The Hollow Ground: The Girl in The Photograph

Steam curled from the cracks in the back porch, thin ribbons of white that dissipated before they reached the rain gutter. Vera Calloway watched them rise from her perch on the kitchen stool, chin resting on her knuckles. The smell of sulfur threaded through the screen door, faint enough that a stranger might mistake it for rotten eggs in a neighbor's trash, but Vera had grown up with it. It lived in the wallpaper of her lungs, in the grit that settled on every windowsill by morning.

The kettle on the stove ticked as it cooled, a slow metronome counting out the minutes since her mother had left for the diner shift. Margot Calloway worked doubles on Tuesdays, left the house at four and returned close to midnight, her feet aching and her patience worn thin. Vera knew the rhythm well enough to set her clock by the sound of the screen door and the particular way her mother exhaled when she saw the dishes had not been washed.

But the dishes could wait.

Vera's fingers found the notebook where she had left it that morning, wedged between the bread box and the wall. Evelyn Marsh's journal, soft leather cover gone dark with age and the oils of a hundred hands. Her mother's cousin had died two weeks ago, found at the bottom of the stairs in the old Marsh place on Ridge Road. The wake had been three days of casseroles and murmured condolences and a sheriff who stood by the door with his hat in his hands, answering the same questions twice for anyone who needed them.

Vera had taken the journal without asking.

She did not entirely understand why. Some quiet compulsion had moved through her when the house had begun to empty, when the neighbors had drifted back to their routines and the flowers on the kitchen table had started to wilt. The journal had been sitting on the side table beside a lamp with a cracked shade, and Vera had slipped it into her cardigan pocket as she passed. A small theft. A small inheritance.

Now she turned it over in her hands, feeling the weight of it. The cover was warm from the stove, the leather cracked in places like old skin. The pages inside were dense with handwriting, the kind of small precise letters that belonged to someone who had been taught penmanship in a one-room schoolhouse and never quite given it up. Vera had read the first page last night, by flashlight under the covers. Evelyn had written about the weather, about a robin nesting in the gutter, about the price of butter at the general store.

Nothing that mattered. Nothing Vera could name.

She flipped deeper, past the entries about weather and butter and robins, past a pressed four-leaf clover that crumbled when she touched it, past a grocery list in different ink that suggested a pen had been replaced somewhere around 1987. The pages whispered against each other as she turned them, a dry papery sound that made her think of the attic in her grandmother's house, of trunks full of clothes that smelled like mothballs and someone else's perfume.

Then her thumb caught on something thicker.

Vera stopped. She turned back one page, then forward again, and saw the corner of a photograph peeking out from the gutter of the binding. The edges were yellow, soft as cloth, and the paper itself had that particular sheen of a print that had been developed at a drugstore and then forgotten in a book for years.

She eased it free.

Two figures stood on a lawn in front of a house Vera did not recognize. Behind them, a porch with white railing, a dogwood tree just beginning to bloom, a sky the pale washed blue of early spring. The photograph had been taken in the late afternoon, judging by the long shadows stretching across the grass, and the colors were those of a time before everything went digital, when photographs had weight and substance and edges you could bend.

On the left stood a girl.

She was maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen, wearing a prom dress the color of crushed raspberries. The bodice was fitted, the skirt full, and she held a small bouquet of white flowers at her waist. Her hair was dark and pulled back from her face in a style that belonged to a different decade, but her expression was unmistakable. She was smiling. Not the performative smile of someone being photographed, but the real thing, the kind that crinkled the corners of her eyes and showed a little too much tooth.

Vera looked at her for a long time.

There was something in the girl's face that tugged at the back of Vera's memory, some resemblance she could not quite place. The slope of her nose. The way she held her shoulders, pulled slightly back, as if she were accustomed to making herself smaller. Vera turned the photograph over, hoping for a name, a date, a caption written in pencil on the back. The white margin was blank.

She turned it back around.

The second figure stood to the girl's right, taller by a head and a half. A man in a dark suit, his hand resting on the girl's shoulder in a way that could have been paternal or possessive depending on the angle of the photograph. His hair was silver at the temples, his posture straight. He wore a tie with a pattern too small for the resolution of the print, and his shoes, Vera noticed, were polished to a shine that caught the late sun.

