The clerk's voice came through Maren Holloway's phone flat and bureaucratic, the particular tone of a person handling a thing they wished to handle less.
"This is Maren."
"It is, yes. County clerk's office, Holloway desk. We've got a situation up at the Lake Aschem dredge. Bones. Skeletal remains pulled up with the silt this morning. Sheriff's office asked us to notify next of kin of record before media gets wind." A small rustle of paper. "You're listed as point of contact for any, uh, historical matter. Cold cases and such. Given your family's standing."
Maren set down the coffee mug she'd been holding. The ceramic kissed the table with a small, plain sound. Outside her kitchen window, the October light sat low and yellow across the back garden, catching the last of the marigolds her mother had planted years ago and nobody had thought to pull.
"Whose bones?"
"Undetermined. They were down deep. The dredge operator brought them up tangled in old root mass and a piece of chain. Could be animal, could be anything. Could be old Indian remains, which is what the county clerk would prefer, frankly, given the paperwork involved." A pause that communicated a great deal. "It could also not be."
The clerk waited. Maren heard him breathing, a small in and out behind the receiver.
"Where are they now?"
"Cooler at the county morgue in Marston. I can have Deputy Cal Riser bring the initial report by your place this afternoon, if that suits. He's the one covering up here since Sheriff Doane passed. Cal's good people. Earnest. Maybe too earnest, if you take my meaning. Boy still carries his daddy's marbles in his pocket and turns them over when he's thinking."
"I know Cal."
"Right. Well. I'll have him swing by. Ma'am. I want to be on the record: this office is not opening a case. This office is forwarding a courtesy notice."
"Noted."
"We are very specifically not assigning investigative resources to what is almost certainly a very old and very uninteresting piece of history." A dry sound that might have been a laugh or a cough. "I have to say that part out loud. For the tape."
"I heard you."
"Good. Good day, then, Ms. Holloway."
The line clicked dead. Maren set the phone back in its cradle and stood very still in her kitchen for a moment, listening to the clock on the wall tick over the second where the morning had become something else.
The bones were not, of course, Indian. Maren had grown up on the story of Lake Aschem the way other children grew up on nursery rhymes. Her grandfather had founded the town of Holloway in 1908, built the first mill on the Aschem outlet, and then, in some arrangement nobody quite explained, deeded the lake itself over to a man whose name she had been told never to speak. The lake had changed hands three times since, but the deed restrictions remained, and the water level had not been lowered by so much as a single inch in over a century. Until this summer, when a state-funded dredging project had finally forced the issue, and the lakebed, which had not seen air since her grandfather's youth, had begun to give up its sediment, and its secrets, one bucketful at a time.
Maren crossed to the hall tree by the front door and took down her coat. The house smelled of wood polish and the wool of the coat and the faintly sweet rot of the marigolds she had not yet cleared. She locked the front door behind her and walked out to the road, where her car sat under the elm.
The drive into town took eleven minutes. She passed the closed feed store, the open diner, the post office with its flag hanging limp in the still air. A man she half-recognized from church was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the hardware and lifted a hand. She lifted hers back. Past the school where she taught fourth grade, where she had returned three years ago after twelve years away, and where the children called her Mrs. Holloway and had no idea, or perhaps had every idea, that the founder's name over the door belonged to her as well.
Main Street ended at the square, and the square ended at the church, and the church ended at the parish hall, and in the parish hall, at almost any hour of the day, you would find Della Marsh.
Della was at the organ when Maren pushed open the side door, working through something slow and hymn-like, her fingers finding the keys with the unhesitating certainty of sixty years' practice. The hall was cool and dim and smelled of old hymnals and floor wax. Della did not turn around, but her fingers faltered, just slightly, on a phrase, which was how Maren knew Della had been expecting her.
"You heard," Maren said.
"I heard the dredge hit something at six this morning. I heard Cal Riser's pickup on Main at quarter past, which is early for that boy. I heard Doris Petty on the phone at the hardware telling her sister before Doris had even wiped the sleep out of her eyes. I heard the clerk call you, because that boy calls you for everything these days and has done since the day he pinned the badge."
