The Hollows--A Novel

by Jess Montgomery

  Oh, Tom. With him, she would find love and, yes, physical pleasure. Over the past weeks, she’s come to realize the truth she’d tried to tamp down to the bottom of her heart ever since saying yes to Merle’s proposal: life with Merle would be bearable, but she’d never really have any type of passion with him.

  That realization was also overwhelming.

  Now Tom is pressing her, too, and she needs time to think, time to find the best way—

  “You want the impossible.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You want to get what you want, upsetting nobody.”

  Hildy pulls herself over to Tom, leans her head on his chest. He doesn’t embrace her as he usually does. She begins to cry. “I’ll break it off with him, Tom; I will. I need time—”

  Tom finally touches her, but only to ease her off of him, and he stands up from the bed as she tries to grab hold of him, and steps out of reach. “No, you won’t. You’d hafta be crazy to do that. What can I offer you but a life of hard work and scarcity?”

  “Love. You can offer me love, and I the same to you—”

  Tom’s laugh, though soft, is abrupt, rueful. “Love? That ain’t gonna put food in your belly, nor a fine, fancy hat on your head, and if’n love were enough”—he gives the word “love” a harsh twist, as if it is some rank, foul thing he wants to strangle—“if’n it were—” And here his voice breaks, and he steps out of the moonlight, and she can no longer see his face, and her heart pangs immediately at losing sight of him. But he doesn’t want her to stare frankly at the tears she knows are now running down his lined cheeks. He wishes to hide the humiliation she’s brought upon him, making him think she could be his when in truth she doesn’t have the courage for the only life he could offer her—that of a miner’s wife. Tougher still, a union organizer’s wife.

  “If’n love were enough, you’d have shown that by now.”

  She hears him step farther away. He picks up her dress from the floor, tosses it to her on the bed. Hildy stares down at it, the modest blue fabric swimming before her eyes, as if she’s staring into an endless pond of water, and she wishes that she were, that she could dive in and swim away from all this trouble.

  “Don’t cry, sugar.” Tom’s voice hitches. “You’d be crazy to throw over a man like Merle for me, for the life I could give you. I know that. You do, too. Just go, and sooner or later, it’ll be like you never spent any time here at all. You’ll get your right mind back and settle down to be his wife.”

  CHAPTER 3

  LILY

  Tuesday, September 21—11:30 p.m.

  Two men stand by a coal-oil lamp hung on a hook staked in the ground beside the caboose. Lily catches their strident voices but not their words, and they fall silent as she approaches.

  One steps forward. In the dim lamplight, Lily sees his hands tremoring, senses the lingering tension of the conversation she’s interrupted.

  “Ma’am? You should get back to your home—”

  Again, she points to her badge. “I’m Sheriff Ross.”

  He goes stock-still. Then he extends his hand. “I’m the conductor. Mr. Lawrence.”

  Their handshake is abrupt. Down to business, then. Lily says, “I understand the deceased is likely female, fell from the tunnel as the train came through, and was clipped by one of the freight cars? That’s what your flagman in training told me.”

  Mr. Lawrence nods. “The head brakeman was preparing to stop the train down at the depot. He saw the body as it hit, near the middle of the train.”

  “He was outside?”

  Now Mr. Lawrence points, directing her attention to a narrow ladder that scales the engine. “His job is to get up top and set the hand brake.”

  Lily calculates: frightening enough to scramble up as the train is rumbling through a dark forest, what’s more to see a body falling from the top of the tunnel—at least forty feet high. Anyone jumping would know they were risking injury or death.

  Voices down the embankment catch her attention. “I hope they haven’t disturbed the body. I want to see exactly where it landed.”

  Mr. Lawrence clears his throat. “They’re still looking.”

  The tunnel is a quarter mile, maybe more, behind the caboose. She’s taken a train only twice, both times to Cincinnati with Daniel. But she knows how it feels to stop an automobile going twenty miles per hour; it would take a minute or so. Lily calculates: a train would take longer, but this one had only the engine, the six cars she’d counted walking over here, and the caboose. If the flagman in training was right and the train was going its customary twenty miles per hour, she reckons that the brakeman should have been able to stop the train sooner, closer to the tunnel.

