The screen door banged against the frame, and a man stood on the porch with his boots planted squarely on the warped boards, refusing to step forward. Dust motes turned in the pale light behind him. The hinges screamed a second time before settling into a wheeze.
Wren Calloway had not expected company. She had not expected the sheriff of the county to arrive forty minutes after she had carried the last of Great-Aunt Maren's photograph boxes inside, nor had she expected him to take one look at the open front door and plant himself as if the threshold were a river he would not cross.
"Morning," she said.
Jonas Greer tipped an imaginary hat. His face was the color of old saddle leather, creased deep at the mouth and eyes, and his uniform sat on his frame the way a fence sits on a hillside, functional and weather-beaten. He looked past her into the dim hallway.
"You're the one came up from Asheville." Not a question.
"Yes."
"Mm." He folded his arms. "Place has been empty three weeks. I drove past Sunday. Lock was still on. I drove past Wednesday, lock was off. I figured you."
"I sent a note to the post office," Wren said. "I left my cell number."
"Came to deliver the news in person." His gaze drifted over the porch railing, the wind chime of bone-colored feathers Aunt Maren had hung from a rusted nail, the three clay pots turned brittle with frost. "Your aunt was particular about her mail. She would've wanted the message carried by hand."
The cicadas had gone quiet while he spoke. The silence pressed against her ears like cotton.
"Thank you," Wren said.
He did not move. The porch boards gave under his weight, a small wooden complaint. He smelled of woodsmoke and the sweet, oily tang of gun oil. From the road, a mockingbird sang three notes and stopped, as if it too were waiting for him to speak.
"Sheriff?"
"Name's Jonas." He lifted a hand. "You got a place to stay tonight?"
"The house."
"Mm." The sound was flat, uninflected. "You'll want to be gone before dark."
The words arrived without emphasis. Wren waited for the rest of the sentence, the reason, the qualifier. None came. The mockingbird tried again, four notes, then silence.
"Because of the drive," she said, when she could no longer bear the gap. "The road down the mountain. I heard it's unlit past the bend."
"No." He shook his head once, slow, the way a man denies weather rather than a fact. "Drive's fine. Plenty of folks drive it every day."
"Then why."
He turned his head a quarter inch, just enough to bring the corner of one eye onto her. The iris was pale gray, the color of creek water under slate, and it held no warmth.
"The house doesn't suit overnight guests." He lifted his chin toward the doorframe behind her. "Maren understood. Maren kept the rule."
"I don't know what rule you mean."
"You will."
Wren felt the hair on her forearms prickle. The air in the hallway sat heavier than the air on the porch, and she could taste something beneath the dust, a mineral tang, the way water tastes when it has run through a vein of copper. She swallowed.
"Sheriff, I grew up in this county. I know the cold comes early in September. I know the power flickers. I know the chimney will need cleaning before I can light a fire. I'm telling you I am prepared."
Jonas Greer looked at her a long moment. The pale eyes did not blink. Somewhere inside the house, a clock ticked. It was the first time she had noticed it, and now it was the only thing she could hear.
"Girl." The word was not unkind. "I've walked three different mothers up this porch to collect what's left of a child who wandered into the trees. I've signed the death certificates of two men who walked into that forest and came back wrong. I have buried a woman who lived to be ninety-one and died scared to death in her own bed." His voice did not change register. He might have been reading off a parts list. "Maren Calloway kept to certain rules. She kept them for seventy years. The house remembers her rules."
"What does that mean?"
"It means what I said."
"It's not an answer."
"No." He unfolded his arms and put his hands in his pockets, a small man defeated by the architecture of his own meaning. "It is not."
A wind moved through the yard, and the feather chime rattled. The feathers were not feathers. Up close, Wren saw they were dried leaves, lacquered stiff, strung on a thread of rawhide. A craft from the old country, from the hollows before the highways. She had not seen their like since she was a child.
"When did you last see my aunt?" she asked.
"August."
"How was she?"
"Old." A pause. "Afraid."
"Of what?"
He glanced at the doorframe again. His jaw worked once, the muscle jumping under the skin.
