The bus wheezed to a stop at the edge of what passed for a town square in Briarvale, and Maren Ashworth stepped off before the doors finished opening. Gravel crunched beneath her boots. A dog she did not know regarded her from beneath the awning of a feed store with one brown eye and the patient indifference of an animal that had outlived its enthusiasm for arrivals.
She stood for a moment with the strap of her duffel cutting into her shoulder, breathing in air that tasted of woodsmoke and cut grass and something older beneath both, a mineral tang like water moving through limestone. The sky was the color of a healed bruise, pale at the edges and darker toward the ridgeline where her grandmother's property lay waiting. Three days on a Greyhound and a connection through Charleston had left her muscles stiff and her mouth dry. She had not slept properly since the lawyer's letter arrived, six days ago now, the envelope heavy with its single page and the key that had slid free when she tore it open on the kitchen table.
The letter had said: house and contents. It had said: sole heir. It had said: no other family had come forward.
Maren walked.
Main Street, such as it was, followed the contour of the valley floor. Storefronts leaned toward each other as if sharing a confidence. A hardware store, its windows papered over from inside. A diner whose neon EAT sign had lost two letters and now offered, with unintentional poetry, AT. A barbershop with a pole still turning, though whether by habit or electricity she could not say. A woman in a cotton dress swept the sidewalk in front of the post office, her broom moving in slow arcs, and when she looked up at Maren her face did something complicated that Maren chose not to read.
The lawyer's office sat at the end of the row, above a shoe repair shop whose door was padlocked. A brass plate read HARGROVE AND HARGROVE, EST. 1947, the t in ESTATES long since worn smooth by thumbs. She climbed the outer stair. Each step groaned a different note under her weight. At the top she paused with her hand on the railing and looked back down the length of the street, and for a moment the town seemed to breathe around her, settling, as though it had been holding itself still for her arrival and could now resume.
The door opened before she knocked.
Mr. Hargrove was older than she remembered from her one childhood visit, which had been twenty-three years ago and had not lasted long enough to lodge in any clear memory. His face was a relief map of veins and freckles, his glasses sitting low on a nose that had thickened with the years. He wore a bow tie the color of weak tea and a shirt that had been ironed sometime in the previous decade.
"Miss Ashworth," he said. Not a question. He stepped aside and gestured her into a room that smelled of pipe tobacco and paper, the air close and warm despite the open window.
"Mr. Hargrove."
"Please, sit. You must be tired. The road from Charleston is not what it was."
"The road was fine." She sat in the chair he indicated, a leather thing with a brass tack along the arm that caught her sleeve. She did not free it. "I came as soon as I could."
"I understand. I do." He lowered himself behind his desk with the careful geometry of a man whose knees had become negotiations. "We were not certain you would come at all, given the, ah. Given the circumstances."
"What circumstances would those be?"
He looked at her. He looked at a folder on his desk. He opened the folder and closed it again, a motion that accomplished nothing and seemed to steady him.
"Your grandmother passed eleven days ago. The house was found by Mrs. Calloway, who brings the mail up on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The door was open. Your grandmother was in the parlor. She had been there, we believe, for some days. There was no sign of, of struggle. The doctor signed the certificate without hesitation. Heart, he said. She was ninety-one."
Maren nodded. She had not known her grandmother well enough to feel the news as a loss, only as a fact that rearranged certain rooms inside her that she had thought were locked.
"And the bequest," she said. "The house and contents."
"Yes." He opened the folder for real this time, and drew out a sheaf of papers that he arranged between them like a hand of cards. "The house. The land, which comprises some eleven acres along the eastern slope. The contents, as the phrase is used in the document, which I have taken to mean everything within the house at the time of her death, including furnishings, books, papers, personal effects, and certain items which she enumerated by description and which I will not enumerate here unless you wish me to." He looked up. "She also left a sum of money, which is modest, and which she directed be used for the upkeep of the property for a period of one year, after which the upkeep becomes your responsibility."
"Why me?"
"You are her eldest surviving grandchild."