  Lily asks, “Does the train come through at the same times every day?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you were scheduled to arrive at the depot at what time?”

  “Nine thirty p.m.”

  “Mighty late. Latest train out of Kinship is on Wednesday nights, eight p.m.”

  “That’s a passenger train. This is freight. Wessex Corporation—over in Rossville…” Mr. Lawrence pauses, realization flickering. “You any kin—”

  “I was married to Daniel Ross, whose father established the town and the original mining operation.” Heat rises in Lily’s face, and she’s glad for the disguise of shadowy light. The sooty, dank smell of coal, coming from the open train cars, is suffocating.

  “Ah, read something about that. Wasn’t he killed by an escaped prisoner—”

  “I was asking about the scheduled arrival time. Nine thirty, you said?” Behind each sharply snapped word is the hurt that still punches up, a hard fist slamming into her heart, whenever someone asks about Daniel. “Were you on time?”

  “Early.”

  “How early?”

  “Not much. We came through the tunnel at nine twenty.”

  “At your usual speed?”

  He frowns. “A bit faster. We left Rossville late, and we were making up time. Wouldn’t have mattered if we were going slower. Body hitting a train or the ground from that height—”

  “Not blaming the train’s speed. Just wondering. Would the train have been able to stop in time to keep from hitting a person, or a body, on the track?”

  “Not at that spot. Can’t see anything on the other side of the tunnel, even with lights on, until we’re nearly out. Most dangerous run for miles, but given these hills, I can see there wasn’t no other choice for how to lay the track. What are you thinking?”

  “Well, simplest explanation is that a local person would know your train’s usual schedule, and decided to jump just before the train would come through. If the impact of the fall didn’t bring death, then being run over surely would.”

  The conductor stares at her, as if this grim, though obvious, explanation is more shocking coming from a woman.

  Lily goes on. “If the train came through earlier, wouldn’t the person be surprised? Maybe lose resolve? Unless the person wasn’t trying to commit suicide, was instead trying for a fast, though dangerous, way out of this area. Ever have something like that happen?”

  “Time to time,” Mr. Lawrence admits. “Elsewhere, when we’re going slower.”

  “I’m trying to think of all the likely reasons someone would jump from the tunnel onto the top of your train—when it was both going faster and coming through earlier than usual,” Lily says. “Smacks of desperation. If you’ll pardon the expression.”

  The conductor frowns, but the other man, until now sitting quietly on the caboose steps, chuckles. “We gotta tell her!” He leaps up, totters toward them, introduces himself to Lily as the head brakeman.

  “A highly responsible job.” Lily opts to ignore the illicit scent of moonshine roiling off of him. Mama always says you draw more flies with honey than vinegar—and though as a child Lily had argued against the value of more flies, she’d come as an adult to understand Mama’s point with the old adage.

  “I’m no
t sure he is feeling well enough to reasonably state—” Mr. Lawrence starts.

  “I’d be remiss not to take his statement.” Lily looks at the head brakeman, who grins as if pleased that Lily values his witness enough to override his boss. “Please go on.”

  “Well, ma’am, after the body fell, I saw another figure at the top of the tunnel. One arm hooked around the trunk of one of them there skinny trees.”

  Lily glances back. Indeed, trees grow to the edge of the top of the tunnel that had been dynamite-blasted right through the hill.

  “Were you able to note anything else about the figure? Male or female?” Another person up there with the victim—that complicates things. And raises a new question: if the victim was alone, the fall could be accident, suicide, or a foolhardy attempt to jump to the train top to hitch out of the area. The latter suggested a younger person—in her own youth, Lily liked going with her brother Roger to the Kinship Tree that grows by a still spot alongside Coal Creek. They’d climb out onto their “jumping-off” limb, leap into the water for a swim on a hot day—a choice that has long since seemed reckless. Yet it’s one of her fondest memories.…

  She shakes her head to clear it. Refocuses on the moment. Maybe, as in her youth, the jump had been a foolish dare. In any case, now there is another witness to search for.

