The Hollows--A Novel

by Jess Montgomery

  Lily finishes, “So I’m here, since I don’t know where Clarence is, and since you might be aware of where he lives, you need to tell me that, so I can bring him in for questioning.” Surely Marvena is savvy enough to understand what she’s really saying.

  Marvena finally says softly, “I don’t know where he lives, but if’n I see him, I can tell him.” Then Lily exhales with relief as she reads in Marvena’s expression that she understands: Lily had come here, where she wouldn’t see Clarence, but plenty of witnesses in town would have seen her drive up to Marvena’s to ask about his whereabouts; and that Clarence needs to clear out of Bronwyn County as fast as he can—and not because of any threat from Lily.

  Then Marvena’s expression collapses in sorrow and fear. “Lily, he won’t—”

  Lily shakes her head, interrupts. “Oh, Jurgis won’t be home for a bit? Well then, tell him I said howdy.” She stands, finishes her tea, puts the cup on the table, and folds up the quilt.

  She pauses at the door and says, without looking back at Marvena, “Olive will be fine. I’ve been to check on her. Course, I can’t be everywhere at once. So I’ve brought on several men as deputies to be at Mrs. Gottschalk’s around the clock. Once the charges are resolved against Mrs. Dyer, I can’t imagine Olive will want to stay in the area, though. She’ll want to figure out where to go next. She’ll want to go where she is safe—well, safer at least.” Lily cuts a meaningful look at Marvena: Where Clarence should go to join her.

  With that, she puts on her hat and steps out of Marvena’s cabin.

  CHAPTER 26

  HILDY

  Tuesday, September 28—8:00 p.m.

  In the thick of the crowd outside the Kinship Opera House, Hildy can barely breathe. She’s pressed between several men and can only see a sliver of brick, of the dimming sky. Her head tingles. She had picked over dinner, skipped lunch, had only a biscuit and jam for breakfast.

  But Hildy is determined. She will see Lily debate Perry.

  And here, in the throng of people who also want to see this debate, it will be impossible for either Mother or Merle to find her, to pull her away—assuming they had come after her.

  Mother had forbidden her to come, of course. All day, she had harangued Hildy for being away. Fussed at her, while Hildy polished the furniture and scrubbed the kitchen floor, that she should go to Merle, offer her help at the grocery, apologize to him—for what, Hildy was unsure. Neither Mother nor Merle knew about her affair with Tom. Mother had, she repeatedly told Hildy, informed Merle that Hildy had run home from the grocery due to “female troubles” when Merle had come to find Hildy—both proud at coming up with the ruse and angry at Hildy for “forcing” her to lie. Quietly, Hildy had scrubbed the day away, biting her tongue to keep from pointing out that Mother had lied, all on her own.

  At dinner, Hildy asked if Mother would like to go to the debate—a mistake. Of course Mother didn’t want to, and she’d told Hildy she must not go, either. It would be improper for her to go support Lily, to be seen there, and Merle would surely think Hildy crazy if she went.

  Fine. She’d go anyway. Slide out the kitchen door, quietly, after dinner.

  Then a knock had come at their door. Merle—looking worried and sheepish, holding a bag of the penny candy. Supplication. Apology, though he’d never say it outright.

  As Merle pressed the bag at Hildy, the flash of memory from a few days ago returned to her—Roger, grinning widely, holding his ridiculous bouquet of licorice whips. Merle had smiled, assuming Hildy’s gasp was in pleasure at his offering, but she’d pressed past him and, for the second time, ran from him.

  Now someone at the front of the crowd hollers out. The doors to the opera house are opening.

  * * *

  “Well now, it’s been a novelty, standing here, debating Sheriff Lily,” Perry says.

  How can she endure it? Hildy wonders. Earlier, she’d managed to work her way to the front of the throng, and now sits a few rows back from the stage. Though her eyes are fastened on Lily, she is sure Lily hasn’t seen her. Throughout the past hour—back and forth on topics such as curfews or the increasing number of automobiles speeding on the country roads—Lily has kept her eyes fixed at some spot above the crowd. The topics have been mundane, yet Perry has managed to work in digs about how these issues would be too hard for Lily to take care of, especially as a widow with small children.

