Charlie Harrison—Jeremy Leung

Charlie Harrison and Jeremy Leung are a married couple associated with the Travelling Symphony whose story is known through a brief stay in St. Deborah by the Water, the birth of their daughter, and their later departure. The Symphony once left them in town so Charlie could give birth away from the road. When it returns, the family is gone; their names appear together on grave markers, but the undisturbed earth beneath them indicates that the markers are not graves. The relation is therefore defined both by the concrete family they formed and by the uncertainty surrounding their disappearance.

Marriage and the earlier stay

Two years before the Travelling Symphony’s return to St. Deborah by the Water, it left Charlie and Jeremy there. Charlie was pregnant, and the arrangement was for the couple to stay in a former Wendy’s near the gas station so that she would not have to give birth while travelling. The decision records a practical pause in the Symphony’s itinerant life: the couple’s circumstances required a place to remain, and the group made one for them.

The account identifies Jeremy first through the Symphony’s informal designation for him, the sixth guitar, and then by name. Charlie is described as his wife. These details establish them as partners within the travelling company and as a family preparing to have a child. The evidence does not describe how they met, how long they had been married, or what either expected their life together to become. What it does make clear is that their shared identity had a place in the Symphony’s arrangements: they were not merely two people left behind, but a pregnant couple for whom the group had made provision.

Annabel’s birth and the family’s absence

On returning to town, the Symphony finds neither Charlie nor Jeremy. A boy at the north end recognizes the company and directs it to camp at the Walmart, but Charlie and Jeremy do not appear as the caravans pass through or settle in the parking lot. Their absence turns the return into a search. Kirsten Raymonde asks after Charlie at the former Wendy’s, explaining that she is looking for both her friend and Jeremy, her husband.

The local midwife tells Kirsten Raymonde that Charlie and Jeremy left town more than a year earlier. She also confirms that Charlie had a daughter, Annabel, who was born healthy. This is the clearest account of what happened during the stay the Symphony had arranged: Charlie gave birth, and the couple’s family grew to three. But the information stops short of explaining why they left or where they went. Their departure is not presented as the end of the marriage; it is the point at which the family becomes unreachable to the people who knew them.

Names on the markers

The search acquires a more alarming shape when three markers appear together in the town cemetery. Painted neatly in black, they bear the names Charlie Harrison, Jeremy Leung, and Annabel, identified as an infant, and all carry the same date: July 20, Year 19. The names place the couple’s child beside them and make the family’s apparent fate seem settled at first glance.

Dieter points out that there is no grave beneath the three markers. The ground is flat and undisturbed, unlike the mounded earth over actual graves elsewhere in the cemetery. The distinction matters: the markers join the family in the appearance of death without confirming that any of them died. In the same cemetery, many real graves date from a winter illness that killed thirty people, but the evidence does not establish that Charlie, Jeremy, or Annabel belonged to that group. Their names on the markers are a disturbing sign of the town’s altered order, not proof of the family’s deaths.

Departure and unresolved outcome

A Symphony member later reports that twenty families left St. Deborah by the Water after the epidemic, including Charlie, Jeremy, and their baby. The acquaintance who supplied this information says that nobody knows where they went and that it was best not to ask. The report places the family’s departure among a larger movement out of town, following an illness that killed thirty people, including the mayor. It does not establish that the epidemic was the reason this particular family left, nor does it reveal whether they travelled together after leaving.

That unresolved destination is central to how the couple’s relationship is presented. The evidence supplies a sequence of shared circumstances—marriage, pregnancy, birth, and departure—but gives no private account of their decisions or feelings. The family’s absence is experienced through other people’s search and speculation: the Symphony expects to find its former companions, Kirsten Raymonde seeks her friend, and the cemetery briefly offers an apparent answer that the ground itself contradicts. Charlie and Jeremy remain linked in the record as spouses and as parents, while the fate of all three family members stays unknown.