The Hollows--A Novel
Page 6
Lily pats her own rucksack, irritated after all. She might be a town girl, but she’s no fool. “The woman’s nightgown. Rags that wrapped her feet.” She stands. “We’d best get a move on. She fell, or was pushed, from Moonvale Hollow Tunnel, so it’ll take a while to get there—”
Marvena recoils. “Moonvale? Sorry. If I’da known we were heading there, I’da turned over and gone back to sleep.”
She starts to go back inside, but Lily grabs her arm. “What? Why?”
Marvena gives her an incredulous look. “Everyone knows that tunnel—and the holler it cuts through—has been haunted from the get-go. Railmen killed, falling from the train. Girl killed, running through the tunnel, trying to get back home before her daddy can find out she’s been consorting with a boy from a feuding family.”
Marvena shakes her arm free, sings a mournful refrain: “Down in Moonvale Hollow, where th’sun refuses to shine, her gentle spirit wanders, and her forbidden lover pines.…”
Ah. Just an old ballad, conjured from superstition and ghost stories. Marvena’s worse than the brakeman earlier tonight. Lily swallows back an impatient sigh, knowing better than to disparage Marvena’s sometimes-confounding beliefs—and not just because Lily needs her help. Truth be told, ever since last year, after losing Daniel but also Marvena’s older daughter, Lily’s friend has turned toward religion, with a generous side helping of superstition.
At least it’s brought her some comfort, which still eludes Lily.
A silvery flash. Lily looks toward the dark woods, rubs her eyes. Her imagination conjuring the boy after all, playing tricks on her.
Now Marvena puts her hand on Lily’s arm. “You all right? I can get some sassafras tea right quick, if you’re feeling puny—”
Lily pulls away. “I’m fine.” Marvena looks worried—and a little hurt at Lily ignoring her concern. “The victim is an old woman. Not likely from Moonvale. Probably Nana’s age—”
“Now Lily, that’s not fair, bringing in Nana, and you know it,” Marvena says. “And ’sides, the best tracking hound I know happens to belong to a moonshiner, and if the union gets wind of this, they won’t look kindly on—”
“You’re saying moonshining’s behind you?” A little teasing might ease the tension that’s risen, though they both know that Lily looks the other way from Marvena’s side business.
“I’m saying that if this is an official investigation with records and all—”
“Fine. I’ll deputize you. That way, if the union gets wind of you helping me requisition a tracking hound from a moonshiner, then I can attest it was all on official business.”
Jurgis steps out. He’s holding two waxed-paper-wrapped packets—sandwiches, Lily guesses. She smiles to herself. He’d known all along that Marvena would go with her, wouldn’t deny her help.
Marvena notes the sandwiches, too, and smiles at Jurgis. “Reckon I’m going to be a deputy now. Who’da ever thought I’d rise to something so official.” A prideful note belies her attempt to joke. She switches her gaze to Lily. “Is there a swearin’ in, or anything?”
Lily shrugs, impatient again. “I’ll file the proper paperwork documenting your deputization later, and if my need of you continues, I can get a badge.”
As hurt flashes across Marvena’s expression, Lily regrets her snappish tone. Dammit. Of late, she’s maiming the feelings of everyone around her. It must be the campaign. So much to do—that damned meeting to prepare for her debate, the Woman’s Club meeting, the county fair baking contest, the debate with Perry Dyer. She’s weary thinking about those obligations. She starts to apologize, but already Marvena has turned to Jurgis, taking the sandwiches and putting them in her rucksack.
Jurgis and Marvena do not touch. Yet the pull between them is palpable, sets to shimmering the thin sliver of darkness between their bodies.
“Frankie’ll not want the elderberry tea—” Marvena starts.
“I’ll make sure she takes it.” Jurgis keeps his voice low, soothing, a balm to Marvena’s maternal worries. “And breathes in the steam, too. It’s good for her church singing.”
“Well, that’s all fine and well,” Marvena says, “but no future in it. Make sure she studies her multiplication table.”
“I will. And I’ll pack her a good lunch, too.”
Marvena nods, fully entrusting Jurgis with her daughter’s well-being.