  Lily has not denied that, not once, sticking instead to her opinions on the issues. The crowd had started divided between the two candidates. Now Hildy senses a shift in its sympathy toward Perry.

  It’s time for the closing comments. “Ladies first!” Perry says, to the tittering crowd. Lily demurs, asking Perry to go first.

  “It’s been a novelty having a lady for a sheriff for the past year, but as our county grows and prospers, is that what we want?” Perry says, to the crowd’s growing cries of approval. “Novelty? Why, who knows what she might do, especially if she gets nervous. Just today, she pulled my own wife into jail! Accusing her of attacking another woman—Olive Harding, the schoolteacher over in Rossville.” The crowd gasps. “Why would my wife do that? Well, seems she learned Olive was consorting with the Negro who’s trying to integrate the Rossville union!”

  Now the crowd roars. Lily stares at that same damned fixed point. Why won’t she say something? Anything?

  “My wife told her that Miss Harding admits that that same man, Clarence Broward, killed an elderly woman. The same poor old woman—who could be any of our own mothers!—whose image was in the Kinship Daily Courier.”

  Hildy shudders. Her own drawing, twisted and used in this way. Yet, even with angry jeers growing, with wadded papers and apple cores and even a pipe being hurled at her, Lily remains implacable.

  “Is he locked up? No! Is this the kind of law enforcement you want for your county?”

  The crowd roars. Perry grins.

  Lily stands stock-still.

  Oh God. He’s won. He’s whipped up the crowd, and won.

  Hildy wonders, Why won’t Lily move, or speak, or at least blink?

  Soon others must be wondering the same thing: Why is Sheriff Lily Ross standing fixed and solid as a statue? No hint of emotion flickering across her face? Perry’s smile fades. The crowd slowly quiets.

  Lily’s hand starts to float up from the podium but then comes down again, grasping the edge. Did anyone else notice? Hildy wonders. A jeer from the front row seems to startle Lily at last into focusing on the moment.

  “I’d like to answer that question,” Lily says.

  Someone in the crowd chuckles, and someone else shushes him.

  “I think my kind of law enforcement is exactly what all of you want for Bronwyn County. Let’s start with the matter of Miss Harding and Mr. Broward. It has been legal for couples of mixed races to court and marry in the state of Ohio since 1887.”

  “Well, that ain’t right!” hollers a man. “It oughta be more illegal than moonshining!”

  Several in the crowd crow in agreement.

  Lily breaks her distant gaze, stares down at the man. “I think we all know that I’m not a fan of the law of Prohibition because it’s hard to enforce.” An appreciative whoop from the back of the crowd sets several to chuckling. Lily waits until the crowd quiets to go on. “But activities can’t be more or less illegal. They either are, or they’re not. I defend the rule of law.”

  Now the crowd fully hushes as Lily scans the packed seats.

  “I defend the rule of law,” she says again. “And that law says that Miss Harding and Mr. Broward may assemble as they see fit. That law also defends the right to free assembly—including the right of Mrs. Dyer to assemble a group of women in a chapter of the WKKK. I can do nothing to break up either assembly—so long as no other laws are violated.

  “Today, Mrs. Dyer freely admitted that she beat Olive Harding nearly to death. There is a law against that. And though Mrs. Dyer says that Miss Harding claims Mr. Broward killed Thea Kincaide, Miss Harding d
enies saying so. Neither of the two WKKK members that Mrs. Dyer claims also heard Miss Harding say this has come forward. And why, I wonder, would that be?”

  Lily scans the crowd, and now it seems as if her eyes alight on each person there. The crowd is rapt. Lily’s eyes finally meet Hildy’s—but just for a second. A second that is long enough for her to see that Lily wishes Hildy weren’t there. That she doesn’t believe that Hildy can handle a gathering this intense. That she would agree with Mother and Merle: Hildy should be at home.

  Lily’s eyes move on. “They have not come forward, because they are cowards. Only cowards hide under masks and cloaks.”

  Now some in the crowd stir angrily. A chill runs over Hildy. There must be women here who are part of the group. Maybe men who are part of their own KKK group.