His face had been scratched out.

Not torn, not cut, but scored with the blade of a penknife or perhaps a letter opener, dragged across the emulsion in a series of quick decisive strokes. The marks were deep enough to score the paper beneath, thin white lines that cut through the features like claw marks. Where his eyes should have been, there was nothing but crisscrossed grooves in the paper. Where his mouth had been, a single gouge ran from cheek to cheek.

Vera set the photograph down on the kitchen table, very carefully, as if it might shatter.

The kettle ticked.

Steam rose from the porch.

The smell of sulfur thickened, then thinned, as the wind shifted. Vera sat for a long moment with her hands flat on the table, looking at the scratched-out face, at the girl in the raspberry dress smiling her real smile, at the dogwood tree and the white railing and the soft blue sky. Something about the photograph made her chest feel tight, a pressure behind her ribs that had nothing to do with the mine fire and everything to do with the particular cruelty of erasure.

Someone had wanted this man's face gone. Someone had taken a blade to a photograph of a girl in her prom dress and made sure that whatever was in those features could not be read, could not be recognized, could not be named. They had done it with care, with intention, with the patience required to score emulsion in clean deliberate lines.

And they had done it before putting the photograph in a book.

Vera picked the photograph up again. She held it closer to the overhead light, tilting it, trying to see through the scratches to whatever lay beneath. The penknife strokes had done their work thoroughly. The man's features were a ruin, a topography of damage, and beneath them she could only make out the vague suggestion of a jaw, the shadow of a collar.

The girl, though. The girl was untouched.

Vera looked at her again. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. A prom dress the color of crushed raspberries. A bouquet of white flowers. Dark hair pulled back from her face. A smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes.

She looked like someone Vera might have known.

The thought came unbidden, and Vera pushed it away, irritated with herself for the reaching quality of it. She did not know this girl. She did not know any girls from a prom she had not attended, from a photograph taken in a decade she had not lived through. The resemblance was nothing. The resemblance was the kind of thing a tired mind invented in a quiet kitchen with the sulfur smell threading through everything.

Vera put the photograph back between the pages of the journal. She closed the cover. She pressed her palm flat against it and felt the warmth of the stove still radiating through the leather.

She thought of her mother, bent over a table of coffee cups at the diner, wiping the same spot over and over with a rag that had gone gray. She thought of Sheriff Brennan standing at the door of the Marsh house, his hat in his hands, his face the color of old putty. She thought of the way the room had gone quiet when Evelyn's name was spoken, the particular silence of a community that had run out of things to say about one of its own.

Evelyn Marsh had been eighty-one years old when she fell down the stairs. That was what the sheriff had said. That was what the obituary had said. That was what Margot had repeated, her voice flat, her eyes on the road, when she drove them home from the wake.

Vera had not asked any questions. There had been no questions to ask.

But now there was a photograph of a girl in a prom dress, smiling her real smile, with the face of the man beside her scratched into nothing.

Vera slid off the stool. She went to the kitchen window and looked out at the backyard, where the steam rose from the cracks in regular intervals, a small faithful geyser that had been erupting since before she was born. The dogwood in the neighbor's yard was just beginning to bloom, pale petals against the gray of the evening sky.

She turned back to the table.

The journal sat where she had left it. The kettle ticked. The screen door banged once in a gust of wind, then stilled.

Vera pulled the journal open again, and began to read.

The morning came in gray and damp, the way mornings came to Stillwater most days, a low ceiling of cloud that pressed against the rooftops and made the streetlights useless until nearly nine. Vera stood at the kitchen counter with the photograph between two pieces of wax paper, pressing the heel of her hand flat against the sandwich she'd made, and she watched the steam rise from the backyard cracks in its slow, faithful rhythm.

She had not slept well. The journal had sat on her nightstand, its pages turned down where she'd stopped, and she had lain in the dark listening to the tick of the stove cooling and the faint, far-off groan of the earth beneath the row house. The burn line ran under their block. You could feel it sometimes in the floor, a subtle warmth through the linoleum, a suggestion of something patient and enormous working its way through the coal seam.

Margot was already gone. Her car keys were not on the hook by the door, and the coffeepot was empty but warm, a single mug rinsed and set upside down on the rack. A note on the refrigerator, in Margot's quick, slanted hand, said: Back by six. Eat.