"Ma'am, your aunt wrote me a letter the week before she died. She asked me to come sit with her the night of the seventeenth, when the air smells of apples and something underneath the apples. She said she couldn't bear to be alone in the house that night. She said she'd been alone too many of those nights already." He stopped. The porch creaked. "I told her no."
"Why?"
"Because I am the sheriff of this county, and my place is at the desk, and the desk is in town, and the road down that mountain is not a road I drive after the sun goes down. Not for your aunt. Not for anyone." He turned his hat in his hands, slowly, the brim running between his fingers like a saw blade. "She understood."
"She wrote me, too."
Something moved in his face. It might have been surprise. It might have been pity.
"She didn't say."
"She said she was alone and she was frightened. She said she had tried to explain it in a way I would believe and couldn't. She said she was sorry she had never told me." Wren's voice caught, and she steadied it by looking past his shoulder at the road, the gravel ribbon that wound down the ridge through the hickories. "She asked me to come home."
"And now you're here."
"And now I'm here."
Jonas Greer looked at her for a long moment, and the clock ticked inside, and the cicadas began again at the edge of the yard, a thin sustained drone that sounded like a wire under tension.
"I'll say this once," he told her. "I will not set foot across that threshold. Not for love. Not for money. Not for the governor of this state. The door stays closed when I talk to you. The door stays closed when you talk to me. You got that?"
"Got it."
"You lock it tonight. You bolt it. You put the chair under the knob if you got a chair. You do not open it for any voice you don't know. You do not open it for any voice you do know, neither, if the hour's past dark." His hand came up and he pointed one finger at the doorframe, not at her. "The wood is sound. The latch holds. Do you understand me, girl?"
"I understand you."
"Mm." He stepped back off the porch onto the gravel path, and his boots crunched. He did not turn. He walked to his cruiser with the unhurried gait of a man who had walked away from a hundred porches, and he opened the door, and he paused with one hand on the roof.
"Your aunt had a name for what lives up that hill," he said, without looking at her. "She called it the Mouth. She said it had been fed. She said it was learning to ask for more."
He got into the cruiser. The engine turned over. The doors locked with a sharp, percussive clunk that echoed off the clapboards of the house.
The cruiser pulled away. The dust settled in the slanting light. The clock inside the house kept ticking.
Wren stood on the porch and listened to the road go quiet. The wind chime stirred once, a single dried leaf turning on its thread, and she thought she heard, beneath the rustle, the faintest sound of a footfall in the hallway behind her. She turned.
The hallway was empty. A rectangle of pale floor, a coat tree, a framed photograph of her great-aunt at thirty, dark-haired and watchful. Beyond, the parlor door stood ajar. Beyond that, the staircase climbed into the dim of the second floor. The clock ticked from the kitchen.
She had been inside the house, alone, for forty minutes. She had carried boxes. She had opened windows. She had not heard any other footstep.
She put her hand on the newel post. The wood was warm.
From the tree line at the edge of the yard, a figure stood at the margin of the bracken. Female, slight, motionless. The hair was dark. The dress was the color of creek mud. The face, if there was a face, was turned toward the house.
Wren's breath shortened. She did not move. The figure did not move.
The clock ticked. A cloud crossed the sun, and the porch light thinned, and the figure was still there, and was no longer there, and Wren was not certain it had been.
The newel post warmed her palm the way wood warms when a hand has been resting on it for a long time. Wren lifted her hand. The warmth did not lift with it.
She climbed the stairs slowly. Each step gave a particular creak, a language she had not learned yet, and she noted the ones that spoke under her weight: the third, the seventh, the ninth. The hallway at the top was narrow and dim. Three doors on the left, one on the right, and at the end, a smaller door with a porcelain knob painted to look like a daisy. The paint was chipped. Someone had held that knob in a small hand, often, years ago.
Aunt Maren's bedroom was the first on the left. Wren had slept there as a girl, on a mattress that smelled of cedar and rosewater, and she remembered the way the morning light fell in a long pale stripe across the quilt. The room was tidy now in the way rooms become tidy when no one is coming back to disturb them. The bed was made. The curtains were half-drawn. On the dresser, a brush, a hand mirror, a small bottle of cologne with a dauber gone brown at its tip. The closet door was open, and inside hung a row of dresses in muted colors, all cotton, all smelling faintly of lavender sachets that had long since lost their charge.