  “Only cowards,” Lily repeats firmly. “As for Thea Kincaide—I will find out how she died. I didn’t even know her name a week ago—but now I do. I know so much about her—but not enough. Not yet. If you wonder why I haven’t been coming to your businesses, your houses, campaigning, it’s because I’ve been working for justice for her. For this woman who”—Lily looks at Perry for a moment—“could be any of our mothers. Who was, in fact, Mr. Dyer’s father’s stepsister. Mr. Dyer’s stepaunt.”

  The crowd murmurs, and Perry turns ashen. “Father never mentioned, never…” His voice trails off.

  Lily waits for the crowd to quiet, and then finishes her statement. “Here is why you should vote for me. Not because I’m a novelty. But because I do not think the rule of law is a novelty. Because I think it should be applied equally, for justice for all.”

  Someone in the crowd breaks the silence with an approving whoop. Other cries follow, and soon there is applause. But Lily only gives a curt nod, leaving the stage, not staying to hear the crowd’s applause rise to its full swell.

  For a long time, Hildy stands as the crowd shuffles out around her.

  “Miss? Are you all right?”

  Hildy startles, then sees an older man, sweeping up the opera house, look at her with concern. The crowd has almost entirely left.

  “I’m fine,” Hildy says. She gives him a reassuring smile and turns to go home, but the man’s next comment stops her.

  “I liked what Sheriff Ross said, ’bout rule of law,” he says. “She’s darned bright. Doesn’t stand a chance of winning, but she’s got my vote.”

  Hildy starts to rebuke the notion Lily can’t win the election, but that phrase, rule of law, stirs an idea. A brilliant idea.

  And tomorrow morning, she will convince Lily to believe in her, to trust her.

  CHAPTER 27

  LILY

  Tuesday, September 28—11:00 p.m.

  At last, Lily is alone. She turns up the coal-oil lamp on her bedroom nightstand, pulls the quilt up to her chin, and sips her peppermint tea. Marvena had been right—her cough needs tending. She’d managed to choke back coughing at the debate. It would have made her seem weak.

  Now Lily picks up a novel she’s been unsuccessfully trying to read for the past few nights, The Red Lamp, by Mary Roberts Rinehart. She keeps dozing off. It’s not Mrs. Rinehart’s fault—the story is thrilling.

  Tonight, though, she is too wide awake, still buzzing with energy postdebate. She glances at the Big Ben clock on her nightstand. Oh God. Eleven p.m. She’ll be lucky to fall asleep before midnight—but that will give her time, at least, to finish her book. Tomorrow, she heads to Cincinnati. Mama and Caleb Jr. are spending the night, so Mama can watch all the children. Dear Mama. Of late, she spends as much time here as at her own house.

  Lily opens to her bookmarked page—sinking into the world of Twin Hollows, of William Porter’s “diary” entries, of the question of whether Jane really had caught the ghost of Uncle Horace on her camera or she was only imagining things.…

  Lily gazes up from the novel. Only imagining things. Tonight, she’d seen the silvery, shimmering boy standing at the very back of the debate crowd, smiling at her with amusement. For a sliver of a moment, everyone else dissolved, and it was just him and her, alone, as if in some mist from a dream—and then he was gone, the crowd was back, and she saw her hand floating up to reach for him. Just a momentary lapse, not enough for anyone to notice, and she’d returned quickly, smoothly, back to her comments, and yet she’d caught Hildy at the front of the crowd staring up at her, always so sensitive to her every nuanced shift of mood and mannerism. A jeer from the front row—Leroy, the guard she’d fired a few days ago—had finally jolted her back into the rhythm of the debate.

  Jolene’s voice filters into the bedroom. “Daddy rounded up all the bank robbers, all by himself! But on the way back here to the jail, one broke away—”

  Lily sits bolt upright, The Red Lamp tumbling from her hand to the floor. What in the world is Jolene telling Micah?

  Lily leaps out of bed, tosses on her robe, and flings open her bedroom door. She crosses the hall to Micah’s room, enters, and finds Jolene sitting on the edge of Micah’s bed.

  “What in the world—” Lily starts.

  She stops as Jolene’s eyes go wide and her lower lip trembles. “Micah wanted to know the story of what happened to Daddy. He’s—He’s been having nightmares.” She whispers, so as not to stir Caleb Jr., sound asleep in his bed.

