The Hollow Beneath the Pines: The Brothers Between

The tape recorder sat between them on the kitchen table, a small black device with two microphones and a red light that blinked whenever Miriam hit the red button. She had bought it at a pawn shop on Route 9 for twelve dollars, and the foam over the mics was already beginning to yellow. She set it down with care, adjusted the angle so it could catch Harlan Voss's voice clearly, and then folded them both her hands in her lap.

"Now," she said. "Whenever you're ready."

Harlan did not look at the recorder. He looked at his own hands, broad and scarred, spread flat on the oiled wood of the table. The kitchen smelled of wood smoke and last night's bacon grease, the windows already beginning to fog from the woodstove in the corner. Outside, the morning was slate gray, the kind of cold that came down from the ridge and settled into the bones.

"My brother," Harlan said.

"Tell me about him."

He was quiet for a long time. The woodstove ticked. Somewhere in the house, a clock was running, though Miriam could not see it.

"Elliott," Harlan said, finally, as if testing the name. "That's who you're asking about."

"Yes."

"He was my younger brother by three years." Harlan lifted one hand and turned it over, studying the calluses as if he had not seen them before. "We were not close. Not for a long time."

"Since when?"

"Since the mine." The word came out flat. "Since before the mine, maybe. Since after high school. Since he went off to that college in Chapel Hill and came back different. Since he decided he knew better than everyone who had stayed."

Miriam nodded. She did not push. She had learned, in seven years of writing for the Cordelia Sentinel, that Harlan Voss gave up his truths the way an old dog gave up a bone: reluctantly, and only when he decided you had earned it.

"You said estrangement," she said. "What kind?"

"The kind where you don't speak at Thanksgiving." Harlan's mouth twisted. "The kind where your mother cries in the kitchen and tells you it's her fault, that she didn't raise you right, and you let her think that because the truth would be worse."

"What is the truth?"

He looked at her then, directly, for the first time since she had sat down. His eyes were the pale, washed-out blue of creek water in winter, and they were not unkind.

"The truth," he said, "is that Elliott wanted to sell the family compound. He wanted to sell the timber rights, the mineral rights, the whole north face of the ridge. He wanted to open the mine site up for what he called historical review. He wanted strangers up there with their clipboards and their metal detectors, picking through what happened in 1975 like it was a yard sale."

Miriam kept her face neutral, though her pulse had picked up. She had suspected, from what Bub Carrigan had let slip at the garage two days before, that the brothers' falling out had to do with the land. She had not known the specifics.

"When did this start?" she asked.

"Last spring." Harlan picked up his coffee mug, found it empty, and set it down again with a small, precise movement that suggested he had done so a thousand times. "Elliott came back from Chapel Hill with a folder full of documents. Old maps. Census records. He had been digging into the family history, the town history, the mine history. He wanted to make a documentary, he said. He wanted to tell the truth about what happened up there."

"And you didn't want him to."

"I didn't want strangers on that ridge." Harlan's voice had an edge now, the faint rasp of a saw drawn across green wood. "I didn't want my brother's idealism to tear open what had been closed for forty years. I didn't want him to drag our mother's name through it, or our father's, or mine."

"Your father."

"Boone Garrity." Harlan said the name like a stone dropped into a well. "He worked the mine. He was a boy then, sixteen, seventeen. He saw things. He never talked about it. He drank, and he worked, and he never talked about it."

Miriam felt the tape recorder hum faintly under her palm. She had not asked about Boone Garrity yet. She had not intended to. But Harlan had offered the name, and she had learned not to refuse what was offered.

"Can we come back to your father?" she asked. "For now, I want to understand the conflict between you and Elliott."

Harlan nodded. He reached for the coffee pot, poured himself more, and the dark stream caught the gray light from the window as it fell.

"Elliott and I hadn't spoken since April," he said. "He called me. He laid out his plan. He said the compound had to be sold, or at least the mineral rights, because the historical value of the site outweighed the family's sentimental attachment. He said it was the right thing to do. He said the families of the lost boys deserved to know what was there. He said if I wouldn't agree, he would go around me."

"Around you how?"

"Our mother. The lawyers. The county clerk." Harlan shrugged. "He had filed the paperwork already. He had contacted the historical society. He had a meeting set with a professor from Boone, some woman who studied Appalachian labor history. He had done all of it before he called me."