Maren walked down the aisle between the empty chairs. The wooden seats creaked faintly under her step, though she was not touching them.
"You didn't call me."
"I was giving you the courtesy of deciding whether you wanted to be the one to carry this." Della's hands stilled on the keys. She turned on the bench and looked up at Maren with eyes that were faded and sharp at once, the particular blue of a winter morning over still water. "Bones in the lake is a Holloway matter. There's no version of bones in the lake that isn't a Holloway matter. And you know whose they are, don't you, child. You knew before the clerk rang your phone."
Maren sat down in the front pew, slowly, and laid her hands together in her lap.
"I don't know whose," she said. "I know who might have wanted them not to be found."
"That's the same knowing, where this town is concerned." Della rose from the organ bench with the careful unfolding of a woman whose knees had opinions about it. She came down the aisle and sat beside Maren, close enough that Maren could smell the lavender water she still wore, the same brand her mother had worn. "Your grandfather made a pact about that lake. I was three years old when they signed it, but I remember the men coming to the house that summer, and the way my mother wouldn't look at the water for a year after."
"Who signed it?"
"Your grandfather. The man he deeded it to. And a third one, who was the doctor's brother. The doctor himself wouldn't put his hand to it, but his brother would, and did." Della folded her hands in her own lap, mirroring Maren without seeming to. "There were two of them once, you know. Brothers. Came up here together in the winter of ought-eight to set up a practice, and then a retreat, and then other things. People came up that winter. People stayed. Some of them didn't come back down."
"The retreat closed before I was born."
"The retreat closed the year your grandfather died. There was a fire." Della's voice did not change inflection. "There is always a fire, where this town is concerned."
They sat in the dim hall together and listened to the building tick and settle, the small sounds of old wood in cool weather. Outside, a car passed on the square, the tires hissing faintly on the asphalt.
"I should go to the morgue," Maren said.
"You should go to the morgue. And then you should come back here and tell Della Marsh what you saw, because Della Marsh has been waiting sixty-three years for somebody to come back from that morgue with an answer." Della's hand came up and touched Maren's wrist, briefly, the touch of a woman who remembered being a girl. "I'm not going anywhere, child. I'm at this organ every day until I die, and possibly some days after, depending on what the Lord and the bishop can work out between them."
Maren covered Della's hand with her own for a moment and then rose and walked back up the aisle and out into the bright, thin, October morning.
The lake sat at the edge of town the way a held breath sits in the chest, still and patient and waiting to be let out. Maren had forgotten how the light moved on it at this hour, the way the sun caught the surface and broke it into a thousand small coins that clinked and spun and never settled. She parked the Civic in the rutted turnout off County 4 and sat for a moment with the engine off and her hands still on the wheel, listening to the cooling tick of the hood and the distant, papery complaint of a loon somewhere out on the water.
The site had been a campground once. She remembered that much from the summers she had spent here as a girl, the way the place had smelled of pine sap and charcoal and the particular human musk of a hundred sweating bodies trying to sleep on air mattresses. Her grandfather had owned the lease, back when leases meant something. The state had taken it over in ought-twelve and let it go back to scrub, and now it was a quarter mile of gravel beach and a stand of birch and a low spit of marshy ground where the cattails whispered in a language she had never learned.
She got out of the car. The air off the water was colder than the air in town, and it smelled of rotting vegetation and the sweet, mineral tang of shallow sediment. Her boots crunched on the gravel as she walked toward the place where the body had been found, the place where the tape was still up, fluttering gently in the breeze, the yellow plastic gone soft and pale from a season's worth of sun.
The deputy had been right. There was nothing to see. The pit had been refilled, the tarp folded, the equipment hauled away. What remained was a square of churned earth and a few indents in the gravel where the generator had stood and the smell, faint now but unmistakable, of something that had been buried and was now in the process of remembering how to be air.