Vera ate. She put the photograph in the pocket of her jacket, the wax paper crinkling softly against her chest, and she walked out the front door into the damp.

Stillwater had two bars that opened before noon and three feed stores that opened whenever the man with the key felt like it. Vera knew all of them. She had grown up trailing her mother through the back booths of the Red Horse and the Cloverleaf, coloring on placemats while Margot worked the late shift, and she had learned the rhythm of small commerce in a town that had been slowly emptying itself for forty years.

She started at the Red Horse because it was closest and because the bartender, a man named Cal who had known her since she was small, was more likely than most to look at a photograph without suspicion.

The bar smelled of cigarette smoke that had been ground into the wood so thoroughly it would outlive the building. Cal was behind the counter pouring coffee into a row of mugs for the retired miners who came in every morning to argue about deer season and the price of scrap. He looked up when Vera came in, and his eyebrows lifted a quarter inch.

"Morning, Vera. You look like you been up all night."

"I been up most of it," Vera said. She set the photograph on the bar, the face of the girl in the prom dress looking up through the scratched glass. "You recognize her?"

Cal picked it up. He held it under the lamp, squinting, turning it slowly. The light caught the scratches where the man's face had been gouged away, and the bar went quiet in the way small bars go quiet when something unusual is on the counter.

"Can't say I do," Cal said after a moment. He set the photograph down gently, as though it might be evidence of something. "That dress looks older than you are. Prom, I guess?"

"Prom," Vera said. "She was seventeen."

Cal nodded slowly. He shook his head. "Seventeen. That's a rough year to be a photograph of." He slid it back across the bar. "Try Freddy down at the Cloverleaf. He used to do the photography for the high school. Might have shot this one himself."

Vera thanked him and walked back out into the gray.

The Cloverleaf was darker and quieter. Freddy was not behind the bar. A woman Vera did not recognize, young, with a tattoo of a moth on her neck, was wiping down the counter with a rag that had gone gray.

"Morning," the woman said. "Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Freddy."

"Freddy's in the back. Been back there since Tuesday, I think." The woman straightened up. "You want me to get him?"

"If you would."

The woman disappeared through a swinging door, and Vera heard, faintly, the sound of a television tuned to a shopping channel. When Freddy came out, he was wearing a flannel shirt and slippers and he moved like a man whose knees had been replaced with hinges that needed oil.

"Who's asking?" Freddy said, and then he saw Vera and his face changed, softened into the particular expression adults made when they saw a child they remembered being smaller. "Vera Calloway. Lord, look at you. You Margot's girl?"

"Yes, sir."

"Last time I saw you, you were about this high." He held a hand at his hip. "What can I do for you?"

Vera set the photograph on the bar. "You ever see this girl before?"

Freddy took off his glasses, cleaned them on the hem of his shirt, put them back on, and bent close to the photograph. He turned it. He turned it again. His mouth moved a little, as though he were testing names against the curve of the girl's cheek.

"No," he said finally. "I don't think so. I'd remember that dress. The Cloverleaf did prom for three years running in the late nineties, and I shot every one of them, and I don't remember her. But that was a long time ago, Vera. A lot of dresses looked like that dress."

"She would have been seventeen."

"Seventeen." Freddy set the photograph down. "Try the feed store. Ed Pruitt still comes in most mornings to buy his tobacco and argue about the price of hay. Ed knew every kid in this county from about 1975 on. If anyone remembers, Ed will."

Vera thanked him. She walked back out into the street.

The feed store was on the far side of the square, across from the diner where Margot worked, across from the courthouse with its flag hanging limp in the still air. Vera could see, through the diner window, a flash of Margot's gray apron as she moved between tables. She did not go in. She crossed the street and pushed open the feed store door, and the smell hit her first, sweet and dusty, a mixture of grain and leather and the chemical tang of insecticide.

Ed Pruitt was at the counter, paying for a pouch of tobacco and a paper, his back bent almost double, his hands spotted with age. He was older than anyone Vera had ever spoken to, older in the way that mountains are old, not in years but in weight. He had been postmaster of Stillwater for thirty-one years. He had delivered mail to houses that no longer stood.

