The wipers could not keep up. Each pass cleared a half-moon of gray, and then the fog pressed back against the windshield as if it wanted in. Margot Kline eased her mother's Volvo onto the shoulder of Route 9 and let the engine idle, wipers beating their stubborn rhythm against the murk.
It was 6:14 by the dashboard clock. Six in the evening felt like midnight.
She had driven three hours from the regional airport at Bangor, where she had caught the last puddle-jumper of the day after finally pulling herself free of a Portland homicide she had been embedded in for nine days. Two days late for her own mother's funeral. The thought arrived flat, without teeth. She had not yet let it bite.
The car carried the smell of Ruth's house: damp wool, the lavender sachets tucked into dresser drawers, the ghost of a cedar block wedged beneath the seat. The Volvo was a 1998 240, sea-foam green, with a crack running across the steering wheel from a hard frost in 2009 that Ruth had treated like a personal failing. The car had survived three engines and two marriages. It had not survived being parked for six months in Margot's apartment garage back in Portland, but it had come close enough.
She was two days late. She had known about the funeral for less than a week. The news had reached her through Dale Fitch, who had emailed on Sunday with the subject line "Ruth" and nothing else. She had stared at the single word for forty minutes before opening the message. Then another two hours before calling the airlines.
The fog parted for one merciful second. She saw a green sign: HARLOW CREEK - 4 MILES.
She put the car in gear.
Margot was thirty-eight. She wrote long pieces for magazines that still printed on paper and shorter pieces for the Hollow Meridian Historical Society, where she kept half her workweek on contract. The Portland gig had been a freelance embed with the state police on the Pelletier homicide, a story about a logging accountant found in a septic tank outside Gray. She had missed the arraignment. She had missed her mother's stroke on Wednesday. She had missed the obituary faxed to the County Sun on Thursday. She had missed everything that mattered, and she had done it with the kind of professional focus that was indistinguishable, from the outside, from indifference.
She turned the heat up another notch. The Volvo's vents wheezed in protest.
The road curved along the edge of Harlow Creek, though the fog reduced the water to a sound more than a sight: a low murmur somewhere down the embankment. Margot cracked her window an inch. Cold came in like a ribbon. Pine. Wet soil. The iron tang of creek water, smoke from someone's woodstove out beyond sight. The air tasted like November in Maine, which tasted like the end of something.
Fourteen months ago she had come home for what she thought would be a long weekend. She had been working on a feature about the founding of Hollow Meridian, the small town an hour south of Harlow Creek where she and Ruth had both grown up. The Historical Society had given her a stipend and a key to the archive in the basement of the old bank building. She had found something in the records. She had found something in Ruth's behavior when she asked her about it. The long weekend had become a month, and the month had become a silence still standing. She and Ruth had not spoken since last September.
She had known, vaguely, that her mother was unwell. Dale had mentioned it in passing, in the careful way Dale mentioned anything that touched the women's unspoken war. High blood pressure. A weakening heart. The slow unraveling that makes news only when it stops.
Margot had told herself she would go home for the memorial next month. She had meant it. She had planned it. The Pelletier piece had eaten the plan.
Now she steered through the last stretch of fog and felt the road surface change from asphalt to gravel. The Volvo's tires found the new texture and hummed against it. Up ahead the dark shapes of Harlow Creek resolved themselves: a post office, a feed store, a motel whose VACANCY sign was half-dead. The Harlow Creek Strip Airport, which was really a grass airstrip with a corrugated metal terminal, sat on the far side of the gravel road. Margot pulled in.
The lot held only a fuel truck and a blue pickup with a dog in the bed. The dog watched the Volvo arrive without moving. The airstrip lights glowed amber in the fog, a string of small suns hanging at the wrong height.
Margot turned off the engine. The wipers died mid-stroke. The fog pressed in on all sides.
Two days late. The phrase settled heavier with the silence.