  “Couldn’t rightly say. The figure was all in white, head to toe. A ghost!”

  Lily glances at the conductor, who gives her a rueful look: I warned you.

  “A ghost,” Lily says flatly. “You saw a ghost at the top of the tunnel.”

  “Yep. And you ask me, that ghost pushed th’other person off!”

  Ridiculous. And yet … she thought she’d seen a phantom boy chasing after something in the woods. Maybe the spookiness of Moonvale Hollow Village and the surrounding woods simply stirred tired—or inebriated—imaginations.

  The head brakeman pokes his face close to hers. She holds her breath to keep from gagging at his odors of moonshine and tobacco and sweat. “Dammit, I know what you and Lawrence here are thinking, but I know better still what I saw—a figure up there. All in white. Mayhap a ghost. Or mayhap a person, dressed in white, I dunno. I saw someone.”

  Lily stares into the man’s watery, dark eyes. Sees his fear, his adamance. He’s not trying to play her as a fool or make a joke. “I believe you saw something, and I will investigate the top of the tunnel—”

  “Lawrence!” another man’s voice—shaky yet ringing with excitement—hollers up from below the embankment. “We found her!”

  * * *

  Lily angles so that she can sidestep down the slope. There is no path, other than the one made by the train’s regular flagman and fireman, their girth snapping tree branches and undergrowth, making it a little easier for her to maneuver while holding a flashlight in one hand, her skirt bunched in the other to keep from getting tangled in the brush.

  At the bottom of the ravine, a coal-oil lamp lights the area, so Lily turns off her flashlight and tucks it between her waist and belt. A telegraph pole had stopped the woman’s body from tumbling the rest of the way down the embankment into a thin stream. The woman is so small that most of her body is hidden behind the man’s stance.

  The man eyes Lily’s sheriff’s badge, lifts his eyebrows, but introduces himself as the B&R fireman. Another glance at her badge—yet he can’t help but explain, “It ain’t a pretty sight, not fit for a woman t’see.”

  “I’m not called out for pretty sights.”

  A retching sound stifles the natural sounds of the autumn night.

  Lily lifts an eyebrow. “One of your men?” She puts a slight emphasis on the last word.

  He frowns. “Flagman.”

  “Let me see her,” Lily says.

  The fireman shrugs—have it your way, lady—but he steps away from the body.

  Lily sets her folded sheet on top of a bush, then kneels before the woman. She swallows hard, understanding why the flagman is so affected. The moonlight and the coal-oil lamp bring a spotlight on the body. Lily breathes slowly, partly to calm herself—her own heart beats hard at the sight of the woman, at once gruesome and piteous—and also to keep the smells, the flagman’s sick, the woman’s release of bodily fluids upon death, from filling her nose too fast.

  The woman is petite. Probably shorter than Lily’s own five feet, three inches, by a good two inches. Elderly—gray-white hair, deeply wrinkled skin. So, not likely jumping from tunnel tops on a dare. She is on her side, legs tucked up, left arm across her body—the repose of a nap. Her right arm juts out at an unnatural angle behind her head.

  The woman wears a thin, pale blue nightgown. Her feet are bare, except for loose wrappings of cleaning rags. Makeshift shoes.

  Why isn’t she wearing suitable shoes, or at least house slippers? Mama says shoes tell a lot about a person—something Lily catches herself repeating as she shows her children how to polish their shoes. The elderly woman’s lack of proper attire suggests the possibility of wandering out of a nearby home. On a whim? Out of fear? In any case, not likely planned.

  Lily gently unwraps the woman’s left foot and shines her flashlight on it. No warts or callouses, only a slight bunion, cuts and scratches on the sole, and a still-bloody spot on the instep where it’s been pierced by a thorny branch. The well-tended condition of her feet suggest that this woman has lived for a long time with privilege and wealth. Not likely, then, a woman from the hills, or from the rough village of Moonvale Hollow. An outsider. So, also not likely she knew the train schedule, as locals would. If what the brakeman said was true—another person was at the tunnel top with her—maybe that person was from here. Knew the usual schedule.