The word surviving landed in the room between them and stayed there.
"My sister would have been," Maren said. Her voice did not change. Her hands did not move. "Before."
"Yes." Mr. Hargrove removed his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth he produced from his pocket, though they did not appear to need cleaning. "I am sorry. I did not know Eliza well, but I knew of her. Everyone knew of her. She was. She was spoken of, here."
"Spoken of how?"
He replaced his glasses. "With fondness. With respect. The way one speaks of the dead here, which is to say, carefully."
Maren let the silence answer for her. She signed where he indicated. She accepted the key, which was iron, black with age, and heavier than any key had a right to be. It warmed in her palm as she closed her fingers around it, or perhaps her palm warmed around it, she could not tell which.
"The house is yours as of today," Mr. Hargrove said. "There is no mortgage. The taxes are current through the year. I would advise you to spend tonight in town. The house has not been opened since we, since the constable and I secured it. There is dust. There is, I expect, a great deal of dust. The roof is sound, I am told, but the front porch sags, and there is a, a matter with the cellar door which I will not trouble you with now."
"I'd like to see it today."
He looked at her over his glasses. "Today."
"If that's all right."
"It is your house, Miss Ashworth." He said this as though reminding himself. "Of course. I will give you directions. The road up is passable in a car, but your bus will not have brought you a car. I can have young Tommy drive you up in his truck, if you can wait an hour."
"I can walk."
"It is three miles."
"I can walk," she said again, and this time it was not stubbornness so much as a refusal to arrive at her grandmother's house in the back of someone else's vehicle, smelling of exhaust and apology.
He gave her the directions. He gave her, unbidden, a small flashlight and a tin of matches and a paper sack containing two apples and a half-loaf of bread wrapped in waxed paper. She thanked him. She left. The stair groaned her back down to the street, which was now empty except for the dog, who had moved to a patch of sun and was sleeping.
The road out of town climbed steadily between walls of laurel and kudzu that had not yet finished their summer conquest of the fences. Cicadas droned in the trees with the insistence of a congregation. Maren walked with her duffel on her shoulder and her grandmother's key in her pocket and the lawyer's papers folded into the breast pocket of her coat, and she thought about the farm she had left behind that morning, the chores undone, the gate she had not latched, the dog she had not fed, and she did not let herself think about any of these things for long.
After an hour the road curved around a shoulder of hill and the valley opened below her, and she saw the house.
It sat on a knoll above a creek, square and dark against the pale sky, three stories if she counted the attic gable, with a porch that wrapped two sides and a chimney that leaned a degree south of true. The roof was slate, much of it missing or slid, and the windows were dark in a way that meant not just empty but sealed, as though the glass had learned to keep its own counsel. A tree had fallen against the east side of the house at some point in the previous year and had been cut where it lay, the stump still pale and sticky with sap, the rest of the trunk drawn away and stacked in cords beside what might once have been a woodshed. The yard was overgrown but not unmanageably, the grass gone to seed, the flower beds a geometry of thistle and Queen Anne's lace. A path of sorts led from the road to the porch steps, the stones still laid in their pattern, though the weeds had tried to argue with the pattern and were winning.
Maren stopped at the gate, which hung open on one hinge. She set down her duffel. She stood for a long moment looking at the house that had been her grandmother's and was now hers, and she did not know what she felt, so she did not try to name it.
A bird went off in the woods behind her with a sound like a hand striking a drum. She picked up her duffel. She walked up the path. The porch steps complained under her boots, and the porch itself dipped and rose again as she crossed it, the boards giving in a slow, deliberate way that felt less like collapse than like the house shifting to receive her weight. The front door was a slab of dark wood with a brass knocker shaped like a hand holding a ring, green with verdigris. Above the lintel, carved into the wood, was a word she could not quite read from the angle, the letters eaten by weather and time.
She took the key from her pocket. It fit the lock with a sound like a small bone settling into a joint. The door opened inward, slowly, as though it had been waiting and had only just now remembered how.