"Mister Pruitt?"

He turned. His eyes were pale blue, the color of a winter sky just before snow, and they focused on her slowly, like a camera finding its subject.

"Vera Calloway," he said, before she had introduced herself. "You look just like your grandmother. Same eyes. Same way of standing."

Vera had never heard anyone say that before. She felt something shift in her chest, a small tectonic movement.

"Mister Pruitt," she said. "I'm trying to find out who this girl is."

She set the photograph on the counter between them. Ed looked down at it. He did not pick it up. He leaned closer, his hands flat on the wood, and the store went quiet except for the faint rustle of grain settling in a bin somewhere in the back.

"Iris," he said.

Vera's breath caught.

"Iris Voss," Ed said. He straightened up slowly, and his hand came to rest on the counter as though he needed it for balance. "That is Iris Voss. I would know that face anywhere. I used to carry her daddy's mail out to the Voss place on Route 61, before the road went in. Iris was always at the mailbox waiting for me. Always had a question. Always had a smile."

He looked at Vera, and his eyes had gone distant, the way eyes go when a person is looking at something that is not in the room anymore.

"She vanished," Vera said.

"She did," Ed said. "Nineteen ninety-eight. She was seventeen. It was right before the prom, if I remember. The Marsh boy was going with her. Jonah Marsh. Sheriff Brennan's nephew, or maybe his cousin. I forget which. The family was twisted up in itself the way families get around here." He paused. "She never showed up to the dance. They found her dress in her bedroom. They found her shoes by the door. But the girl was gone."

"What happened?"

Ed shook his head. "Nobody ever knew. Sheriff Brennan worked it for months. They dragged the creek. They searched the mine shafts. They put her picture on the front of every paper from here to Pittsburgh. And then, like things do around here, the story just... stopped. People moved on. There was nothing to move on to."

Vera looked down at the photograph. The girl's smile seemed different now, less like a smile and more like the record of one, a fossil of an expression that had been pressed into paper and preserved. She thought of the scratched face of the man beside her, the violent absence where his features had been.

"Mister Pruitt," she said. "Do you remember who the man in the picture was? The one with the scratched-out face?"

Ed looked at the photograph again. He leaned closer. His mouth drew down at the corners, a small, involuntary grimace, as though the scratches themselves had caused him pain.

"I can't tell you that," he said. "That's been taken off. That's been taken off on purpose." He looked at Vera, and there was something in his eyes that had not been there before, something careful and afraid. "I don't want to know why you're asking, Vera. I don't want to know what you've found. You go and talk to Sheriff Brennan. You let him handle it. That girl has been gone for twenty-five years, and the people who loved her have made their peace, one way or another, and you don't want to be the one to stir that up."

"Mister Pruitt," Vera said.

"Go home," Ed said. "Go home and eat your breakfast and go to school."

"I graduated last spring."

"Then go to work." He picked up his tobacco and his paper. "Go and leave this alone."

He walked past her toward the door, and she let him go. The bell above the feed store door rang once as he went out into the gray morning, and Vera stood at the counter with the photograph in her hand and the name Iris Voss sitting in her mouth like a stone.

She slid the photograph back into her pocket. She walked out into the square. Across the street, through the diner window, she could see Margot clearing a table, her shoulders set in the particular way they set when she was tired. The courthouse flag stirred once in a breath of wind and then went still.

Vera stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, looking at the diner, looking at the courthouse, looking at the road that ran out of town toward Route 61 and the place where the Voss house had been. The burn line ran under her feet. She could feel it, that faint warmth through the soles of her shoes, the patient heat of a thing that had been burning since before her mother was born.

She turned toward the courthouse.

The courthouse door was heavier than she remembered, or maybe she was the one who had changed. The brass handle was cold under her fingers, worn smooth by a century of palms just like hers. She pulled it open and stepped into the dim hallway, and the smell of old wood and floor polish wrapped around her the way the building always did, like something that had been waiting.

A clerk looked up from behind a desk. He was a thin man with glasses and a tie that had been knotted too tight. "Help you?"

"Sheriff Brennan," Vera said. "Is he in?"

"Office hours are nine to four."

"It is nine."

"He's not in yet." The clerk looked at her with the patient weariness of a man who had been explaining things to people all morning. "You're Margot's girl."