Maren walked the perimeter slowly, the way she had learned to walk a classroom when a child was misbehaving and she could not yet see who. The ground sloped away to the water on the east side, and on the west side it rose into a low bank crowned with birches whose leaves had gone the color of old paper. Somewhere in those birches, she thought, there must have been a path. There was no path now, but there was the suggestion of one, a flattening of the undergrowth that might have been a foot trail or might have been the natural lie of the land.
She stopped where the pit had been and looked down at the disturbed earth. The dig had been careless, she could see that even without having seen it done. The excavator had bitten too deep on the south side, and the back wall of the pit had collapsed in on itself, mixing the layers. A child's sandal, blue rubber, the kind that used to be sold at the gas station by the register. A pull tab from a soda can, the kind that had been phased out before Maren was born. A length of wire, copper, green with patina. She picked each of these up and turned it over in her fingers and set it back down where she had found it, the way a person handles evidence at a museum rather than a crime scene.
She had not come here to find evidence. She had come because Della had told her to come, and Della was, in her own quiet way, the closest thing to a compass this town had left.
The water lapped at the gravel a few feet away, small wavelets the size of thumbnails. She watched them come in and go out and come in again. The loon called once more, farther off now, the sound like a question asked in an empty house. She turned and walked north along the shoreline, away from the pit, toward the place where the beach curved in and the birches came down to meet the water. The gravel here was older, packed down by decades of feet, and the air smelled less of rot and more of leaf mold and the cold, green scent of still water at the edge of a wood.
It was there, half buried in the gravel at the tideline, that she saw it.
She did not see it at first. She saw the chain first, a length of dark metal that caught the sun and threw it back in a single bright pulse, and she thought it was a fishhook lost from some angler's line. She bent to pick it up and the chain ran through her fingers and there was more of it than there should have been, and at the end of the chain there was the pendant, and the pendant was half a heart.
She straightened up with it in her palm and stood for a long moment with the water at her boots and the loon silent and the October sun coming down through the birches in long, pale shafts that made the gravel look like the floor of a cathedral. The half-heart was rusted, of course. After sixty-three winters in the ground, anything would be rusted. But the rust had eaten in a pattern, and the pattern was familiar to her in a way she could not at first place, the way a tune is familiar before you remember where you heard it.
The chain. The chain was the thing. It was not a uniform machine link. It was handmade, each ring closed with a single flat twist, and the twist had a particular direction to it, a counterclockwise habit that she had seen only once in her life, in the workshop of a woman named Hester Cole who had lived on the east side of the square when Maren was a girl and who had made jewelry out of things she found in the woods and in the basements of houses that were being torn down. Hester Cole had been dead for thirty years. Maren had been one of the last people to buy a piece of her work, a copper bracelet that she had worn until it wore through at the clasp and then had kept in a drawer in her apartment in Columbus until the move back, when it had gone into a box that was still, at this moment, in the back of her car.
She turned the half-heart over in her fingers. The break was clean, a jagged line that ran from the top of the heart through the swelling of the lower curve, and the metal on either side of the break was the same gauge, the same hand. The other half had been made by the same woman, the same anvil, the same small, patient hammer. Whoever had worn this had worn the whole thing once, and had lost half of it, or had it taken, or had given it away.
There was a town story about a pair of halves like this. Maren had heard it from Della, years ago, sitting on the porch in the summer before she left for college. Della had been telling her about the twins, the Larkin girls, who had come up to the retreat with their parents in the winter of ought-eight and had never been seen again. There had been a search. There had been a great deal of noise in the newspapers for a season, and then the noise had died, and the case had gone quiet, and the files had been moved to a back room of the sheriff's office where they had stayed until the sheriff himself died and his widow had put the boxes out by the curb with the recycling.
The Larkin girls had each had half a heart. Della had been sure of this. Della had remembered seeing the halves together once, on the porch of the retreat's main house, the two girls sitting on the railing with their necks craned forward and their hands up to their throats, showing each other the way the metal caught the light. Della had remembered the sound of their laughter. Della had remembered that one of the halves had come loose, briefly, and the girl who wore it had looked down at her chest with an expression of small alarm and then had pressed it back into place with the palm of her hand, and the other girl had laughed again, and the first girl had laughed too, and the moment had passed.