Wren did not begin with the closet. She began with the dresser, because dresser drawers keep their order longest. The top drawer held gloves, folded. The second held stationery, stacked, the envelopes soft at the edges. The third held a leather box, and inside the box, a watch that had stopped at 3:17, and a thin gold chain, and a folded square of paper so old the creases had gone white.
She unfolded it carefully. The handwriting was her great-aunt's, younger, the loops less certain.
"I have begun to hear it in the nursery," the note read. "Not at night only. In the afternoon, when the light is thick. M. says I am overwrought. I will not write more in this house. I will write at the library, and I will take this page with me, and I will not put it back in the drawer."
The note ended there. No signature. No date.
Wren folded it again and put it in her pocket. She moved to the closet. She removed the dresses one at a time, ran her hand along the shelf above the rod, and found nothing. She crouched and checked the floor of the closet. A corner of carpet was lifted by a tack that had worked loose. Beneath it, a gap in the floorboard, and in the gap, a stack of notebooks bound in marbled paper, tied with a kitchen string.
She carried them into the hallway and sat on the floor with her back against the wall. The string was stiff with age. She untied it. Three notebooks, the smallest one no larger than her palm. The cover of the smallest was different from the others. It was not marbled. It was blue cloth, and on the front, in a child's careful hand, a single name: Sadie.
Wren opened it.
The first page bore a date. April 3, 1962. The handwriting was large and round, the letters not quite settled on the lines.
"I am seven today and Mama gave me this book. She says a book is a place to put things you cannot say out loud. I will put the wall sound in here because Mama says I am not to talk about the wall sound at supper."
Wren turned the page.
"April 7. The wall sound came again last night. It is not like a voice. It is more like a voice that has been folded up small and put inside the plaster. I hear it behind the crib. I tell it to stop and it does not stop."
"April 12. I asked the wall why it talks at night. The wall did not answer in words. It made a sound like water going over stones. Mama says the pipes are old. I do not think it is the pipes."
"April 19. Aunt Maren came to sit with me while Mama was at the store. She sat in the rocking chair and did not look at the wall. I asked her if she heard it too. She said she had heard something in this house when she was small but she had forgotten what it was. She said forgetting was a kindness. I did not like the way she said it."
Wren's mouth had gone dry. She looked up from the page. The hallway was quiet. The clock downstairs marked its even rhythm. A floorboard somewhere in the house settled with a small, woody exhalation, the kind of sound houses make when the day cools.
She turned more pages.
"May 2. I put my ear to the wall and the sound got louder. It is not one voice. It is many voices all whispering the same word, only I cannot hear the word. The word is behind a door in the sound. I knocked on the wall and the knocking went on after I stopped. Mama came in and asked why I was bleeding. I did not know I was bleeding. There was a scratch on my knuckle shaped like a mouth."
"May 9. I told Mama I wanted to sleep in her room. She said no. She said a girl who can hear a wall talk is a girl who can sleep in her own bed. She turned off the light. The wall sound was louder in the dark. It went on for what felt like a hundred years. When it stopped the room smelled like creek water and something sweet I could not name."
"May 15. I drew a picture of the sound. It looked like a tree with too many branches. Aunt Maren saw the picture and she went very still. She said, Where did you learn to draw like that. I said I did not learn it. She took the picture away and I never saw it again."
Wren held the page in both hands. The paper was brittle at the edges and faintly mottled with age, the way paper gets when it has lived in a closet above a lavender sachet for sixty years. The child's pencil had pressed hard enough in places to dimple the page, the strokes of a hand that had wanted very badly to be heard.
She turned to the final entry.
"June 1. Mama says we are leaving this house for good. She says the house is not good for me. I am glad. I will miss the porch and the tree and Aunt Maren. I will not miss the wall. I will not tell the wall I am going. I do not want it to know my name."
The entry ended mid-page. The lines below were blank. The next several pages were blank too. The back cover was unmarked.
Wren closed the notebook. She sat with it in her lap. The hallway held its breath. From downstairs, the clock. From outside, a faraway train, low and long, crossing the valley toward a town that no longer had a station.