Her mother had called her once, last winter, after Margot's article had run. She had left a message on the office voicemail in that thin reedy voice that always sounded surprised by the act of speaking. Margot had called back. Margot had not apologized. Ruth had said, "Well." Then, "I see." Then, "When you have time, come home. We can talk then."
They had not talked.
Now Ruth was in the ground somewhere outside of town, in the old cemetery behind the white clapboard church where the Klines had been burying their dead for a hundred and forty years. Margot had not been invited to the service. Dale had attended, by virtue of being the town librarian and the unofficial greeter of anyone who walked through his door. He had sent her a photograph: Ruth's casket, dark wood, a small spray of white flowers, a handful of mourners in dark coats. The November grass, brown and trampled.
The photograph had reached her inbox at 2:47 Friday afternoon. She had been in a Portland briefing room at the time, taking notes on the chain of custody for a bloodstained jacket. She had not opened the image until nine that night, sitting in her car outside her apartment building, engine off. She had sat with it a long time. Then she had called the airline.
The Volvo ticked as it cooled. Margot did not get out. The fog moved past the windows in slow waves.
She thought about calling Dale. She should call Dale. He would want to know she was here. He would also want to know why she had not come for the funeral, and he would ask it in that soft, reluctant way of his that made the question feel like an apology.
She thought about calling her father, except that he had been dead for sixteen years and the thought was a reflex, a small muscle memory of wanting someone to talk to about Ruth.
She thought about the archive. She thought about the letter she had found in the basement of the old bank building fourteen months ago, and the second letter she had found in the back of Ruth's closet, and the third letter that Ruth herself had finally handed her in the kitchen of the house on Pine Street, with a look on her face Margot had not known how to read. The look, she thought now, had been relief.
The letters had been about the founding of Hollow Meridian. About what the town had done in 1883 to settle its water rights. About whose names were on a specific document she had not yet been permitted to see.
The founding of Hollow Meridian. The drainage of the marsh to the west of town. The drums that had been heard from the marsh at night by early settlers, and never heard again.
Margot had written the piece. The piece had run. Ruth had not spoken to her since.
Margot reached for her phone. Two bars. She composed a text to Dale: Landed at Harlow Creek. On my way to Meridian.
She sent it. The phone buzzed back nearly at once.
Dale: Thank god. Drive safe. The road is awful.
Then, a moment later: She would have been glad you came.
Margot set the phone down. She turned the key. The Volvo coughed, then caught.
She drove.
The road unwound from Harlow Creek into darker country, woods pressing close on either side. The fog thinned to a damp haze, and she could see the forest now: hemlock and spruce, a few skeleton maples shedding the last of their leaves. A deer burst from the shoulder and crossed in front of the car so close its hide left a smear of warmth against her headlights. Margot slowed but did not stop. The deer vanished into the trees.
She thought about the murder in Portland. The accountant's name was Gene Pelletier, age fifty-one, divorced, father of two adult children who had not known about his second family. Margot had spent nine days in a town that smelled of leaf rot and diesel, interviewing people who knew nothing useful, watching detectives perform the small patient work of building a case from almost nothing. She had written the kind of piece she was known for: thorough, fair, unshowy. The editor liked it. The piece was filed. The world had rotated without her.
She thought about the second family. The grieving woman in a clean kitchen in Gray who had not been invited to the funeral and who had answered Margot's questions with a politeness so complete it was its own kind of grief. The woman had said, when Margot asked if she wanted to be named, "No. Just don't. He was my husband. That should be enough." Margot had not named her.
There was something. A stillness. A small, weatherproofed room inside her chest where she kept the awareness that she was good at her job in the same way her mother was good at keeping the books: completely, and at a cost.
The road dipped, then climbed. Hollow Meridian was twenty minutes ahead if you did not count the time it took to negotiate the unmarked turns through the state park land that buffered the town from any sensible route. Margot knew the turns. She had grown up on them. She could feel the road in the dark the way some people feel the shape of their own kitchen at night.
She braked for a stop sign she could not see, counted three in her head, and rolled through.