The smell that met her was the smell of a house that had been closed against the world for a long time and was breathing again for the first time: dust, yes, and the dry paper smell of books left too long on their shelves, and beneath that something colder, something mineral and close, the smell of stone floors and old plaster and the particular staleness of rooms that have not heard a voice in a season. There was also, faintly, the ghost of lavender, as though someone had placed sachets in the drawers decades ago and the lavender had been holding its breath ever since, waiting.
Maren stepped inside. The door closed behind her of its own weight, or what felt like its own weight, the latch settling into its keeper with a soft click that echoed through the hall and did not return.
She stood in a parlor that ran the depth of the house, a long room with a fireplace at the far end and a staircase rising along the left wall, the banister a dark handrail worn to a shine in the center by hands that were not hers. Furniture stood where it had always stood, she supposed, covered in white sheets that had yellowed to the color of old teeth. A grandfather clock against the right wall had stopped at quarter past three, the hands frozen there as though time had decided to take a break and had forgotten to resume. She could not bring herself to lift any of the sheets. Not yet. Instead she let her eyes travel the room, taking inventory the way her father had taught her when she was young and the farm was still a thing to be learned: this here, that there, the value of a place measured not in what it contained but in how it stood up to being looked at.
On the mantel, beneath a film of dust, stood a row of small framed photographs. Maren crossed the room and stood before them, and after a moment she raised the hem of her coat and breathed across the nearest frame, clearing a porthole in the dust. A young woman looked back at her from inside the glass, her hair dark and pulled back, her mouth set in a line that was not quite a smile. Maren did not know her. Behind her, in the photograph, the front of this house was visible, the porch new, the paint fresh, and a man stood at the gate with his hat in his hand, his face turned away from the camera as though he had heard something in the woods.
She wiped another frame. Her grandmother, younger here than Maren had ever seen her, in a dress with a high collar, standing in a field of something that might have been tobacco. Another wipe. A family group, the figures arranged in the stiff formality of the previous century, a man and a woman and four children of varying heights, the tallest of them a girl with a serious face and hands that hung at her sides as though she did not know what to do with them. The smallest child, a boy, had been caught mid-blink.
The last frame in the row was empty. The glass was there, and the backing, and the small brass clips that had held a photograph in place, but the photograph itself was gone, leaving only a pale rectangle of preserved paperboard, the outline of a face that had been turned to the light for years and now was not.
Maren set the frame back. She stood a moment longer. Then she turned and climbed the stairs, which creaked a steady rhythm under her boots, a staircases conversation with itself, and she did not feel afraid, exactly, though she felt watched, which was not the same thing, or was the same thing said differently.
The second floor held a landing, a hallway, and three doors, all closed. She tried the first on the left. A bedroom, the bed stripped to the mattress, the windows shuttered from inside, a wardrobe of dark wood against the far wall. She closed it and tried the door across the hall. A smaller room, a writing desk and a chair, bookshelves lining three walls, the spines of the books unreadable in the dim light. She tried the third door, the one at the end of the hall, and found it locked, the knob turning but the bolt held fast. She did not have a key for it. She did not, she realized, have a key for any door in the house except the front one.
She stood in the hallway with her hand still on the locked doorknob and listened. The house, around her, did the things houses do: it ticked, it settled, it shifted in its joints. A board somewhere down the hall gave a single creak, like a footstep, and then did not repeat itself. From somewhere below her came the sound of the grandfather clock, which had not been working a moment ago, striking the hour, a single note that rolled through the empty rooms and faded into the plaster. She counted the strikes without meaning to. Three. It had been right, after all. It had only been waiting for someone to come and see.
Maren let go of the doorknob. She went back downstairs. She found the kitchen, which was warm even in the dim light, the stove iron and heavy, the pump at the sink working when she tried it, the water that came up tasting of iron and clean. She found the pantry, the larder, the cellar door, which she did not open. She found a bedroom on the ground floor behind the parlor, a smaller room than the ones above, with a narrow bed and a washstand and a window that looked out on the creek, and she set her duffel on the bed and sat down beside it and put her hands on her knees and did not cry, which was what she had expected of herself and which she refused.
