The Hollows--A Novel

by Jess Montgomery

  From the window, Lily sees a thin path out back that leads up another hill to a small cemetery—a family plot. At last—a small break in this difficult case and morning. The headstones will bear names, reveal who the house had once belonged to.

  She steps back, stares at the small bird. In her presence it’s quieted. Go on, go on, she thinks. Back to your nest—probably in a tree outside. Nuthatches can mate for life. Another bird might be longing for its return.

  It must have flown in last night as women came and went in the house—but why had they done so? The women’s gatherings she knows of are in proper parlors or church fellowship halls, such as the Kinship Woman’s Club, discussing how to get a public library for the town.

  She goes to the open window. “Go on, shoo, shoo!”

  “Lily!” From the next bedroom, alarm pitches Marvena’s voice high. The woman doesn’t scare easily, so Lily pulls out her revolver as she hurries to Marvena.

  Marvena’s hand shakes as she points to something on the floor.

  A hooded cape, sewn from rough white cotton. The pointed hood has buttonholes to attach a face covering, with slits cut for eyes.

  Lily recoils, more startled by this than by the snake from moments ago. As realization strikes, Lily’s stomach turns, and bile runs up to her throat. She swallows back rising bitterness, draws a deep breath, forcing herself to think carefully, logically.

  The Ku Klux Klan had had a small following in Bronwyn County years ago, before the turn of the century, after the Civil War ended and some former slaves ventured north to find work in coal mines or as farmhands. An ignorant reaction to the end of slavery—that’s what Lily’s father had been sure to teach both her and her brother.

  Her heart pangs—as she thinks of how her father, a kind man who stood firm against injustice, had made sure that his children understood their nation’s history, both glorious and inglorious. So she also knows that the federal Enforcement Act of 1871—one of three anti–Ku Klux Klan acts—had helped to nearly dismantle the KKK.

  The second rising of the KKK came when Lily was in her teens, around 1915, the excuse for it this time being support of Prohibition, when temperance was a county-by-county, state-by-state choice, well before it became a national mandate. The year 1915 was also when the film The Birth of a Nation was released. The film made it to the Kinship Opera House a year and a half after its release, and Lily’s father had taken the family.

  An image of her dear father’s face flashes before her—at home, after the film, both Mama and Daddy had gone quiet, their faces pinched as if in great pain. The next day, they sat Lily and Roger down in the parlor. Lily can hear them again now, explaining why they found the movie offensive. Yet also explaining that there were many in their community who would feel differently—and the challenge was, and always had been and always would be, to live and lead by example, guided by the principle that all are created equal.

  Lily tries to focus on the hood and cape. She is not aware of a KKK group in this part of Ohio. Had a chapter opened here, right under her watch?

  Yet something seems different about this hood, apparently left accidentally behind.

  Like the boot and shoe prints, it’s small.

  The women’s boot and shoe prints.

  Oh God. This isn’t from the KKK.

  It’s from the WKKK—the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, not just wives and daughters and mothers of men in the KKK, but an auxiliary women’s group, born of the KKK but also out of a branch of the suffrage movement that aligned itself with the principles of prohibition and strong sentiments that though women had their specified places in home and society, they were equal to men—as long as they were of European descent, not an immigrant, and Protestant.

  The WKKK movement had been making the newspapers of late, with articles and opinion pieces both supporting and castigating the movement, which had begun three years before, combining numerous smaller women’s groups that espoused the same beliefs, while drawing strength from a portion of suffragettes who wished to put their political power to work to ensure what they called the American way of life. The WKKK already had chapters in every state, with the biggest and strongest in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Arkansas. And Ohio.

  God, they’d hate the sight of her, a female sheriff, fitting their criteria in every way, except in her own beliefs, and in doing man’s work, not work sanctioned for women—homemaking or teaching or nursing.

  Lily kneels, pokes the hateful hood with the tip of her revolver, as if testing a snake to see if it is still alive.