She thought of the figure at the tree line. The dark hair. The dress the color of creek mud. The face she had not been able to see. A child in 1962 would have been an old woman now, or no longer living. The figure had been slight. Young. The wrong age, or the right age for something else.
The nursery was the small door at the end of the hall. The porcelain knob shaped like a daisy.
Wren stood. The floorboard under her foot gave a single, polite creak. She walked the length of the hallway. She stopped in front of the door. The paint on the knob was chipped in the shape of a small hand, and the chips were old, the underlayers gone yellow.
She did not open it. Not yet. She pressed her palm flat against the wood. The door was warm, the way the newel post had been warm, the way wood is warm when someone has been standing just on the other side for a long time.
She stepped back. She looked at the notebook in her hand. She looked at the door.
She thought of her great-aunt's note in the pocket of her jacket. I will not write more in this house.
She opened her phone and called the sheriff's office. The line rang four times before a voice answered, flat and unhurried.
"Greer."
"Sheriff, this is Wren Calloway. I'm at the house on Black Creek Road. I think there's something you should know about."
"This hour of the morning?" Greer said. His voice did not change register. "You're at the Calloway place."
"I'm at Maren's house. There's a light in one of the rooms upstairs. I didn't turn it on."
A pause. The flatline of the open connection, and beneath it the faintest sound of someone shifting in a chair, the creak of old springs.
"What room?"
Wren looked down the hallway. The door with the porcelain daisy. The paint chipped like a small hand. "The nursery. At the end of the hall."
She could almost hear him weighing it. The professional arithmetic of a man who had learned not to laugh at the things people reported from the dark.
"You stay on the line," he said. "I'm coming out. Don't go into the room. Don't touch the door."
"I already touched the door."
A beat. "Describe what you felt."
"Warmth." The word came out smaller than she wanted it to. "Like the wood had a temperature. Like someone had been leaning against it."
"All right." Greer's voice, when it came back, was the voice he used for the families of the missing, the careful one. "I'm putting on my boots. I'll be there in twenty minutes. Keep the line open. Talk to me."
She kept the line open. She held the phone to her ear and walked back to the top of the stairs and sat on the top step with her back against the newel post. The wood was still warm under her shoulder blade. The faint perfume of dried lavender rose from the wallpaper, so old it had become part of the plaster.
"I never asked," she said into the phone, "about the disappearances. When I was growing up, there were stories, but my mother didn't like to talk about them. I should have asked."
"You were a child," Greer said. "Children aren't supposed to carry that."
"What was it?" The question came out before she could soften it. "What happened to those people?"
A long breath through the receiver. Somewhere in the background, the clink of a spoon against a mug.
"My daddy was sheriff before me. His daddy before him. The Calloway Hollow Road has a long memory. You know how it is up here. People leave, and sometimes they don't make it as far as they think. The forest is deep, and the road winds, and there are places where the radio won't pull a signal." He paused. "I've signed off on four search and rescue reports in fifteen years. None of them found a trace."
"Do you believe there's something out there?"
"I believe the forest takes people," he said. "I don't know what takes them. That's the truth, and I won't dress it up for you."
Wren closed her eyes. The warmth of the post seeped through the back of her shirt.
"I think Maren knew," she said. "I think she spent her whole life knowing."
"Yeah." Greer's voice was quiet. "Maren Calloway was a smart woman, and she had a long memory too. She and my grandmother were close. My grandmother used to talk about her. Said Maren had a way of seeing what other people missed. Used to go up to the orchard at night sometimes, my grandmother said. Used to sit on the bench with her arms folded, just looking out toward the trees."
"Looking at what?"
"I don't know. Whatever it was, she looked at it for fifty years." A pause. "She left you the house."
"She left me the contents."
"Same thing, in these hills."
Wren opened her eyes. The hallway lay in front of her, the door at the end, the light still visible under the gap at the bottom, steady as a heart that had learned to beat in the dark.
"I'm going to hang up now," she said. "The phone battery is low. I'll leave the front porch light on."
"Call me if anything changes."
"I will."
She ended the call. The house settled around her, the old wood making its small adjustments, the clock downstairs marking the half hour with two soft notes that faded into the plaster.