Outside, the light was beginning to fail. The pale bruise of the sky had deepened toward its edges, and the woods behind the house were already filling with a darker green that would soon be black. Somewhere down the valley a dog barked once, twice, and stopped.
Maren stood. She went to the front window and looked out at the path, the gate, the road. No one was coming. No one had followed her. The town had let her go without fuss, and the house had let her in without question, and she stood now in the dim parlor of a woman she had not known, holding a key that did not fit every door, and she thought: this is the inheritance. Not the house. Not the contents. The standing in the hallway with your hand on a locked door and the whole long evening ahead of you and no one to ask what is on the other side.
She turned from the window. She crossed to the fireplace and knelt and began to clear a space among the ash and the old kindling, and her hands moved with the competence of a woman who had kept a fire going for years in a stove that did not always want to catch, and she did not hear, or did not attend to, the small sound from above her, from the locked room at the end of the second-floor hall, a sound like a drawer being opened, slowly, by a hand she could not see.
The kindling took on the second try, the small dry splinters catching at the base of the larger split and then flaring up into the chipped bark, and Maren crouched back on her heels and watched the flames climb and felt, with the heat on her face, a momentary animal satisfaction that she allowed herself without apology. The house was colder than it had any right to be. She had grown up in houses that held their warmth like a grudge, and this house had not held hers, and she suspected it would not hold any warmth she gave it tonight, either. Still. A fire was a fire, and a fire was a comfort, and she was a woman who had learned to take comfort where she could find it.
She stood and brushed her knees and looked at the room.
The parlor was not large. It was a room that had been arranged, she thought, by a woman who had read about arrangements in a magazine and had then done her best with what she had. A braided rug in dulled reds and browns lay over the wide-board floor, and the boards beneath it were scuffed into pale channels where feet had walked for decades along the same paths: from the doorway to the settee, from the settee to the fireplace, from the fireplace to a door in the far wall that was now closed. The settee itself was high-backed and horsehair-stuffed and draped with a crocheted afghan that might have been yellow once and was now the color of weak tea. Two straight chairs flanked it. A bookshelf stood against the wall opposite the fireplace, and a floor lamp with a fabric shade leaned beside it, and the shade was bowed on one side where some small thing had pressed against it from inside, and Maren did not ask what.
Above the mantel there was a mantel clock, stopped, and beside the clock a framed photograph in a wooden stand, and beside that a small pottery vase, empty, and a wooden box with a hinged lid.
She crossed to the mantel and looked at the photograph first.
Two women stood on the porch of this house. Behind them, in the photograph, the porch rail was white and the sky was a flat bright blue and the woman on the left was younger than Maren had ever known her to be and was laughing with her mouth open, and the woman on the right was smaller, darker, and not laughing. Maren recognized her grandmother in the smaller woman, though she had never seen her grandmother as young as this. The laughing woman she did not recognize at all. She turned the frame over. On the back, in pencil, in a hand she thought she might have known once: E.A. and C.D., summer of '54.
E.A. She set the frame down. C.D. The letters sat in the air of the parlor like a small smoke.
She did not open the wooden box. Not yet. She went to the bookshelf instead.
The shelf was heavy and dark and smelled of paper and dust and something else, something fainter, something that lived in the space between the books where the light did not reach. The books themselves were the books of a long, quiet life: almanacs, a Bible with a broken spine, a collection of county fair programs from years that ended in odd numbers, three paperback mysteries with cracked spines, a hardcover of wildflower identification whose cover had been wrapped in clear tape and was coming loose at one corner, a leather-bound ledger with no title on the spine, a row of Readers' Digest condensed volumes in fading red. The shelf was not, at first glance, a bookshelf that hid a door. But Maren had grown up in a house where her grandmother had hidden things in plain sight, and she had learned, early, to look for the seam that did not want to be found.
She found it on the third pass.