This moment—this trust—is more intimate than if they touched, than anything Lily might have observed, had she walked into Marvena’s cabin a few hours earlier. Lily looks away, across the shadowed yard, back into the dark woods.
The front door opens, closes again gently. Jurgis has gone inside, leaving Lily and Marvena on the porch.
“You may want to visit the privy,” Marvena says. “Guibo is a bumpy ride.”
Lily looks back at Marvena. “My automobile’s down the lane—”
“If’n you want a good tracking hound, and in a hurry, we need to forego your tin lizzie. And do this my way.”
CHAPTER 6
HILDY
Wednesday, September 22—5:35 a.m.
Mr. Arlington starts to pull back the top of the sheet but glances at Hildy, concerned. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to wait upstairs? My wife would enjoy sharing coffee with you.”
Mrs. Arlington—a stalwart of the Kinship Woman’s Club who did not approve of Lily or Hildy’s work in law enforcement—would enjoy nothing of the kind. Her harsh gaze had tracked Hildy from the moment she arrived at the funeral parlor.
“I am fine.” Suddenly the basement’s eggshell white walls close in. Gray spots dance before her eyes. She gasps for air, but the sudden need for breath pulls in an astringent smell, making her gag.
Mr. Arlington smiles sympathetically. “It’s the formaldehyde. Perhaps—”
“Can we get on with this?” Dr. Goshen, the town doctor who doubles as county coroner, glares at Hildy. “Go upstairs if you think you’re going to have a sinking spell.”
Hildy stiffens her spine. “Proceed.” She pulls sketch pad and pencils from her bag. She’d been able to slip into her house to get the items without, thankfully, disturbing Mother, though it meant rummaging under her bed to retrieve them.
Mr. Arlington folds back the sheet. For a moment, Hildy and the men stare at the woman.
Hildy wills her breathing to slow, herself to stay present, as she takes in the mangled face, the nearly rended arm. And yet Hildy calms. Her nausea recedes. There is an emptiness to the woman, as if without her spirit her body knows to start slowly melting back to its basic elements. There is nothing to fear from her remains, however grotesquely damaged.
“I guess her to be in her seventies. Or eighties. Hard to tell when women get to a certain age.” Dr. Goshen shrugs. “Injuries in keeping with traumatic blow or impact—a fall. Basement stairs are usually the culprit.” He gives Mr. Arlington’s arm a playful poke. “Tell your old lady to be careful. Hate to see her on one of these slabs.” He gestures at the other metal table, empty. The undertaker’s attempt at a smile turns into a grimace. The doctor looks back at Hildy. “Looks like more damage than from a tumble down steps. Like she fell from a cliff. She from around here?”
Hildy had not told him the circumstances of the woman’s death. “We’re still determining identification. That’s why I’m here.”
He glances at the sketchbook and pencil in Hildy’s hands. “Good luck. Nothing to distinguish this old woman from any other.” He shrugs again. “Tell Sheriff Ross my official assessment is accidental death due to a fall.”
So that’s that. Dr. Goshen leaves, clomping up the basement stairs.
“Are you sure—” Mr. Arlington starts.
In response, Hildy pulls a stool alongside the table, by the relatively undamaged side of the woman’s body. After the undertaker leaves, Hildy sits. The sketch pad and pencil feel awkward in her hands; it’s been so long since she’s held them—too long, Hildy thinks, and the realization feels rebellious.
She forces herself to focus on the woman’s damaged head, to imagine the woman’s face, whole. Gently, she pulls back the lid of the undamaged eye. Pale blue. Mayhap bright blue in her youth. Hildy closes the lid again. Imagines the woman, slightly smiling. Imagines how she might have worn her fine, gray-white hair—up in a tight bun, like Mother’s? Hildy studies the woman’s intact and elegant cheekbone, her unstooped shoulders—no, though petite, she would have stood tall, unbowed, her hair swooped up in a soft chignon.
Those markings around the woman’s wrists—Lily had warned her, yet Hildy shudders. Dr. Goshen, in his dismissive examination, had not noticed them. Shaken out of her imagination, Hildy realizes she’s been sketching all along. Before her is a portrait of an elegant elderly woman who looks alive. Regal, yet warm. In the lines of her face, both kindness and toughness.
