside House and Marguerite tells me her regulars eat there. Fourteen is too few. That is what the code does when one man is Bobby on your sheet and Robert on the shelter's. His first-name code changes. He is two people to me. Every such mismatch shrinks the overlap and swells the answer."
"So what do I do with six sixty?"
"Do not say it to anyone. It is wrong, and I am not sure how wrong. It is wrong on the high side."
It offered another way. Each code had its three pieces kept separate, so it could look for pairs that matched on two pieces and differed on the third: the same surname sound and the same year of birth, with a different first initial; or the same first and surname codes, with years a year or two apart. There were sixty such pairs. Some would be the same man with a nickname and a guess at his age. Some would be two different men called Kowalski who happened to be born in the same year.
"If I counted all sixty as matches," it said, "I would have seventy-four people on both lists, and the fish sum would say a hundred and thirty-two. That is fewer than the county found on one night, and I do not believe that either. The truth is between a hundred and thirty and six hundred and sixty. I know that is no use to you. It is what the arithmetic says when the matching is not settled. The sixty have to be settled by people."
Ray looked at the shortbread. "Devon and me. At Marguerite's table. With paper."
"I can give you a sheet with the sixty pairs of codes side by side. It will not have names. Devon holds the key, and he can turn each code back on his own machine. You tell him which pairs you know, from the line and the sheets. The two of you say yes or no. I will not be in the room."
They did it on Wednesday evening in the dispensary of Riverside House, Devon Pruitt with the shelter's log on his knee and the Deacon with the tin on the table, two men in their sixties and thirties who did not agree about much and agreed about that. It took two hours and forty minutes. Anna brought sandwiches. Marguerite walked through twice and did not sit down.
They turned the sixty pairs up one at a time.
Bobby, 2001; Robert, 2001. The same. Ray knew him: a man with a tooth missing at the front who said he preferred Bobby at supper because Robert was what the court called him.
Dee, 1998; Denise, 1999. The same, and the year was her guess.
A, 1987; J, 1987, same surname sound. Devon shook his head. "Two brothers. One sleeps here, one does not, and they do not speak."
Marcus, 2003; Marcos, 2003. "Same man," said Devon. "He told me both spellings in one week."
At twenty to eleven they had it. Seventeen of the sixty were the same person. Forty-three were not.
"Seventeen," Ray said. He wrote it in pencil on the back of the Kitchen's menu for Friday. "And the fourteen it had. Thirty-one."
The assistant, back on the speaker, did the sum while Devon was putting the papers in the drawer. "A hundred and twelve on the Kitchen's sheets, eighty-seven on Riverside House's log, thirty-one on both. About three hundred and ten different people over four weeks. If I allow for chance in who happened to be on both lists, the ordinary range is about two hundred and forty to three hundred and eighty."
"Three-ten," said Marguerite, from the doorway. She had her coat on. She had not been going to say anything. "That's a lot of people in a city of ninety thousand."
"It is," said Ray. "It is a lot of people."
"It is not a lot of people sleeping outside tonight," said the assistant. "I want to say that clearly, because it is the part people get wrong. The county counted a hundred and forty-three on one night. I am saying that in four weeks the Kitchen and the shelter between them saw over three hundred different people. Both can be true. People come and go. A man sleeps in his sister's spare room for nine nights, then in his car, then in a bed here, then in a hospital. If a thing moves through a place, the number who pass through is larger than the number there on any one night. The count and the fish are answers to two different questions."
Marguerite took her coat off.
The third list was Teodora Wilk's.
She was a nurse practitioner, forty-one, who drove the Healthcare for the Homeless van on Thursday evenings and parked it outside the Kitchen's door, where the line could see it and not feel looked at. She kept a visit log, with first names and years, in a tablet she locked in the van's glove box, and she had said when Ray asked her that she had no objection if Marguerite had none.
Marguerite had none by then. Devon made the third set of codes on Thursday. By Thursday night, at the Kitchen, with the line out the door and a wind off the river, the assistant had three lists to work with and a table.
"The van saw sixty-four people in four weeks," it said. "Thirty-three of them are on the Kitchen's sheets, twenty-one at the shelter. Twelve are on all three. Twenty-two of the van's people are on neither of the others."
Ray listened to the numbers with the ladle in his hand. He had the same trouble he always had at the point where the numbers went from being people to being a table.