"That must have felt like a betrayal."

Harlan was quiet. The woodstove popped. A log shifted, sending a small shower of sparks against the iron.

"I was angry," he said, finally. "I told him he was a fool. I told him he didn't understand what was up there, and he didn't understand what would happen if he pulled it open. I told him our father would roll over in his grave, and our mother would never forgive him, and the town would never forgive him. I told him he was spitting on the only family he had left."

"And what did he say?"

"He said the family was exactly what he was trying to honor." Harlan's voice was low now, almost a growl. "He said the family was supposed to protect its own, and that we had failed. He said the boys who went into that mountain deserved better than silence. He said he was going to do it with me or without me."

Miriam let the silence sit. She had learned that Harlan filled silences if you let him, but only with what he wanted to say. If you pushed, he shut like a clam.

"Was there anything else?" she asked, after a long moment.

"He said one more thing." Harlan looked down at his coffee. "He said I knew where the bodies were. He said I had always known. And he said if I wouldn't help him bring it into the light, he would find another way."

The kitchen seemed to contract around the words. Miriam did not move. She did not write. She let the recorder catch what Harlan had said, word for word, because she knew, with the certainty of a woman who had grown up in this town and heard its silences, that Harlan Voss had just handed her something he could not take back.

"Did you know where they were?" she asked, quietly.

Harlan did not answer immediately. He finished his coffee. He set the mug down. He looked out the window at the gray morning, at the ridge beyond the yard, at the trees that belonged to him and his brother and no one else.

"I knew where my father said they were," he said. "I didn't know if it was true. I still don't."

"And you didn't tell Elliott."

"I told him to leave it alone." Harlan's voice had gone rough, the way a saw blade goes rough when it hits a knot. "I told him some doors don't open because the people behind them are gone, and some doors don't open because what's behind them should stay buried. I told him he was playing with fire he didn't understand."

"And he didn't listen."

"He never did." Harlan's eyes came back to hers, and for the first time she saw something in them that was not pride or patience or the careful blankness of a man who had learned to keep his face still. It was grief, raw and unguarded, and it passed across his features like a cloud across a winter sun. "He was my brother. I loved him. I would have done anything for him, except that."

Miriam nodded. She reached over and pressed the red button on the tape recorder. The red light blinked off.

"I want to take a break," she said. "And then I want to come back to what your father told you. And I want to come back to Boone Garrity. And I want to know, if you're willing to tell me, what happened in the mountain in 1975."

Harlan looked at her for a long time. The woodstove settled. The clock in the other room ticked on, steady as a pulse.

"You're a patient woman, Miss Calder," he said.

"I'm a journalist," she said. "Patience is the job."

He almost smiled. It did not quite reach his eyes, but it was there, the ghost of something that might once have been warmth.

"My mother is in the front room," he said. "She might talk to you, if you ask her right. She won't talk to me. She hasn't talked to me about Elliott since he died."

"Since he died?"

"Last March." Harlan's voice was very quiet now. "He had a heart attack, in his apartment in Chapel Hill. I got the call at four a.m. I drove down. I was too late."

Miriam felt the room tilt, just slightly, the way a floor tilts when you step onto a porch you thought was solid. She had come here expecting a living brother, a man she could question, a man who could answer for himself. She had not known Elliott Voss was dead.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't be." Harlan stood, slowly, the way old men stand, using his hands on the table to push himself up. "He was doing what he thought was right. He always was. That's what made him impossible, and that's what made him my brother."

He picked up his mug and carried it to the sink. He did not look at her again. The water ran, and then it stopped, and then Harlan Voss walked out of the kitchen, and Miriam sat alone with the tape recorder and the cold window and the faint, persistent smell of wood smoke.

She did not press stop. The tape kept running, catching the silence, the tick of the clock, the small sounds of the house settling around her like a held breath.

The front room of the Voss house smelled of beeswax and old wool, and the light that came through the lace curtains was the color of weak tea. Miriam stood in the doorway for a moment, letting her eyes adjust. A woman sat in a high-backed chair near the fireplace, a quilt across her lap, her hands folded on top of it like a woman in a daguerreotype. She did not look up when Miriam entered, but her lips moved, just slightly, as if she were tasting something she did not like.