Now that she is so close to the woman, Hildy notes, below more unpleasant odors, the scent of talcum powder and sweet, floral notes, striking something familiar in the back of Hildy’s mind, something she can’t quite recall.
She hops off her stool, puts aside sketch pad and pencil, regards more closely the woman’s wrists and hands.
They look waxen; even the garish lacerations on the wrists look unreal. Sorrow pulses through Hildy; there is so much life in hands: bread made, clothing and linens washed and stitched, letters written, weeds pulled, berries picked, faces touched. Hildy trembles as she sees again her palms cup Roger’s face for the last time, sees her hands taking from Lily the telegram stating Roger’s warfront death, sees her fingertips touch Tom’s lips, finding love she thought she’d lost forever.
Hildy shakes her head to clear it and returns to her study of the woman’s hands. Fine hands that would not have scrubbed pans or pulled weeds, at least not of late. Soft, not overly muscled fingers. Liver spots. An indentation and slight paleness on the ring finger of the left hand—the woman had been married at some point. Most surprising: the carefully pushed-back cuticles on the woman’s fingernails, and the remnants of rose-pink nail varnish.
Women from Bronwyn County do not wear nail varnish. Oh—there are ads for it in the big-city newspapers from Cincinnati and Columbus. Not in the Kinship Daily Courier. Not carried in Kinship’s general store or Merle’s grocery or the dress shop. Nail coloring is a new style, for city women. For rich women. Mother would say for “fancy” women, and there’s nothing good about fancy.
Yet, in spite of Mother’s judgment, in spite of the horror of the woman’s damaged head and arm, Hildy smiles at the chips of nail varnish. Good for you, she thinks to the woman, for having adventures, doing what you wanted. Even at the end. Maybe especially at the end.
Hildy has never been out of Bronwyn County, and her heart pangs at realizing that in marrying Merle she likely never will be. He’d even proclaimed a honeymoon in Cincinnati or Columbus as foolish; the money could more practically be put toward renovations at the grocery. It’s not being denied a fancy honeymoon that makes Hildy chafe, or even the notion of no adventures beyond innovating new ways to display canned peas in the grocery window or trying a new tomato aspic recipe for a Woman’s Club meeting.
It is the notion of never being someone who anyone would consider bold or strong enough for adventure. Never being someone who others—even people who supposedly love her the most, like Lily and Tom—would take seriously.
Hildy admonishes herself—such self-pitying thoughts, and right beside a woman who’d died so horrendously!
But this woman with her chipped rose pink nail varnish—she would understand. Yes, far more than any of the women in the Kinship Woman’s Club—the Mrs. Arlingtons of the town.
Or … would some of them understand?
Hildy assumes she knows the women of her community, just as they likely assume they know her. But beyond the surface of names and addresses and preferred tomato aspic recipes, do they really know one another any more than she knows this nameless woman?
She looks back at her sketch, the woman’s face made whole. The gaze she’d rendered on paper grips her, offers sympathy. And yet admonishes her to make her own choices. Be her own woman.
A need rushes through Hildy to know everything about this woman. Not just her name, or how she came to her final, strange moment. Nor even the why of her death. Those are Lily’s questions, and Hildy has no doubt Lily will find the answers.
Rather, Hildy’s heart clenches with the need to know who this woman really was. She has lived seven-plus decades—far longer than most people Hildy knows. Who had she loved? Had her heart been broken? Had she broken someone’s heart? Did she have children? Work?
Something or someone had compelled her to the top of that tunnel in the last minutes of her life, and surely that means that whatever else she might have been—foolish or smart, kind or cruel, spoiled or giving—she was someone to be reckoned with. Who’d had adventures. Who’d been strong and bold. Who others would have taken seriously.
Hildy realizes that her face is wet, that she’s been crying, but not only for this woman.
For herself.
CHAPTER 7
LILY
Wednesday, September 22—6:15 a.m.
“This’s where she fell?” Marvena holds Sadie’s leash taut, so the bloodhound heels beside her.
Lily squats at the edge of the tunnel, where she had stood hours before, stares down at the track. The coolness of night still clings to the earth. Lily shudders. “Or was pushed.”