"Yes, sir."

"He'll be in after ten. Maybe eleven." He turned back to his papers. "There's a chair if you want to wait."

She did not want to wait. She thanked him and stepped back into the gray morning. The square was quiet. A woman crossed the street with a paper bag of groceries. A truck rattled past toward Route 61. The diner window caught a slant of light and threw it back, and inside Vera could see Margot pouring coffee for a man in a feed cap.

Vera stood at the base of the courthouse steps and put her hand in her pocket. Her fingers found the photograph. She did not take it out. She only touched it, feeling the slick surface of the old print, the slight curl at one corner where someone had once held it too long.

She thought of Iris Voss walking out of a house on a winter night. She thought of her mother, twenty-five years younger, carrying a tray of plates through a diner that looked almost the same as the one that stood across the street now. She thought of her father, who had been a boy then, who would go down into the mines for the first time three years later and never come back up from the third one.

She would not wait in the courthouse chair. She would go home, and she would wait there, and when Sheriff Brennan came in she would walk back across the square and tell him what she had found.

She crossed the street toward the diner. She pushed through the door and the bell rang and Margot looked up from the coffee pot.

"You," Margot said. "You eat today?"

"I'm not hungry."

Margot set a plate in front of an empty stool. Eggs, toast, bacon. "Sit."

"Mama."

"Sit and eat, Vera."

Vera sat. She ate. Margot poured her coffee without being asked and moved on down the counter, and Vera looked at the gray light coming through the window and thought about the way Ed Pruitt had said the name Iris Voss, the way he had folded his hands over his tobacco and his newspaper as if he were folding them over a wound.

When she finished, Margot took the plate away and set the check down in front of her. It was a dollar and sixty cents. Vera paid it and left a quarter.

"I'm going home," she said.

Margot nodded. "You be back before dark."

"Yes, mama."

"And you eat supper."

"I will."

Margot looked at her for a long moment. Then she reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind Vera's ear, and her hand was rough and warm. "Go on, now."

Vera walked home through the gray morning. She climbed the steps of her row house and went inside and locked the door behind her. She sat at the kitchen table with the photograph in front of her and the curtains open so she could see the street and the square beyond. The burn line ticked beneath her feet. She waited.

The morning passed. The light shifted. She heard the school bus go past at half past seven, and she thought of the years when she had been on it, and then she thought of nothing at all. Around ten o'clock she got up and made a second cup of coffee and sat down again.

She dozed. She did not mean to. Her head tipped forward onto her hand, and the photograph slid across the table, and she caught herself and straightened up. The light through the window had changed. It was after noon.

She had slept two hours. The house was silent except for the tick of the kitchen clock and the faint pulse of the burn line under the floor. She stood and stretched and looked out the window. The square was empty. The diner was open. A man was pumping gas at the station.

She should have gone back to the courthouse. She should have gone and waited in the chair and spoken to Brennan as soon as he walked in. But she did not. She sat back down at the table. She turned the photograph over and read the penciled words again, Iris Voss, Carder Bridge Road, last seen February 1979, in a hand that had pressed so hard the paper had creased.

She got up and went to the hall closet and pulled out her mother's old coat, the green wool one with the torn pocket, and put it on. She took her keys from the hook by the door. She looked out the window one more time, then opened the door and stepped out into the afternoon.

She drove. She did not know where she was going, at first. She turned out of her driveway and went right, away from the square, and the road narrowed as it climbed. The houses fell away. The trees closed in. She drove past the old Voss place without stopping, past the foundation and the cellar hole and the overgrown drive. She drove until the road crested a ridge and then dipped down toward the bridge.

Carder Bridge was not really a bridge, not anymore. It had been a wooden span across Carder Creek, but the creek had shifted course decades ago, and now there was only a low concrete ford where the water ran shallow over gravel in the spring and froze solid in the winter. The road went down to the ford and then climbed up the other side and kept going into the next county, but no one used it much anymore. There was a turnaround at the top of the ridge on this side, an old gravel pull-off where people used to park and look out over the valley. There was a rusted railing. There was a wooden sign, faded, that said SCENIC OVERLOOK.

Vera pulled in and parked. She turned off the engine but left the key in. She got out and walked to the railing and looked out at the valley.