She got up. She walked down the hall. She stopped at the door.
She put her ear to the wood.
From inside, the sound of small feet on the floorboards. The rhythm of a child pacing, the way a child paces when she is waiting for something to be over. Then a voice, thin and far away, the way a voice sounds when it has to travel through a long pipe of plaster and lath and old pine.
"Nerw. Nerw. Nerw."
Wren's name, backward. Spoken in a register that was not quite a child's voice, not quite anything human.
She closed her eyes. She thought of the photograph in the frame on the dresser. The woman on the bench. The hand on the shoulder. The face she could not see.
She opened the door.
The nursery was small. A wooden crib in the shape of a sleigh, the iron hardware gone to a fine rust. A rag rug on the floor, faded to the color of weak tea. A window with a curtain that had been white once, now the yellow of old paper. A single rocking chair in the corner, the kind with a caned seat that has gone brittle with age.
The light was coming from the lamp on the dresser. A small glass lamp with a brass base, the shade shaped like a tulip. It had not been on when she walked past. It was on now.
In the rocking chair, a shape. Not sitting. Standing, half turned, as if she had just heard someone come in and was about to turn to look.
A child. Dark hair, the length of a girl's who had never been to a barber. A dress the color of creek mud, the same mud she had seen at the tree line the day before. Bare feet on the rag rug, the toes curling against the weave.
Wren did not move. The child did not move. The lamp hummed the way lamps hum in old houses, the filament making its small complaint.
The child turned.
Wren saw her face. It was the face from the photograph. It was the face from the orchard. It was the face of a girl of about eight, who had been standing in the same place since 1962, waiting for someone to come back and tell her it was time to go home.
The child opened her mouth. The voice that came out was not the thin pipe she had heard through the door. It was the voice of a girl who had been practicing what she wanted to say for sixty years.
"You came."
Wren's throat closed. She could not speak. She could only nod.
The child looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked toward the window, toward the yard, toward the orchard beyond.
"She's waiting," the child said. "She's been waiting a long time. She said you would come."
"Who, sweetheart?" Wren's voice was barely a whisper. "Who is waiting?"
The child pointed toward the window. Through the glass, the orchard, the trees, the dark of the forest beyond.
Wren looked. For a long moment she saw only the shapes of the trees, the silver of the leaves, the dark of the spaces between.
Then, at the very edge of the tree line, a shape. A woman. Tall. Still. A dress the color of dried lavender. A hand raised, palm out, as if to say, not yet.
The woman stood there for a long breath. Then she lowered her hand. She turned, slowly, as if she had been standing in that same spot for sixty years and had finally decided to move. She walked into the dark between the trees, and the dark closed behind her like water.
The lamp on the dresser went out.
The child was gone. The rocking chair was empty. The rag rug held the impression of nothing.
Wren stood in the dark of the nursery and breathed. The clock downstairs struck the half hour again, two notes that were not two notes, the echo that was not an echo.
She went downstairs. She turned off the porch light. She turned it back on. She left it on. She sat on the porch step with her back to the door and waited for Greer.
When his headlights came up the drive, she was still sitting there, the notebook in her lap, the pen in her hand, the page half full of handwriting she did not remember writing.
She tore the page out. She folded it once and put it in her pocket.
She did not show it to Greer. She did not mention the nursery. She told him the light had gone out before he arrived, that she had not been able to explain it, that she was sorry to have called him out in the middle of the night.
He looked at her for a long moment. He nodded. He told her to call him if it happened again. He told her to lock the door.
He drove away.
Wren sat on the porch a long time. The sky over the orchard was the color of a bruise. A bird sang once, high and clear, the way birds sing when they think no one is listening.
She took the page out of her pocket. She looked at her own handwriting, the script she did not remember writing. The ink was brown. The words were these.
Tell her I saw her. Tell her I am still here. Tell her the orchard is the same.
She folded the page and put it back in her pocket.
She went inside. She locked the door. She went upstairs and lay down on the bed she had been given, and she did not sleep again that night, but she lay still, and she listened to the house, and the house listened to her, and somewhere out beyond the orchard, in the dark of the trees, a woman in a lavender dress was walking home.