  Next Lily notes chafed raw skin on both wrists—markings that do not suggest injuries from falling into an oncoming train or from landing in this spot but, rather, binding. For the first time since getting called here, shock churns Lily’s gut. Who would bind the wrists of an old woman, and why? Outrage on the woman’s behalf quickens Lily’s pulse.

  Moment by moment, the woman’s death seems less likely to be the result of unfortunate accident, or self-inflicted by a wish for death or an attempt to escape the area.

  Gently, Lily lifts the woman’s left foot; the leg moves smoothly enough. Rigor mortis, Lily knows from her days serving as a nurse during the prior decade’s influenza outbreak, would start to set in somewhere from two to six hours after death, depending on the condition of the body and the environment—faster if it’s cooler and if the deceased had been exerting physical effort before death. Lily touches the woman’s neck and jaw, where stiffness would first start. The flesh is slightly taut but depresses easily enough at Lily’s touch. So the woman was alive when she fell two hours ago—or was pushed, if the drunken brakeman was right about a figure on top of the tunnel—onto the train. Or had only died very shortly before. It is possible someone killed the woman and hoped to destroy the corpse and evidence by pushing the body into the path of the 9:30 p.m. train. But the train had come through ten minutes early.

  Lily goes back to the simplest explanation: the old woman, wherever she was from, seeking to kill herself and mistiming her jump. Or perhaps she had dementia. Maybe the rope marks were from a family member’s attempt to protect her? Yet the woman escapes, wanders to the top of the tunnel, falls or jumps.

  Then what of the condition of her feet suggesting she is not from there? Of the brakeman’s insistence he’d seen someone up there with her?

  Both of those questions suggest a not-so-simple explanation.

  What if the woman had died while bound and in desperation a family member had pulled the body up, then pushed her off? Had she been bound when she fell from the top of the Moonvale Hollow Tunnel? Did the ropes come free upon impact? Or had she broken free of those bonds before she fell?

  The difference strikes Lily as vital.

  Lily stares away from the body. Just a dozen yards on, Lily can see nothing but eternal darkness that could lead anywhere. It seems a liv
ing thing, the darkness, waiting for her. For anyone who would dare go to it.

  Bronwyn is one of eighty-eight counties in Ohio—a tiny scrap of land. And yet, in this darkness, it seems overwhelming and vast. So many places to hide truth or bodies. Most of her work is in Kinship, the county seat, and the coal towns. But death had come here, the most remote part of the county.

  There would be much easier ways to dispose of a body in these deep, dark woods. Why do so in a way that would draw this much attention? This purposeful mutilation seems as hostile as murder itself.

  Unless Lily is reading too much into those markings on the woman’s wrists. Unless the drunken brakeman was hallucinating. And this is a simple suicide, or an unfortunate accident of an old, confused woman. The easiest explanation.

  Someone squats next to her. Lily looks over, expecting to see the fireman, but it’s the flagman, who’d been retching from the discovery of the woman—God knows what he’ll do at whatever sight awaits them once they turn her over.

  Lily regards the flagman. He is middle-aged, tough looking, leathery skin, lines well carved in his brow. Even as his arms rest on his thighs, his hands shake.

  His voice quivers, too. “She brings to mind my own mamaw.”

  Carefully, Lily rolls the woman over. The flagman gasps. Lily looks away for a moment, but the image of the right side of her face—a pulverized mash of blood and skin and bone, the unnatural angle of her head—manifests before her. The woman’s neck had snapped on impact with either the train or the ground or the telegraph pole. Lily swallows hard. Counts to three. Forces herself to look again.

  Lily smooths back the woman’s hair, gray-white, yet fine and soft as a child’s. In the undamaged part of the woman’s face, Lily notes the fine high cheekbones, delicate brow and nose and mouth, the remaining eye, still open, a vivid blue. Intelligent. The word drifts into Lily’s assessment. Gently, Lily lowers the eyelid. She figures the woman to be in her seventies, a lovely, dignified seventy, and certainly once a beauty, and a woman from wealth.