The town lay below her, small and gray and quiet in the afternoon light. She could see the square. She could see the courthouse and the diner and the feed store and the row of houses that climbed the far hillside, and the burn line ran through it all, the dead trees pale against the darker ones, the faint haze that rose from the ground in places where the heat broke through. From up here the town looked like something that had been set down in the valley and then forgotten, or like something that was slowly being lowered into the earth, inch by inch, by the fire underneath.

She leaned on the railing. The metal was cold. The wind came up the ridge and moved through her hair and the collar of her mother's coat.

She thought about Iris Voss. She thought about a girl who had been older than her by a few years, who had lived in a house that was now just a foundation, who had walked out of that house one winter night and been seen walking down Carder Bridge Road by a man who had not been believed. She thought about Ed Pruitt's hands folded over his tobacco. She thought about her mother's hand rough and warm against her ear.

She thought about Sheriff Brennan, and whether he would listen, and what he would do if he did.

The light was beginning to change. The afternoon was tilting toward evening. The shadows in the valley were lengthening. She should go home. She should go home and eat supper and come back tomorrow and talk to Brennan in the morning.

She did not move.

A truck passed on the road below, climbing toward the ridge. She heard it before she saw it, the engine working hard on the grade, and then it came into view around the bend and she watched it crawl up toward her. It was a dark blue pickup. She did not recognize it. It slowed as it neared the pull-off, and for a moment she thought it was going to stop, but it did not. It went past. The driver did not look at her. The truck crested the ridge and started down the other side toward the ford and was gone.

She let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

A few minutes passed. Another car came up the road, a sedan, and went past. Then nothing. The wind moved through the trees. A crow called from somewhere down the slope and was answered by another.

Vera straightened up from the railing and turned back toward her car. She was reaching for the door handle when she saw them.

Headlights. Down on the road below, coming up from the direction of town, moving at a speed that was not quite steady. They swung around the bend and she watched them climb the grade, and as they came closer she saw it was a vehicle, dark-colored, and the headlights were bright in the fading afternoon. They swept across the pull-off as the vehicle passed, throwing her shadow long across the gravel, and then they were past, and the vehicle kept going up the ridge.

She waited for it to crest and go down the other side. It did not.

It stopped. Maybe fifty yards past her, at the crest of the ridge, just before the road tipped down toward the ford. She could see the shape of it now, a car, dark, maybe blue or black. It sat there with its brake lights glowing red.

Vera stood beside her own car with her hand on the door handle and watched it. The brake lights held steady. The engine idled. She could hear it faintly, a low rumble that drifted down to her on the wind.

Then the lights went out.

The brake lights went off. The headlights went off. The car sat on the crest of the ridge in the gray afternoon, dark and silent, like something that had been there all along and she had only just now noticed.

Vera's heart climbed into her throat. She did not move. The wind moved her coat and her hair. The crow called again. The burn line ticked faintly under her feet, patient, indifferent.

The car did not move. A minute passed. Two. The light continued to fade. The shadows in the valley deepened. Somewhere down below a dog began to bark, and then stopped.

Vera took her hand off the door handle. She did not get into her car. She did not start the engine. She stood in the pull-off at the scenic overlook above Carder Bridge and watched the dark shape on the ridge, and she understood that whoever was in that car had followed her from town, and that they had chosen this place, this overlook above the road where Iris Voss had last been seen, and that they were waiting.

She thought about turning around. She thought about getting in her car and driving home and locking the door. She thought about her mother's hand against her ear and the quarter she had left on the counter and the way the courthouse flag had stirred and gone still.

She thought about Iris Voss walking down Carder Bridge Road on a winter night in 1979, and she thought about the man who had seen her and had not been believed, and she thought about what it must have been like to know something and to have no one listen.

The car on the ridge sat in the gathering dusk. Its engine was off. Its lights were off. It was waiting for her to do something. It was waiting to see what she would do.

Vera zipped her mother's coat up to her chin. She took the photograph out of her pocket and held it in her hand. She started walking up the slope toward the ridge, toward the dark car, toward whatever was waiting for her there, and the burn line ticked under her feet, and the wind moved through the dead trees, and the town below her lay quiet in the last of the light, and she did not stop.