A new text arrived. Dale again: Simone is in town. Arrived this afternoon. Says she has the documents you asked for.
Margot's hands tightened on the wheel.
Simone Duval. The Franco-Canadian genealogist she had hired remotely to trace the Kline family line back further than any local record would carry. Margot had been waiting two months for whatever was in those documents. She had not expected them to arrive the same week Ruth died.
She did not reply. She watched the road.
The pines thinned. A line of white fence posts appeared at the edge of her headlights, leaning every direction like something that had given up. Past the fence, a flat dark expanse opened up: the south marsh, the drained half of it anyway, where the county had cut a straight trench in the 1880s and walked the water downhill into the river. Margot had been told, on her last visit, that you could still hear the trench running in spring. She had heard it once, around four in the morning, sitting on the porch of the house on Pine Street. A low, hollow sound. Steady. Patient. As if the water were practicing something, and was not yet ready.
She could hear nothing now. The fog had taken the marsh, and the marsh had not made a sound.
The road curved past the cemetery gate. Margot did not look. She did look. The grass beyond the low stone wall was still trampled from Friday. Someone had left a single fall mum on a flat stone, its petals gone brown with rot. She thought about stopping. She thought about getting out and walking to her mother's plot, which she had never seen. She thought about finding nothing to say.
She drove past. The Volvo's headlights picked out the first street signs of Hollow Meridian proper: MAIN STREET. PINE. CHURCH. The town assembled itself around her in fragments, pieced together out of the dark and the fog. A newspaper box on the corner. A bench outside the post office. The soft yellow windows of the diner on Mill Street, which had not changed its menu in twenty years and had not changed its prices either, Ruth used to say, with a kind of rueful civic pride.
Dale's light was on at the library. She could see it from two blocks out, on the left. She did not stop.
She parked in front of the white house on Pine Street. She turned off the engine. The fog moved past the windows. Somewhere down the block a screen door closed, soft, then a porch light went out.
Margot sat in the dark with her hands on the wheel and did not move for a long time.
The white house on Pine Street did not have a light on. Margot sat for a long time in the dark car, watching the fog move past the porch rail. Then she reached for the keys again.
She did not go inside.
She backed out of the driveway, turned toward the center of town, and drove past the row of darkened shops until she reached the funeral home. Its name, CALLOWAY AND SON, was etched into a small brass plate beside the door, and below the plate someone had hung a spray of dried white hydrangeas that had gone the color of old paper. Margot parked at an angle, half on the curb. The lot was nearly full. Through the beveled glass of the front door she could see the soft amber of lamps, the shapes of coats and hats.
She sat for another moment, then opened the door.
Inside, the air held the smell of lilies and furniture polish and, beneath both, something faintly chemical that Margot did not want to name. A woman in a dark suit stood just inside the entryway, hands folded, smiling with the careful stillness of someone who had been smiling for several hours. She offered a printed program. Margot took it. She was directed down a hallway lined with framed photographs of the town.
The viewing room was smaller than she had expected, and warmer. Ruth's casket stood at the far end beneath an arch of white carnations. A small table to its left held a photograph of her mother at perhaps thirty, hair set, mouth closed in a careful almost-smile. To the right, a larger arrangement of gladioli and ferns.
The room was not crowded. A cluster of older women stood near the window. Two men in dark suits spoke in low tones by the door. And at the threshold, as if unsure whether to commit to entering the room, stood a tall man in a sheriff's uniform.
Margot recognized him at once. Dale Fitch. He had been a boy in her high school class, two years behind her, the kind of boy who carried too many books and spoke softly and was always being told to speak up. He had grown into himself. The uniform sat well on his shoulders, and his face had settled into the kind of steady expression she associated with men who had learned to wait.
He saw her. He crossed the room with the careful tread of a man conscious of the floor. He took her hand in both of his.
"Margot."
"Dale."