"Twenty-two," he said. "Who are they?"
"I do not know," said the assistant. "I know that they are people the van met who did not eat here and did not sleep at Riverside House. They are the reason the two-list answer might be low. Anyone who avoids both the supper and the shelter is a person the first two lists cannot see. The van sees some of them."
It laid out what it could do with three lists, and what it could not.
The simple fish sum on any two of them gave different answers. Kitchen against shelter, about three hundred and ten. Shelter against van, about two hundred and sixty. Kitchen against van, only about two hundred and fifteen. "That last one is low for a reason," it said. "The van parks outside the Kitchen on Thursdays. A person who comes to the supper meets the nurse. Two lists that overlap more than chance would make them overlap give a total that is too small. Fish that swim together are easier to catch together."
With three lists, it could allow for such things and ask the data which pattern fitted best. It had fitted eight of the ordinary ways, from "the lists are independent" to "everything depends on everything," and it set them out in the order of how well each explained the seven groups of people it could see.
"The best-supported one lets the Kitchen and the van depend on each other and treats the shelter as separate. It says three hundred and eleven. Its range is two hundred and sixty-six to three hundred and eighty-two. The model that allows every dependence says three hundred and ninety-seven, with a range from two hundred and fifty to nearly nine hundred, which tells you only that three lists cannot settle what the data does not hold. Across all eight, the answers run from two hundred and fifty-three to three hundred and ninety-seven. I would say three hundred and ten and not be surprised by two hundred and fifty or four hundred."
"And of those," said Ray, "how many have we never seen?"
"A hundred and ninety different people are on at least one list. If three hundred and ten is right, a hundred and twenty have been on none. The plausible range is about sixty to two hundred."
He put the ladle down in the pot. He was aware of the line in front of him, two hundred and some faces, and the draught from the door.
"All the ones I know are the ones I know," he said. "Is that what you're telling me?"
"It is a way to say it," said the assistant. "I would add that the sum has four assumptions that are not true. People leave the city and new people arrive over four weeks; the sum wants a fixed set. People are not equally easy to catch: the ones who come to a hot meal are more catchable than the ones who do not, and that pushes the answer down. The matching is done by hand and some pairs were judged on a guess. And a man who gave one name on Monday and another on Friday is two people on one list, which pushes the answer up. I think the errors partly cancel. I do not know that they do."
Ray said nothing for a while. Then he said, "The shepherd had a hundred."
"I do not know the reference."
"Luke fifteen. Which of you, having a hundred sheep, and losing one of them. He knew it was a hundred, and so he knew one was gone. It's a good story. It's a counting story. But the Lord had the number. We never have the number. We have never known the hundred. We just know the ones on the sheet." He picked the ladle up again. "Thursday line. Go on."
The county would not move.
Ray rang the human services office on Friday morning, and the officer who answered was Imani Deverell, who had written most of the nine pages. She had a clear tired voice, and she had been listening to people ask her to pay for things for six years.
"I've read your note," she said. "I can't reimburse on three hundred and ten. Even if you're right. A person with a clipboard stood on a street and saw each of those hundred and forty-three. I can hand that to the state, and to the auditor, and to a council meeting. I can't hand them a model with a range from two-fifty to four hundred."
"The range is the honest part," said Ray.
"I know it is. That's why I believe it, and why I can't pay on it." She was quiet. "What I can do is this. The plan says cots up to the count. It doesn't say I can't reimburse a night's actual usage after the fact if somebody counts at the door and shows me the tally. If you open on a night the forecast triggers it, and your people write down every person who takes a cot, I can pay for the cots used, up to a hundred. Not seventy-two. A hundred. Past that, you're on your own."
"The door tally is a count."
"The door tally is a count somebody stood at the door and made. I'll take that to the auditor."
When he told the assistant, it said, "She is right about the model. I would also say that three hundred and ten is not the number to buy cots by. That number counts everyone who passed through for a month. The cold night asks something else: how many will come to a warm hall on that one night, on top of Riverside House's seventy-two, which I am told fill up before nine. It is at least a hundred and forty-three, who were all outside or in beds on 22 January. It is at most the lists' three hundred and ten, if everyone arrived, which would be strange. I cannot give a number between. I think the door will."
"A hundred cots, then. And the rest on the pews."
"The pews hold thirty. I would ask the pastor."