  She swallows hard, another line of bile rising in her throat. Sure, the hood is just cloth, can’t hurt her, but what it represents—ah, that is a snake, very much alive, and not a falsely frightening one like the hognose earlier, but a truly venomous one, coming up out of the earth where good people, people like her father, would have hoped it would remain buried. A snake nonetheless reemerged, coiled down tight in its hatefulness, emboldened by the fear it stirred in others, its readiness to strike undoubtable. For snakes always strike.

  And evil has a way of slithering forth again and again, its old form disguising itself in new masks, its ancient pretexts of hatred rewritten with new justifications.

  This particular evil has its own charter and organization.

  In her county.

  Her jurisdiction.

  And at one of the last places the still-unidentified woman had been alive.

  CHAPTER 8

  HILDY

  Wednesday, September 22—6:55 a.m.

  Hildy tries to type quietly, so as not to stir Mama and the children, still sleeping upstairs.

  Still, to Hildy’s ears, each strike sounds like echoes in an empty room—impossible, since she is working at the rolltop desk in Lily’s well-appointed parlor. The same furniture and rugs and draperies are positioned as they were when Lily and Daniel had moved in eight years before—nothing new, nothing taken away. Touches of Lily’s efforts to make the county-owned sheriff’s house a true family home grace the neat, tidy room—a bouquet of purple garden phlox in a red glass vase on a side table, the soft ticks of the nightly wound mantel clock, and, on the settee, pillows embroidered with a lady in a matching pink dress and parasol. Hildy has a similar set, though hers don’t display such neat, perfect stitches; they’d made the pillows in home economics class in high school years ago, giggling over something long forgotten, but that at the time had made Hildy’s stitches go wobbly, while as Lily kept hers even.

  Yet this parlor, this house, no longer feels like Lily’s.

  Hildy can’t quite place when the house became so oddly unfamiliar. After Daniel’s death, but not right away. And not because Daniel is no longer here, though his was a big presence and his absence is just as huge.

  Slowly, even with Lily and the children still here, and often Mama and Caleb Jr., too, the house has developed a stiff, empty air. As if the family has moved out, leaving the furniture and decorations as stage setting for a life that was supposed to have been.

  Hildy sighs. Mother says she is overly sentimental, that she should learn to be pragmatic.

  Pragmatic. That’s what Tom had told her to be last night. What Mother wanted her to be by marrying Merle.

  Hildy snorts a half laugh at the notion of Mother and Tom agreeing on anything—Mother would scorn Tom as beneath them, and Tom would be amused by Mother’s haughty airs.

  Focus. For Lily’s sake. She must get a clean copy of the sheriff’s notice to the Kinship Daily Courier in time for it to run in today’s afternoon edition.

  Hildy taps out the last few words and rolls out the paper. She studies the sheet, rattling between her trembling hands. On the desk and on the floor around her feet are wadded up attempts to document what she and Lily know so far about the deceased woman. It’s startling, how hard this task is. Shouldn’t there be more on the page? Given all that she had thought and felt about the woman in the basement of the funeral home? There it is. Just a few small facts. A longing rushes over h
er, a longing to write a thorough description of the woman’s life, of who she is. Was.

  Overly sentimental.

  The mantel clock strikes 7:00. Hildy jumps.

  As Hildy reads over her copy one more time, the door to the kitchen opens. Hildy startles and looks up as Mama steps into the parlor.

  Mama is carrying two cups of coffee. Only now does Hildy smell bacon, and buttermilk biscuits. She’s been so caught up in trying to get this copy right, she hadn’t heard Mama crossing behind her in the parlor, or any noise from the kitchen, just her own typing.

  She stands, goes to Mama, takes one of the cups, and nods at the settee. “Please, I can tell you’ve been working hard this morning.”

  Mama sits. “You too,” she says, a lilt of amusement to her voice as she eyes the wadded drafts on the floor by the desk.

  “Oh! I’ll clean that all up,” Hildy says. “It’s just that Lily asked me to put together a sketch, and a sheriff’s announcement, and—”

  Mama pats the spot next to her. “Relax, Hildy. It’s hard to get something like that just right.” She sips her coffee. “Mmmm.”