"I was hoping you'd come." He did not smile. He held her hand for a beat longer than was customary, his grip firm without being rough, his palm slightly cool. "Your mother talked about you. More than you might think."
Margot drew her hand back slowly. "I would like to believe that."
"She did." He nodded, once, as if confirming something to himself. "She did, Margot."
He stepped aside. A smaller man in a charcoal suit moved into the space Dale had occupied, holding a paper cup of something pale. His face was narrow, the bones sharp beneath the skin. He wore small round glasses that caught the light. When he spoke, his voice was cultivated and unhurried, and there was a faint, soft accent to his consonants, a way of pressing the tongue against the palate.
"Dr. Alan Petrov," he said, and inclined his head. "I tended to your mother's last years, when she would let me. You have her jaw, if you will forgive the observation. The rest is your father, I think."
"I don't remember my father," Margot said.
"No." He looked at her a moment longer than was comfortable. "Few do, in this town. I am sorry for your loss. Ruth was a careful woman. Careful to a fault, some said." He paused, and the pause had the texture of something lifted from a script. "She will be missed."
"Thank you."
"There is a donation book at the front desk," he added, his tone shifting to something almost businesslike. "For the cemetery fund. In lieu of flowers."
"Of course."
He stepped away with a small, polite nod. Margot watched him go, and noticed that his shoes did not make a sound on the carpet.
She turned back toward the casket. The women by the window were watching her now. One of them lifted a hand in greeting. Margot lifted hers back.
Then the door behind her opened, and the air in the room changed.
The woman who came in wore a camel coat, double-breasted, that Margot guessed at three thousand dollars without knowing how she guessed it. Beneath it she wore something dark and simple, and her hair was cut very short, and very precisely, and her skin had the particular evenness of a person who had never skipped a dermatologist. She moved through the room without speaking to anyone, and the room parted for her. She was perhaps thirty-two, perhaps thirty-five. She had the kind of beauty that did not announce itself.
She saw Margot. She came straight to her.
"Simone Duval," she said, in a voice that was cool and crisp, with the faintest softening of certain vowels. "You must be Margot."
"I am."
"I had not expected you." Simone's gaze settled on Margot's face, and did not move. "I had expected an absence. A wire sent from elsewhere. Something apologetic and distant."
"I'm standing here."
"You are." A small pause. "You came home exactly when the money is on the table, you understand. You came home the week the estate is to be inventoried. You came home in the same week that your mother's sealed record is to be opened. You came home at a particular time, Margot. That is what I am saying."
The room had become very quiet around them. The two men by the door had stopped speaking. One of the older women near the window was looking at Simone with the expression of someone trying to recall a name.
"I came home because my mother died," Margot said. Her voice stayed level. "I did not know about any inventory."
"You did not know," Simone repeated. "That is one way to put it."
"I did not know," Margot said again. "I have not been in touch with Ruth in eleven years. I am here because a woman from the church called my editor and my editor called me, and I am here now because it is the right thing to do. I did not know about any money. I did not know about any record."
Simone looked at her a long moment. Her face did not soften. But something behind her eyes shifted, a small reassessment, the way a chess player might reconsider a move.
"Bien," she said, very softly. "Then we are both here under difficult circumstances." She held out her hand. Her grip was brief, dry, and firm. "I am the genealogist your mother hired, six months ago, to trace the Kline line back through the founding families. I have worked on this from Montreal. I came down because your mother asked me to come down, and because I had questions."
"About what?"
Simone tilted her head, just slightly, toward the photograph of Ruth. "About the shape of your family. About what was sealed, and why." She paused. "About what was in that record your mother kept, in her filing cabinet, in the spare bedroom, in a folder that has not been opened in forty years. About who is named in it, and who is not."
Margot felt her hands go still at her sides. The air around the lilies was very thick. The fog outside had pressed against the windows of the funeral home, and the light inside had become even more amber than before.
"I do not know about a record," Margot said.
"Yes," Simone said. "That is what I thought you would say."