Maren stood with the half-heart in her palm and listened to the water come in and go out. The other half, she thought. Where was the other half. If the twins had come to the retreat in ought-eight and had never been seen again, and if one of the halves had come loose on the porch on a summer afternoon, then the other half might have been kept by a sister who had loved it, or by a parent who had not known what else to do with it, or it might have fallen into the grass at the edge of the porch and lain there for sixty-three winters and been covered, eventually, by leaf and loam and the slow patient work of the soil.
Or it might be in the morgue. On the body that had been pulled out of the pit that morning, the one whose face Maren had not yet seen and whose name had not yet been read. The chain around that body's neck might have a half-heart on the end of it, or the half-heart might have been taken, long ago, by someone who had wanted it for reasons of their own.
She closed her fingers around the pendant and felt the rust bite into her palm and the cold of the metal travel up her wrist. The loon called once more, very far off now, and a wind came off the water and lifted the hair at the back of her neck and carried with it the smell of the lake, which was the smell of the town, which was the smell of her own childhood, which was the smell of something that had been buried and was trying to remember how to breathe.
She put the pendant in her coat pocket and turned and walked back along the beach toward the car, her boots crunching on the old gravel, the sun on her shoulders, the half-heart a small, cold weight against her hip.
The drive back to town took nineteen minutes, and she counted every one of them by the white dashes on the road and by the rhythm of the half-heart knocking against her hipbone as she turned onto the county road and then onto Main Street, past the old feed store with its faded sign, past the church where Della Marsh would be practicing the organ tonight if it was Tuesday, past the school where she had once taught and might teach again, past the water tower with its peeling paint that spelled HOLLOWAY in letters you could only read from the air.
Her apartment was over the hardware store, in a building that had been her grandmother's and then her mother's and now was hers, and the stairs to the second floor creaked in the same places they always had, on the fourth step and the ninth, and the door stuck the way it always had, and the air inside was cold because she had not turned the heat up before she left that morning.
She turned the heat up now, and the radiators began to tick and whisper, and she hung her coat on the hook by the door and stood for a moment in the narrow hallway with her hands in her pockets, feeling the pendant there with her right hand, feeling the cold of the metal that had not warmed in her pocket the way a coin would have warmed, that had stayed cold the way metal stays cold when it has come out of the ground.
She took it out and held it in her palm and looked at it in the gray light from the window at the end of the hall. The rust on the chain had come off on her fingers and left a reddish smear, and the half-heart was tarnished dark, and she could see now, in the better light, that there were scratches on the back of it, tiny scratches that might have been letters or might have been nothing.
She turned it over and squinted and could not make them out. She would need to clean it, or she would need someone with better eyes, or she would need to let it be what it was, a piece of metal that had been buried for a long time and had come up again into the light.
She put it on the small table by the door, on top of the pile of mail that had arrived while she was gone, and she walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood at the window and looked down at the street.
A pickup truck went by, and then a woman with a stroller, and then nothing for a while. The light was beginning to fade, and the streetlights were not on yet, and the town sat in that gray in-between that happens in small towns in the late afternoon, when the day has decided to end but the night has not quite agreed to begin.
She thought about the case, the way you think about a thing you are not sure you should pick up. She thought about the pit, and the body, and the half-heart, and the twins who had come to the retreat in ought-eight and had never been seen again. She thought about Tessa Larkin, who was nineteen now and had been ten when it happened, and she thought about the letter that had arrived that morning with no return address, and she thought about the woman who had come to the school that afternoon and asked for her by name.
She thought about her sister.
Nine years. It had been nine years in October, and she had been twenty-two and had been teaching in Pittsburgh and had gotten the call from her mother at three in the morning, and she had driven home through the night and arrived at dawn and found the house full of people and her mother sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea she had not touched, and her father standing by the window with his back to the room, and her sister's car still in the driveway with the keys still in it and her sister's coat still on the hook by the door.