  Gratefully, Hildy sits down and follows Mama’s example. She takes a sip of coffee, savors the strong taste and scent.

  “Where’d Lily get off to now?”

  Hildy smiles at Mama’s question, and at the same peeved look Mama had worn when Lily was getting into mischief when they were children—running off to jump into the river from the Kinship Tree or to wander the hills. Where’d Lily get off to now? was a question often asked in Lily’s youth—usually of Hildy, who everyone saw as the staid one. Pragmatic.

  “She’s off tracking the woman that fell. With Marvena.”

  Mama relaxes. “Well, I reckon that makes sense. If there’s anyone who’d know how to get a good tracking hound and use it, it’d be Marvena.”

  Hildy stares at her cup. Her stomach is queasy, and her face flames at how jealous she is of Lily and Marvena’s friendship. She puts her cup aside, goes to gather the wadded papers.

  “Hildy, let me see your sketch.”

  She suddenly doesn’t want to share it with Mama—with anyone. Why would Lily think she could draw a useful likeness? She hasn’t drawn in years. The only reason she even had the charcoal pencils is because she’d hung on to them and other childhood mementos in a box she keeps tucked under her bed—overly sentimental, as always. The sketch deserves to be wadded up, tossed aside with the other papers. Lily probably meant this to be a keep-busy task, while she did the real work with Marvena.

  Mama has issued a directive, not a question, so Hildy brings her the sketch and sinks back down onto the settee. As Mama stares at the sketch, Hildy feels protective. It’s all she can do to keep from snatching it back.

  Something passes over Mama’s expression. Not judgment but something like recognition, and for a moment Hildy’s heart leaps. Maybe the woman can be identified quickly, the case solved—but then she realizes that Mama isn’t recognizing the woman in particular, but that she sees something of herself in the woman: getting older, less relevant, drifting.

  “You brought her back to life,” Mama says quietly. “You always were a right good drawer.” She hands the sketch back to Hildy. “Nearly forgot about that.”

  “Thank you.” Hildy’s heart swells at Mama’s compliment. The mantel clock chimes the quarter hour. “I—I should get it and the announcement over to the newspaper office. And I should get to Merle’s—he’s been wanting to show me how he runs the grocery—but the prisoners need to be fed, too, and the children, and Jolene off to school—”

  Mama laughs. “You young ladies, stretched so thin these days! Well, I already took breakfast to the prisoners—I couldn’t sleep, anyway, I get overheated at night of late, no matter the weather, it seems, and I can handle the children.”

  “Oh, that was good of you. I’ll collect up the plates later—”

  “They’re a surly lot this morning.” Mama sounds amused by her own warning. “Two to a cell, three in one of them!”

  Hildy nods. “The commissioners finally had to bring in a security guard for overnight. It’ll be a relief when the new jail is done.” The facility, started in the past spring, is nearly complete. “It’ll be good to have it out of the backyard!”

  Mama gives Hildy a long look. “Lily didn’t tell you? The county commissioners are also moving the sheriff’s office to the courthouse, and working with the mayor to establish a police department for Kinship. Eventually this house will be converted to police headquarters.”

  “Lily … and the children … will have to move?”

  “In time,” Mama says. “Whether she wins the election or not. I’ve told her that they could move in with me and I could watch the children and … Oh, Hildy. I’m sorry. I assumed Lily told you. She should have.”

  Yes. She should have. That’s what best friends do.

  “Now, now,” Mama says. “She knows that you’re set to marry Merle soon, and I’m sure she doesn’t want to trouble you as you make your plans. Do you have a date set?”

  Hildy shakes her head, blinking back tears.

  A faint smile wavers on Mama’s lips as she pats Hildy’s hand. “Roger would want you to be happy. I don’t want you to mourn him forever. I want you to be happy, too.”

  Oh God. Mama thinks she’s delaying a wedding date with Merle because of Roger.

  Happy.