She turned and moved to the casket, and stood for a moment with her head bowed, and the room held its breath, and Margot stood a few feet away from her mother for the first time in eleven years and could not bring herself to step forward.
The cluster of older women by the window began to drift toward the casket. Dale Fitch stood just inside the doorway, his hands clasped behind his back, watching the room. Dr. Petrov had moved to a side table, where he was pouring himself a second cup of something pale. None of them looked at Margot. None of them needed to.
She stayed where she was. The fog pressed at the glass. Somewhere outside, she could hear, very faintly, the low sound of the marsh again, a sound she had half-imagined on the road, a low hollow sound that did not belong to anything she could name.
It was steadier now. It was closer.
Simone Duval lifted her head from beside the casket and looked across the room at Margot, and their eyes met, and held.
The wake lasted until the light had gone from the windows and the older women had begun, in low voices, to discuss casseroles. Margot did not stay for the casseroles. She thanked the pastor with a handshake that felt borrowed from someone else, and she watched Simone Duval cross the parking lot toward a small gray rental car, and she did not call out to her, and she did not call out to anyone.
The fog had thickened while she was inside. The marsh sound was gone now, swallowed by the weight of it, and what was left was a low white world and the yellow squares of the funeral home's back rooms and, beyond them, the small dark shape of a cottage she had not known was there.
She had seen it before, of course. Everyone in Hollow Meridian knew the Kline cottage, the old tenant house behind the funeral parlor that the Klines had rented out for forty years. Her mother had lived in it briefly, before Margot was born. Ruth's sister had lived in it. A series of strangers had lived in it. The clapboard siding was a tired cream color. The window boxes were full of dead stalks.
Margot walked toward it on legs that did not feel entirely her own. The fog wet her face. She could feel, very faintly, the smell of the marsh returning through it, that brackish and vegetal sweetness she had grown up with and then forgotten, the smell of Hollow Meridian at its oldest.
The cottage door was not locked. Ruth had been the last tenant. Ruth, in her last months, had refused to come to Margot's apartment in the city. Ruth had insisted on staying here, in this place she had always insisted she was fond of, in this rental owned by the funeral home where she had worked for so many years.
Inside, the cottage smelled of dust and lavender and the particular staleness of a room where someone had been ill. There was a hospital bed in the front room, folded now and pushed against the wall. There was a wheelchair beside it. There was a small table with a water glass still on it, and a paperback novel turned facedown, and a card with lilies on it from the historical society. There was, against the far wall, the desk.
Margot knew the desk. She had known it since she was nine, when her mother had let her sit at it and write her first story in a green spiral notebook. It was an old oak piece, dark with age, with a leather top that had cracked into continents. It had three drawers on the right side, and one wide drawer in the center, and one small drawer on the left that had always stuck.
She crossed the room. She put her hand on the leather top. She felt, under her fingers, a faint grit, like very fine sand, or like ash.
The center drawer rolled open easily. It contained the usual: pens that no longer worked, a stapler missing its staple tray, a stack of greeting cards Margot had sent over the years and never received a thank you for, a photo of Ruth at thirty in a sunflower print dress, and a small key on a red thread.
Margot held the key in her palm. It was a cabinet key, the kind for a small lock, brass, older than her.
The small drawer on the left did not open when she pulled it. She pulled harder. It did not give. She pulled until her shoulder ached, and then she went to the kitchen and found a butter knife, and she came back, and she worked the knife into the seam, and she felt the old wood protest and then surrender, and the drawer came open with a sound like a small drawn-out breath.
Inside the drawer there was a single manila folder.
It was thick at the center, as if it held many pages, and the manila had darkened with age at the edges into the color of weak tea. Across the front, in blocky capital letters that had been made with a rubber stamp, were the words HARLOW CHEMICAL ENV. COMPLIANCE 2009, and drawn through the year, in red ink, in a hand Margot did not recognize, was a single, emphatic X.