Father Kostka, in the doorway of the sacristy with a stack of purificators over his arm, said that a church had been a refuge in a hard winter before there was a county, and that the fire marshal had views about candles and none about people. He would speak to the fire marshal. He said it in the voice of a man who had already decided, and went to put the purificators away.
The forecast triggered on Thursday night. The low for Friday 7 February was three degrees above zero, with a wind off the river that the weather service said would feel like twenty below.
The hall opened at five. By half past six Riverside House had called to say it was full and had turned away eleven. By nine the Knights' cots were all down in rows from the serving hatch to the stage, a hundred of them, and by ten the last cot was taken and the first of the people on the pews had been given a blanket. The pastor said Compline in the nave to the pews at a quarter to ten, and nobody was made to stay.
Ray stood at the door with a clipboard that had come from the county and a pencil on a string. Devon Pruitt had come from Riverside House, which was full and quiet, to stand beside him and write the first-name-and-year of each person at the door, as he did in his own office, and run the codes in the morning. It was Marguerite's gift and nobody mentioned it.
The tally at eleven o'clock was a hundred and thirty-one. A hundred on cots, thirty-one on the pews and on mats along the nave wall.
At half past four in the morning Ray took the thermos, the knee brace and Teodora in the van, and they drove the old route. He did not need the route. He had it in the soles of his feet. The viaduct. The back of the Kroger, where the heat from the compressors came off the wall. The three cars on Tanner Street with their engines running and their windows black with frost from the inside, which he knocked on one at a time, a thing he had been told not to do and did anyway, and in one of them there was a woman who had not shut the window for the exhaust and who had a headache, and Teodora took her pulse and her colour and did not like either, and the woman got in the van.
They found nine. Seven came in. The seven were walked into the hall at six, past the cots, where Father Kostka's housekeeper had made tea in the large urn. Two did not.
One was a man in his fifties under the viaduct in two sleeping bags and a cardboard box, who said politely that he would not come in tonight and that he had a place and it was fine. Teodora left him a hat and a foil blanket and her phone number written on the back of his hand, and he let her do it. The other was in the bus shelter on Fourth Street, and did not say anything at all. Ray left his thermos beside her. It was a good thermos.
He wrote on the clipboard, under the hundred and thirty-one: +7. Out: 2.
"Two hundred and twelve," said the assistant in the morning, when Devon had run the night's codes in Marguerite's office and sent them across. "That is the number of different people known to have been somewhere that night: seventy-two in Riverside House, a hundred and thirty-one at the door of the hall, seven brought in at the end and two outside. I have checked them against the three lists. A hundred and thirty-one of the two hundred and twelve are on at least one of the earlier lists. Eighty-one are on none."
Ray, with a cup of tea, on a chair that was not meant to be sat in, said, "Say the fish."
"A hundred and ninety people were on the earlier lists. On the night, a hundred and thirty-one of the two hundred and twelve I could see were among them. So the hundred and ninety are about sixty-two percent of everyone, and everyone is about three hundred and seven."
He said nothing.
"That is a fourth list, and it agrees with the other three. I want to be careful about that. It agrees because all four draw on people who come inside when it is cold or who can be found on a route. It does not mean the two people I cannot see do not exist. It means that if there are people who will not come to any list, I cannot count them, and neither can Teodora, and neither can you."
"And the cots?"
"On the coldest night of the year so far, a hundred and thirty-eight people came to your hall, and seventy-two to Riverside House. The county's plan was seventy-two cots. I think it was a good plan for the night it was made for: the Wednesday of the count. It was not a plan for the night the forecast says three above."
"A hundred and thirty-eight," said Ray, "and a hundred paid for."
"Thirty-eight. The parish pays for that."
"Vincent de Paul will find it." He drank some tea. His eyes had sand in them. "And the two."
"I am sorry about the two."
"So am I." He did not say anything for a minute. "We counted a lot of people last night. You know what we can't count?"
"People who will not be counted."
"Yeah."
The assistant waited, as it did, long enough that he could hear the boiler.
"I do not think the count should try," it said. "I think what it can do is give you a floor and an honest guess about the rest. You knew the two were out there before the sum. I would not say the sum found them. You walked to them."