  She’d been so happy with Roger. His face—young, unmarred, handsome—rises before her. Something in his expression now seems to suggest that he’d never been meant long for the rough-and-tumble and furor and fury of this world.

  As his face fades, the one replacing it is not stolid, older, steady Merle, but craggy, thin-faced, hard-etched Tom Whitcomb.

  Hildy’s heart races, her palms sweating. She looks down, away from Mama, only to meet the eyes of the woman in her sketch and sees an approving glint in the eyes she’s imagined, the eyes she’s drawn, eyes that say, Yes, Tom.

  “I can take care of the jailhouse and the children,” Mama is saying. “You get on over to the newspaper, then to the grocery.”

  Hildy looks from the sketch back to Mama. Usually, Mama carries herself with resoluteness, but this morning, a thin gray strand of hair pulled loose from her dark bun makes her seem fragile. What would Mama think—if she knew about Tom? Suddenly her opinion matters to Hildy more than Merle’s or Mother’s. Or Lily’s.

  Yet she must choose. She can’t remain with both Merle and Tom.

  Roger would want you to be happy.

  Hildy smiles softly as Mama’s words echo in her thoughts.

  Well then. She’ll choose to deliver the announcement and sketch to the newspaper.

  And then go see Tom.

  Find a way to make up from their fight the night before, tell him she needs a bit more time to break off from Merle, to break the news to Mother and Mama and Lily.

  CHAPTER 9

  LILY

  Wednesday, September 22—8:30 a.m.

  In the family cemetery behind the farmhouse, Lily regards a headstone:

  Murphy Dyer, September 20, 1856–August 15, 1925. Beloved father and husband. At Rest in the Lord.

  Murphy—father of Perry Dyer. Other headstones, with their cold carved names and dates, testify to the Dyer lineage. Charles Dyer was the first patriarch buried here. He’d have settled Moonvale Hollow around 1796 on land that he’d have gotten in the then United States Military District, payment for service in the Revolutionary War—the way many other farms in this region were originally established. He’d died in 1826, after, as Perry explained in an interview published in the Kinship Daily Courier, long years of scrabbling a living off the land, as did his son, Adam, until he had the brilliant idea to lease land to the train lines and Moonvale Hollow grew into a village.

  After Adam’s passing, his son, Murphy, had overseen the operations, before passing them on to Perry, no doubt assuming Perry and his wife, Margaret, would remain as the generations had before th
em.

  Shortly after Murphy’s death, Perry and Margaret had sold the leased land to B&R and used the money to move to Kinship. And the couple had been trying to climb to the top of Kinship society ever since.

  Though perhaps there is an additional explanation. Three small headstones—with dates in recent years, two labeled “Infant” and life-spans of a few days, and another for eighteen months, one named Charles after the patriarch who had originally settled this hollow, are tucked in a row near the fence line. From the dates, children born and lost in the early years of Perry and Margaret’s marriage.

  Perhaps Margaret, knowing that she is old enough that her childbearing years are likely behind her, had wanted to get away from the reminder of such unspeakable loss, readily viewable from the bedroom window. Perhaps both Margaret and Perry had. Sympathy twangs Lily’s heart, a note discordant to the usual antipathy she feels toward the couple.

  Yet there is also this jarring note: it seems someone is using the old, reclusive Dyer farm for WKKK meetings. The hateful hood is now in Lily’s rucksack, alongside the dead woman’s gown and foot rags.

  Is Margaret the instigator behind the group? Or merely a member providing space? Does Perry know, or care, what his wife is doing?

  A bird settles on an old redbud tree shadowing the headstone. The tree is half-dead, its trunk hollowed out, only a few small living branches staggering toward the sky. Yet the ancient tree still provides asylum for the bird—another nuthatch. It trills, then disappears into the hollow trunk. Surely this is not the same nuthatch as the one in the house, or its mate. Still. Wouldn’t it be lovely if it were?

  As Lily rejoins Marvena at the cemetery gate, Marvena asks, “Learn anything?”

  “Let’s backtrack. I’ll explain along the way.”