Margot did not pick it up at first. She stood with her hand still on the drawer, looking at it. The cottage was very quiet. Outside, in the fog, she could hear her own breathing, and below it, faintly, the marsh again.
She picked up the folder.
The moment it left the drawer the smell came up at her, sharp and unmistakable, rising from the old paper like a memory the paper had been holding for fifteen years. Sulfur. A sweet solvent, the kind they had used at the plant in the old days, the kind that had given the south end of Hollow Meridian its permanent undertone of something faintly rotten, faintly sweet. The smell clung to her fingers. It clung to the inside of her nose.
She opened the folder.
The first page was a compliance form, the kind she had seen a hundred times in the historical society's collections, a cover sheet for the quarterly environmental audit that Harlow Chemical had been required to file with the county. The company name was printed at the top. The date was stamped in the upper right. The X crossed the date. There was no explanation for the X.
The second page was a list of chemical outputs, by line, by month, by volume in gallons. The third page was a list of disposal sites, with grid coordinates. The fourth page was a hand-drawn map of the marsh on the south side of town, with a small area near the old pumping station circled in red pencil, and inside the circle the words, in the same hand as the X, TEST WELL B.
Margot turned the page. The fifth page was a single typed paragraph, unsigned, on plain paper. It read: To the Town Clerk of Hollow Meridian, this is to inform you that the attached documents constitute the complete record of the Harlow Chemical environmental compliance audit for the year 2009, with the exception of those materials that have been sealed by order of the County Health Authority under statute 18-322. Sealed materials are not part of the public record. Respectfully, M. Fenwick, County Health Office.
The sixth page was missing.
Margot turned to the back of the folder. The tab where a staple had been was still there, a small silver rectangle pressed into the manila. Someone had removed the sixth page, and had done so carefully, and had left the rest.
She sat down on the floor of the cottage, in the dust and the lavender smell and the ghost of sulfur, with her back against the desk and the folder open in her lap. The fog pressed at the windows. The hospital bed, folded against the wall, looked like a stranded boat. Somewhere outside, very faintly, she could hear Simone's car starting in the parking lot of the funeral home.
The marsh sound came again, just for a moment, low and steady, and then it was gone.
Margot looked down at the map. The red circle around TEST WELL B. The X over the date. The missing sixth page. The smell of sulfur and sweet solvent on her fingers, and under it, the lavender her mother had kept in sachets in every drawer of every house she had ever lived in.
She thought of Ruth at thirty in the sunflower dress. She thought of Ruth at the funeral home an hour ago, waxen and still. She thought of the record Ruth had kept for forty years in a filing cabinet in a spare bedroom, the record Simone had asked her about across her mother's casket. She thought of what it might mean that Ruth had kept this folder, too, and had kept it locked, and had left the key threaded on red, and had not thrown the folder away.
She thought of the X. She thought of who had drawn it, and why, and what they had been trying to mark.
She closed the folder. She stood up. She put the folder into the inside pocket of her coat, where it sat against her ribs like a small, warm, breathing thing. She took the key off the red thread and put it into her jeans pocket, where it sat cool against her thigh.
She went back through the cottage and turned off the lamp Ruth had left burning on the side table. She stood for a moment in the front room, looking at the folded bed and the wheelchair and the card with lilies on it.
Then she walked out into the fog, and pulled the cottage door shut behind her, and stood for a moment in the yellow light that fell from the funeral home windows across the small patch of wet grass.
The fog was so thick now that the streetlamps were only halos. The marsh was invisible. The chemical plant, four miles south, was invisible. Everything was invisible except the light on the grass and the sound of her own breath and, beneath it, very faintly, that low steady sound from the marsh, which had not stopped, which had perhaps never stopped, which was only waiting, very patiently, to be listened to.
Margot stood still for a long time.
Then she turned, and walked toward the parking lot, and got into her car, and sat with her hands on the wheel for another long time, breathing in the smell of sulfur and sweet solvent that had come in with her from the cottage and would not, she understood, leave her alone for a long time.