"Mrs. Voss," Miriam said. "I'm Miriam Calder. I was just speaking with Harlan. I hoped I might speak with you, too."

Una Voss raised her head. Her eyes were pale blue, almost gray, and they took Miriam's measure in a single long look that felt, somehow, like being weighed on a grocer's scale. She did not smile. She did not frown. She simply looked.

"Harlan sent you," she said. It was not a question.

"He said you might remember my family. The Calders, over on the creek road."

"I remember everybody." Una's fingers tightened on the quilt. "That's the trouble with living this long. You remember all of them, and none of them remember you."

Miriam pulled the wingback chair a little closer and sat down. The cushion exhaled under her, a faint dusty sound. "I'm trying to understand what happened in 1975," she said. "With Cyrus. I know it was hard. I know people don't like to talk about it. But I'm not here to make trouble. I'm here because I think there's something that was missed."

Una was quiet for a long time. The clock on the mantel ticked. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked, and Miriam had the absurd thought that it was Harlan, listening at the stairs.

"Something was missed," Una said at last. "That's one way to put it."

She did not elaborate. She looked, instead, at the fireplace, where a small fire burned but did not warm. The coals shifted and sighed. Una's face, in that amber light, looked older than the body that held it, as if the woman inside had aged at a different speed than her skin.

"Your mother was a good girl," Una said. "I want you to know that. Whatever you heard, whatever you think you know, your mother was a good girl, and Cyrus was a good boy, and none of what happened was what it looked like."

Miriam's pen stopped on the page. "What did it look like?"

Una did not answer. She was looking at something Miriam could not see, something thirty years gone. Then, with a small impatient sound, she bent forward in her chair and tugged at the hem of the quilt. Miriam heard the whisper of fabric, the faint clink of something small and hard.

Una's hand came up closed around it. She held it out to Miriam, not quite letting go. "Elliott gave me this," she said. "Last time he came up from Chapel Hill. He came in March, right before he died. He said, 'Mama, hold this for me. In case anything happens to me, give it to whoever comes asking the right questions.' I didn't know what he meant. I thought he was feeling poorly. He looked poorly. He looked like a man with something on his chest he couldn't get up."

Una's fingers uncurled. In her palm lay a small brass key, old, the kind that opened a desk drawer or a hope chest, the bow worn smooth by years of handling.

"I don't know what it opens," Una said. "He didn't say. He just said, 'The right person will know.' And then he went back south, and two weeks later Harlan called me and said Elliott was gone."

Miriam took the key. It was warm from Una's hand and lighter than she expected, as if it had been hollowed out by being held. She turned it over. There was a number stamped into the shank, nearly worn away: 1975.

"Mrs. Voss," she said carefully. "Did Elliott ever say anything about what he found? About Cyrus? About what he thought happened?"

Una's eyes came back from wherever they had been. She looked at Miriam with the same weighing look, but there was something else in it now, something almost like pity. "Elliott wrote it all down," she said. "Everything. He told me once, near the end, that he'd put it in a book, like a captain's log. He said if anything happened to him, the book would say. He said the book was the only witness that couldn't be made to lie."

She settled back in her chair and closed her eyes, as if the conversation had cost her something she could not afford. "You take that key," she said. "And you find what it opens. And then you come back and tell me what it says, because I have wondered for thirty years, and I am tired of wondering."

Miriam slipped the key into her coat pocket. It lay against her hip, a small cool weight, a secret she had not asked for and could not now refuse.

"I will," she said. "I promise I will."

Una opened one eye. "Don't promise. Just do. Promises in this town are like the wood smoke; they get in your clothes and you can't get them out."

Miriam stood. Her knees ached. The room felt very still, very full, as if the air itself were listening. She thanked Una, and Una waved her off with a hand that looked like a dried leaf.

At the door Miriam paused and looked back. Una had not moved. The fire cracked once, softly, and a knot of resin popped and hissed.

"Mrs. Voss," Miriam said. "Why did you give it to me? Why not Harlan?"

Una's eyes were closed again, but her mouth moved. "Because Harlan already knows what he believes," she said. "And you, child, you don't know yet. That's why."