  The chastisement that had immediately sprung to Lily’s lips—that Jolene knows better—fades away as the realization hits her that she hasn’t even been aware of Micah’s nightmares. Surely Hildy or Mama should have told her.

  Another thought pushes aside irritation at not being told: It’s only human to create a narrative to fill the gaps we don’t know, the gaps that terrify us. The visions—like a shimmery, silvery boy appearing and disappearing—that haunt us.

  It’s what her children are doing, with the vague explanations she’d offered for their father’s death.

  Lily rushes to her children, needful and scared in this moment, and sits on the edge of Micah’s bed and scoops them both to her. “Oh, my little sweet peas. I miss your daddy, too. He wasn’t killed stopping a bank robbery, though. He was killed by an escaping prisoner.” She swallows hard, giving her children the lie that she had at first been given.

  “Is the pris’ner gonna come back for us?” Micah’s voice trembles.

  “Oh no, no,” Lily says. “He … he was caught. He’s in prison now.”

  “Behind our house?” Micah sounds truly alarmed now.

  “No, that’s just the jailhouse. Truly bad people go to prison. He’s in the Ohio Penitentiary, all the way in Columbus.” Lily clears her throat. Another lie.

  “Well, then I wanna go see him! Beat him up! For what he did to Daddy!” Micah wails.

  “We can’t do that—” Lily starts.

  “Why not?” Micah asks.

  “We have to let the law govern what happens to people who break the law—”

  Micah stares up at her now, eyes wild with confusion and anger. Her answer might have been the right thing to say to tonight’s debate crowd, but she hasn’t said the right things to soothe her little boy. She’s only made things worse. As she strokes his head and tries to think—now her head is pounding—Jolene speaks up. “That Ranklin boy was back at school today.”

  Lily tucks her hand under Jolene’s chin and gently tilts her child’s head up so she has to look at her. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?” She scans Jolene’s face for fresh marks.

  “No-o-o.” Jolene drags out the syllable so that it’s almost a moan. “He said I might see Daddy’s ghost. That when people are gone before they’re supposed to be gone, they sometimes don’t go away completely. Like the ghosts at the Moonvale Tunnel!”

  “G-ghosts?” Micah’s voice cracks on the word, and he grips his mother tightly, the small tremors of his body ricocheting through Lily.

  Lily almost smiles—relief at the subject changing from the circumstances of Daniel’s death, albeit to another tricky one. She keeps her expression somber. “Do you know, I heard those same stor
ies when I was your age?”

  “You did?” Jolene’s eyes widen with wonder. “Those stories are that old?”

  Lily chuckles. “Yes, that old. But you know what? I’ve been investigating out there—”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, an older lady got hurt, and—”

  “How?”

  “By the train, sweet pea.”

  “Is she dead?”

  Lily hesitates. She wants to comfort her children, but instead she keeps letting the conversation spin in the wrong direction. She squeezes Micah and Jolene, her arms easily wrapping around them. Soon that won’t be the case. They are growing up quickly and asking questions that become trickier by the day. Maybe they would be better served by real answers. So Lily says, “She is. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t seen any ghosts. Not of her. Not of anybody.”

  “Really?” Micah’s tone is a mix of disappointment and relief.

  Lily’s stomach clinches, as she thinks of the silvery boy. Still, she answers quickly, “Really.”

  Jolene starts crying. “So, I’m never gonna see a ghost of Daddy?”

  “Oh, sweet pea.” Lily’s heart aches under the weight of seeing the hurt her child bears, a hurt that makes her long to see a ghost. “You don’t want to see your daddy’s ghost, do you?”

  “N-no,” Jolene stammers. “But it would be better’n not seeing him again. Wouldn’t it?”

  Lily smooths her daughter’s hair back, gently wipes the tears. “I see him, in you and in Micah. In your beautiful eyes, and how smart you are, and sometimes stubborn.…” She pauses and gives Jolene’s belly a little tickle, and Jolene hiccups a small laugh. Then she looks at Micah, tousles his hair. “In your mess of black hair, and in your funny and feisty spirit.”

  Both children brighten for a moment, but then Micah’s expression darkens again. Lily’s heart flips. Another way in which he looks like his father. “I’m already forgetting what Daddy looks like.” He hiccups.