They had searched. They had searched the woods and the lake and the old mine roads and the railroad tracks and the river, and they had found nothing, and the case had gone cold the way cases go cold in small towns when there is no body and no witness and no reason and the months become years and the years become a thing you live around instead of through.
She had left, then. She had gone back to Pittsburgh for a while and then to Philadelphia and then to a town in Vermont where she taught for two years and made friends she did not keep, and she had come back to Holloway in the spring because her mother had died and left her the apartment and because she had needed to, or thought she had needed to, or wanted to, or some combination of those things that she had not yet sorted out.
She had come back, and she had taught at the school, and she had walked the streets she had walked as a child, and she had looked at the lake and the woods and the old mine roads, and she had waited, without admitting to herself that she was waiting, for something to change.
And now something had changed, or was changing, and the half-heart on the table by the door was a part of it, and the letter in the mail pile was a part of it, and the woman who had asked for her by name was a part of it, and the body in the pit was a part of it, and she was standing at the window in her cold apartment deciding whether she was going to pick it up.
The kettle whistled, and she turned and took it off the burner and poured the water into a mug and stood holding it for a moment, the steam rising into her face, the heat of the mug against her palms.
She thought about Deputy Cal Riser, who had come to the school that afternoon and who had sat at her desk and told her what they had found, and who had looked at her with the particular look that people in this town looked at her with when they wanted to ask her something they did not know how to ask. He had not asked her, and she had not offered, and they had sat in the quiet for a while and then he had stood up and thanked her and walked out, and she had watched him go down the hall and out the front door, and she had sat at her desk for a long time after.
She thought about Della Marsh, who would know something, who always knew something, who had been the organist at the church since before Maren was born and who had played at her sister's memorial and at her mother's funeral and who knew the families of the twins who had come to the retreat in ought-eight because Della Marsh knew everyone's families, because Della Marsh had been here longer than most of the families had, because Della Marsh was the kind of woman who remembered the names of people who had left and the names of people who had died and the names of people who had done both.
She drank the tea and set the mug down and went into the bedroom and changed into dry clothes, and then she went back to the hallway and stood by the table and looked at the half-heart on top of the mail.
She picked it up again. She held it in her palm and felt the cold of it, and the weight of it, which was not much but was enough, and she turned it over and looked at the scratches on the back and tried again to make them out.
She could not. She would need a cloth and some kind of cleaner, or she would need to take it to someone, but she did not want to take it to anyone yet, because once you take a thing like that to someone you have decided something, and she had not decided yet.
She put it back on the table, on top of the letter with no return address, and she stood there for a moment with her hand resting on it, feeling the cold of the metal through her palm.
The case was not hers. She was not the sheriff. She was not the deputy. She was not even officially a part of anything, except that a woman had come to her school and asked for her by name and a deputy had come to her school and told her what they had found and a piece of jewelry had been buried in the woods near a body that might be one of the twins who had disappeared in ought-eight and might be someone else entirely.
She could leave it alone. She could put the half-heart in a drawer and the letter in a drawer and the whole thing in a drawer and teach her classes in the morning and grade her papers and walk her dog and live her life in this town that had been her mother's and her grandmother's and that was now hers.
Or she could pick it up.
She thought about her sister, and about the way her sister's car had been in the driveway with the keys still in it, and about the way her mother had sat at the kitchen table with the tea she had not touched, and about the way her father had stood by the window with his back to the room, and about the way none of them had ever said what they thought had happened because saying it would have made it too real and too close and too hard to live around.
She thought about Tessa Larkin, who was nineteen now and had been ten then, and who had come to the school that afternoon and asked Maren to look for her sister.
She thought about the half-heart, and the body, and the twins, and the lake.
She thought about her sister.
She picked up the half-heart and put it in her pocket, and she picked up the letter and put it in her other pocket, and she put on her coat again and went downstairs and out the back door into the alley, and she walked the two blocks to the church in the gray light of the late afternoon, past the hardware store and the feed store and the diner where the high school kids hung out after school, and she did not stop, and she did not look back, and she did not decide anything, except that she was going to talk to Della Marsh, and that was enough, for now, to be a decision.