Miriam stepped out into the cold. The porch boards rang under her boots. Behind her, the front room curtain shifted, just slightly, as if someone had drawn it back and let it fall.

The key sat against Miriam's hip like a stone pulled from a riverbed, still cold, still holding the shape of whatever hand had last held it. She crossed the porch, descended the three wooden steps, and walked to her car without looking back. The Voss house watched her go. Every window caught the last of the afternoon light and threw it back at her, flat and gray, the way a closed eye might.

She did not start the engine at once. She sat with her hands on the wheel and let her breathing slow. Somewhere up the hollow, a dog barked twice and stopped. A truck shifted gears on the blacktop, far away, the sound arriving in pieces through the trees. The key in her pocket ticked once against the car frame as she turned the ignition. A small sound, barely there. Like a clock winding down, or a lock waiting to be tried.

She backed out onto the gravel and drove.

The road unspooled beneath her wheels in the familiar rhythm of these mountains, each curve a sentence she half-remembered from childhood. The hemlocks pressed close on the right. On the left, the ridge dropped away into a quilt of bare branches and dried laurel. A creek caught the light below, silver and silent. She had not driven this road in twelve years, and yet her hands knew it, her shoulders knew when to soften into the turns, her foot knew when to lift off the gas. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. That was something Harlan had said to her once, at a town meeting she had only half attended, and she had not understood it then. She understood it now.

The gas station appeared around the last bend before the valley floor, the same cinderblock building it had always been, the same two pumps out front, the same hand-painted sign reading CARRIGANS in faded red. A wooden turkey on the roof, weathered to a pale gray, its wings frozen mid-fan. She had bought gum there as a child. She had bought gas there when she was sixteen and learning to drive, the summer before everything changed.

She pulled in under the canopy. The pump clicked when she shut the engine off, a small mechanical sigh. She got out, stretched, and slid her card into the reader. The numbers climbed. She watched them climb the way she had once watched the minutes tick down before the school bell, as if counting might change the shape of what came next.

The door of the office opened with a tinny bell, and a man stepped out into the gray afternoon. He was thick through the chest and thin through the legs, with a face like a creekbed after a long dry spell, all weathered lines and pale stubble. He wore a mechanic's jacket, unzipped, over a faded Eagles cap. His eyes were already half-shut against the light, though whether from the brightness or from something he had been drinking, Miriam could not tell.

"Well now," he said, his voice carrying that particular Appalachian music, the vowels drawn long and the consonants dropped like stones into a well. "If that ain't Miriam Calder. Little Miriam from up River Bend, the one with the journalist hands and the questions for days."

"Bub Carrigan," she said. "I wasn't sure you'd remember me."

"Remember you?" He laughed, short and hoarse. "Your mama used to bring that old Buick in here for a tune-up twice a year, rain or shine. Spring and fall, regular as the preachers. I remember everybody who ever owed me money, and everybody who ever paid on time. You're in the second column, girl. Always were."

She managed a smile. The pump clicked off. She replaced the nozzle and turned back to him. He was leaning against the doorframe now, arms folded across his chest, the posture of a man settling in to watch something unfold.

"You headed back up the mountain?" he asked. "Saw your car pointed that way."

"I was visiting Una Voss," she said, keeping her voice even, testing the name in the open air.

Something shifted behind his eyes. Not a flinch, not quite. More like a shutter being drawn, quick and practiced. He pushed off from the doorframe and stepped closer, and she caught the smell of him then, gasoline and tobacco and the sweet, heavy undertone of bourbon at four in the afternoon.

"Now why in the world would you be doing that?" he said, and the words came slower than before, each one given its weight. "Ain't she enough trouble up there without city folks coming round to stir the pot?"

"She invited me," Miriam said.

"Did she now." He nodded, as if confirming something he had suspected for a long time. "Well, that's Una. Always did like to pick her own scabs. You know how it is with them Vosses. They get a thought in their head and it takes root likepokeweed. Can't be got out gentle."

Miriam leaned against the hood of her car, mirroring his posture without thinking about it. Two people standing in the gray light, pretending to be casual. "I was asking her about the family," she said. "About 1975."