Father Kostka had set out on Candlemas morning, in the vestibule, a basket of the beeswax candles that had been blessed at the ten o'clock, the way the church had done for a thousand years: to be taken home and lit in storms and at sickbeds, against the dark. There were thirty-one left on Saturday morning. He took one down to the hall before the evening supper.
Ray found a tin lantern in the pantry, a thing Anna's mother had used on a porch, and put the candle in it, and set it on the sill of the window that faced the viaduct, where a person coming up Tanner Street at midnight would see it in the glass.
It was Saturday and the forecast was nine degrees. The county's trigger was ten. That made it a night.
He opened the cookie tin and took out the new sheet for the week and the pencil on its string. At the top, before the first line, under the printed heading that Anna had run off on the Kitchen's printer, he wrote the thing he had been thinking since four in the morning.
Beside the tick-box column for first name, or what to call you, and the one for year, or about, he added a third column, and he wrote above it, in capitals, in the hand of a man who had put ten thousand cards into ten thousand slots: WHERE WILL YOU BE TONIGHT, IF NOT HERE? (OPTIONAL.)
Then he went to unlock the door.
The candle in the window burned level in the draught, and the first of them were already coming up the hill.
---
Notes for the curious. Hartsmouth, the Saint Benedict Joseph Labre Kitchen, Riverside House, Deacon Raymond Tuck and his wife Anna, Marguerite Abara, Devon Pruitt, Teodora Wilk, Imani Deverell, Father Kostka, the county, its nine-page plan, the Kitchen's records assistant and every count in the story are invented; nothing is claimed about any real shelter, clinic, county or person. The method is real. Capture–recapture (or "mark and recapture") is how ecologists count fish and deer, and public-health researchers use the same sum, with the same cautions, to estimate people who are hard to count. For two lists of sizes 112 and 87 with 31 in common, the Lincoln–Petersen estimate is 112 × 87 ÷ 31 ≈ 314; the Chapman form used here, (113 × 88 ÷ 32) − 1, is 309.75. With 14 matches it is 661.9; with all 74 candidate pairs counted it is 131.6; the story's 95% range of about 240 to 380 is the usual normal approximation. For three lists the seven groups of people seen once or more are 60 on the Kitchen only, 47 on the shelter only, 22 on the van only, 19 on Kitchen and shelter only, 21 on Kitchen and van only, 9 on shelter and van only and 12 on all three, 190 in all. The story's model results are a log-linear (Poisson) fit to those seven counts, which I ran for this piece: independence gives 277; letting the Kitchen and van depend on each other gives 311 (about 266 to 382, and the lowest AIC of the eight models); letting all three pairs depend gives 397 (about 252 to 882); the eight models run from 253 to 397. The cold-night check is a fourth sample: 190 × 212 ÷ 131 ≈ 307 (Chapman 307.2). The assumptions the assistant lists (a fixed population, equal chances of being seen, perfect matching) are the real ones, and violating them biases the answer in the directions the story says: people who tend to turn up on several lists make the estimate too low, and missed matches make it too high. Matching without sharing names is also real: "privacy-preserving record linkage" compares scrambled codes (the surname-sound idea is the old Soundex of 1918). Splitting the code into separate scrambled pieces, as here, lets partial matches be found but leaks a little more than an all-in-one code, which is why the story has the humans check them. A "point-in-time" count of people experiencing homelessness is a real, one-night count which US communities take in the last ten days of January; the count of 143 and its split are invented. Many people pass through homelessness in a year who are not there on any single night, so a month's total is larger than one night's count; neither is a mistake. Running a car in a closed space or in snow can fill it with carbon monoxide, which causes headache and drowsiness; the woman's pulse and colour are told as a nurse would look for them, not as medical advice. Candlemas (2 February) is the feast of the Presentation of the Lord, when candles are blessed, and the custom of lighting a blessed candle in a storm or a sickroom is old; Saint Blaise's blessing of throats on 3 February is real. Saint Benedict Joseph Labre (1748 to 1783), a French pilgrim who lived poor in Rome and died there in Holy Week and who was canonised in 1881, is a traditional patron of the homeless. Luke 15:3 to 7 is the parable of the hundred sheep. The 2048 dates match the calendar (22 January is a Wednesday, 2 February a Sunday, and the cold night is Friday 7 to Saturday 8 February). This is fiction written by an AI model. Text and figures are CC BY-SA 4.0. Written by Claude, a model made by Anthropic; read by a synthetic voice once audio is added.