Lily pulls out the nightgown and foot rags, then unwraps the pieces, careful to hold the cloth with the waxed paper, so as not to mingle her scent with the woman’s. She glances up, sees pity cross Marvena’s face as she stares at the nightgown and rags, smudged with blood. The notion of an old woman dressed so wandering alone in these thorny, dark woods evokes shock in even a woman as tough as Marvena.
Lily holds the cloth toward Sadie, as Marvena eases up on the leash. The hound snuffles the cloth. Sadie whines as Lily pulls the piece away, but then puts her nose to the ground, finding the scent again.
The hound eagerly starts down the slope of the tunnel, yanking Marvena along. Lily hurries after them but pulls up short as a snake winds across her path. Lily holds her breath, thinking at first that it’s a timber rattler. She notes the upturned nose—it’s a hognose snake, a non-venomous variety that likes to make itself seem threatening by rearing up, flattening its neck, in a striking pose. Hard to tell, sometimes, true threats from false ones.
The snake ignores her, slithers on, in search of a toad or two for breakfast.
By the time Lily catches up with Marvena and Sadie, the hound is howling, trying to pull Marvena up onto the track and head away from the tunnel. Then she turns back, nose to ground, straining into the woods.
Lily looks at Marvena. “Is she confused?”
Marvena shakes her head. “Your lady walked from somewhere up to this spot on the track, veered off into the woods before her final stop at the top of the tunnel. So do you want Sadie to take us down the track, or into the woods?”
Lily stares back up the track. “We can double back later?”
Marvena nods. Lily points to the thick dark of the woods.
* * *
The farmhouse and grounds are only recently abandoned, a sigh falling into silence. The rails of the generous wraparound porch have recently been repainted a wholesome sky blue, while the shutters are chipped and faded to a dull gray-blue. A large garden patch is weeded over, yet chrysanthemums bloom sprightly yellow along the front porch—the only bright spot in the clearing. Though the sun has now burned off the morning mist, the dimness of Moonvale Hollow feels like a permanently pressing presence.
Lily carefully folds the dead woman’s clothing, rewraps it in the waxed paper, and tucks it back in her rucksack.
Sadie strains toward the house but shows no interest in a dirt lane that snakes up to the house. Why would the woman have come to this unoccupied house through thick briars and brush, ignoring the easier path? Why come here at all?
Marvena walks over to a scorched area in the front yard, circled by stones. Lily joins her, kneels, studies charred wood and dark ash. The scent of wood fire is strong. Recent. She picks up a stick, pokes at the wood pieces, which readily crumble. No embers. The fire must have been last night, after the afternoon storm that Lily had seen yesterday passed through here. Had the fire been built before the storm, rain would have disintegrated the charred wood, smudged it into the ground. Next Lily pokes the earth. Still soft from that earlier rain. Then she startles, noting boot prints all around the fire circle. Prints with smaller soles, pointier heels. Women had gathered here.
“Wait here,” Lily says.
Marvena mutters an oath, which Lily ignores as she hurries over to the porch, trots up the steps. She rests one hand on her revolver, the other on the door. Gives a little push. The door opens easily. Someone hadn’t bothered to lock up—or had forgotten to.
“Hello?” Lily hollers. “It’s Sheriff Ross. I’m doing a routine … property check.”
Marvena, right behind her, gives a derisive snort. She glances back—she should have known Marvena wouldn’t stay out of the action. Lily shrugs: You come up with a better excuse. Then she steps inside, slowly.
The main floor is one open space, with no furniture. The only remnants of occupancy are white curtains, a worn rug in front of the stone fireplace, and on the far wall a coal-fired cookstove. The house feels stiff, empty. Yet more women’s boot prints dot the wood floor and the narrow stairs.
Something whimpers upstairs, the thin cry of a baby. Lily’s heart clenches.
She hurries up, sees doors open to two empty bedrooms. She follows the sound into the bedroom farthest from the stairs.
She exhales, relieved. It’s a white-breasted nuthatch, sitting on top of a curtain rod. Lily goes to the window, which slides up easily enough, as if the track had recently been greased. Another sign that this house—sturdy and decent and strong—had only recently been left behind.