Bub's face went still. The half-smile he had been wearing did not fall so much as harden, the way water hardens when the temperature drops. He looked at her a long moment, then past her, at the ridge rising dark against the sky.

"You and everybody else," he said, and now the slurring was unmistakable, the consonants softening at their edges. "Every few years somebody comes up the mountain with a notebook and a hunger, and they all want the same thing. They want the story. They want the shape of it. They want to put it in a book or a paper and have folks down in Raleigh or Charlotte read it over their morning coffee and feel something they can't name."

"That's not why I'm here."

"No?" He laughed again, but there was no humor in it. "Then why are you here, Miriam Calder? Why now, after all these years? Why this particular week, when the weather's turning and the leaves are down and folks around here are feeling the weight of things?"

She did not answer at once. The pump display glowed green in the gray light. A car passed on the road, slow, and Miriam caught the silhouette of a woman driving, hat brim low, face turned away. Bub watched it pass. He watched it the way a man watches something he is trying not to follow.

"Your Uncle Cyrus," he said, and the name came out rough, as if it had caught in his throat. "He was a good man. Quiet as a held breath, but good. He didn't deserve what happened to him. Nobody did, but especially not him."

"You knew him?"

"Knew him. Worked on his truck more times than I can count. That old Ford, the green one with the dent in the tailgate." He rubbed the back of his neck. "He'd bring it in when the carburetor was acting up, which was always, because he never did have the patience to tinker right. He'd stand there in the bay with his arms folded and watch me work, and he wouldn't say three words the whole afternoon. But when you were with him, you felt like you were with somebody who knew where he was going, you know? Like he had a map in his pocket and the rest of us were just guessing."

Miriam's hands had gone cold against the hood of the car. She hadn't noticed until now. "What do you remember about the summer he disappeared?"

Bub's eyes came back to her, sharp for a moment, clear as creek water over stones. Then the cloudiness returned, settling back over them like fog over a ridge. "I remember it was hot," he said. "I remember the cicadas. I remember folks saying things they shouldn't have said, and I remember folks not saying things they should have."

He stepped closer. The bourbon smell was stronger now, almost sweet. "I'll tell you one thing, Miriam, and then I'm going to walk back in that office and not come out again until you're gone. The Voss family sends its debts underground."

"What does that mean?"

He shook his head. "Means what it says. Means what it always said. Means that when a Voss owes something, whether money or grief or guilt, it goes into the ground. Into the mine, into the well, into the hole beneath the house. The Vosses been doing it for generations. They put things in the earth and the earth keeps them."

"That's a saying?"

"That's a fact." He was looking past her again, at the ridge, at the trees, at something only he could see. "And when I say debts, I don't mean what you owe the bank. I mean what you owe the dead. I mean what you owe the ones you hurt. The Vosses have been paying on those debts a long time. Longer than your lifetime. Longer than mine."

He pulled his cap lower on his forehead, the gesture of a man finishing a conversation he should not have started. "You ought to go on home," he said. "Whatever you came up here to find, it's not going to set well once you find it. That's how it always is with the Vosses. The knowing is worse than the not-knowing. I can promise you that."

He turned before she could speak again. The bell on the office door gave its tinny ring as he pulled it open, and then he was through it, and the door swung shut behind him with a soft click of the latch. Through the smudged glass, Miriam could see him moving toward the counter, his back to her, his hands in his jacket. He did not look back.

She stood there a long moment, listening to the silence settle back into place. The pump display had gone dark. The woods at the edge of the lot rustled once, though there was no wind. Somewhere a crow called, two syllables, and then nothing.

She got into her car and sat with her hands on the wheel, not starting the engine. Bub's words turned over in her mind like stones in a tumbler, smoothing themselves against each other. Sends its debts underground. The Vosses been doing it for generations. The knowing is worse than the not-knowing.

She thought of Una, sitting in her chair by the fire, the brass key on the table between them. She thought of Harlan in his doorway, half in and half out of the house, asking what she wanted and meaning what had she come to take. She thought of Cyrus Voss, the name she had been chasing for twelve years without knowing it, the name she had been chasing her whole life.

The key in her pocket ticked once against the seat frame as the engine caught. A small sound, barely there. The sound of something beginning to move. The sound of a thing that has been still a long time, finally shifting in its bed.