The right edge of the shelf did not meet the wall the way the left edge met the wall. There was a quarter inch of light between the wood and the plasterboard, and when she pressed the books aside with the back of her hand, she saw that the light came from a gap that ran floor to ceiling, and that the shelf, where it met the floor, sat on a strip of darker wood that was not the floor at all but a threshold.
She did not press it yet. She stood back and looked.
There was no handle, no obvious latch. The shelf was a single piece of furniture, solid, dark, and as tall as she was. To open it, she thought, you would have to know that it opened. You would have to know the trick. And if you did not know the trick, you might press every book in the house and never find the seam, and the door would go on being a shelf, and the room behind it would go on being a room that was not a room, for the rest of your life.
She thought of the sound she had not heard, or had not attended to, when she was kneeling at the fire. The drawer-sound. Above her. From the second floor.
This was not the second floor. But it was, perhaps, the same house.
She put her hand flat against the dark wood and pushed.
The shelf did not move.
She pushed harder. The shelf shifted a quarter inch and stopped with a small wooden protest, as though it had not been asked to do this in a long time and was reconsidering the request. She braced her shoulder against it and pushed again, and this time the shelf swung inward on a pivot she had not been able to see, grinding slightly against the floor, and a breath of colder, damper air came out at her from the dark beyond.
She let the shelf swing all the way open and stood in the doorway and let her eyes adjust.
It was a small room. Smaller than the parlor, and lower-ceilinged, as though it had been finished after the rest of the house and the carpenter had worked around what was already there. There were no windows. The air smelled of paper and dust and something else, something that was not rot, not quite, but a kind of slow fermentation, the smell of things left in a sealed place for a long time. The floor here was bare board, and the walls were unpapered plasterboard, and in the center of the room there was a small wooden table with one chair, and on the table there was a stack of books and a single candle in a brass holder, and on the floor beside the table there was a wooden box of the same make as the one on the parlor mantel but larger, and beside the box there was a shape that Maren did not at first identify and then identified and wished she had not.
It was a dress. A woman's dress, dark cotton, long-sleeved, folded with a precision that spoke of a woman who had known how to fold a dress so it would keep. The collar was high and buttoned at the throat. The hem was even. On the breast of the dress, where a brooch might have been, there was a small dark stain that Maren did not look at for longer than a second.
She did not touch the dress.
She went to the table and looked at the stack of books. They were journals, she saw. Five of them, each one hand-stitched in the same fashion: a heavy paper cover, the spine reinforced with linen tape, the pages sewn through with a heavy thread in a crosshatch pattern she had seen her grandmother use on feed sacks when the sacks tore. They were not uniform in size. The smallest was the thickness of a pamphlet; the largest was three inches thick. They were tied shut, each one, with a piece of cotton tape that had been knotted once and left long, the way you tie a thing you mean to come back to.
On the cover of the smallest one, in ink that had gone brown with age, a name. Eliza Ashworth. And below the name, in the same hand, a date. December, 1962.
Maren sat down in the chair.
The chair creaked under her. The candle was unlit. She did not light it. The room was dark enough that she had to bring the journal close to her face to read the name, and then she could see the name clearly and did not need to bring it closer, and she held the journal in her lap and looked at it for a long moment and thought about not opening it and thought about opening it and then untied the cotton tape and opened it.
The first entry was dated December 14, 1962. The handwriting was her grandmother's. She knew the hand before she knew the woman, had known it since she was a girl watching the old woman address an envelope in the lamp light, and she had never been able to read her grandmother's face the way she could read her grandmother's hand, and now the hand was here in her lap and the face was gone.
December 14, 1962. The first cold night. I have moved the small table into the room and I have put the chair by it and I have brought the candle down from the shelf in the pantry and I have sat here for an hour and not lit it. I do not know what I am waiting for. I think I am waiting to know whether I will do this, and then I will know, and then I will do it, or I will not.
There is a sound at night that I cannot place. It is not the house settling. I have lived in this house long enough to know the house settling. It is not an animal. It is not the wind. It comes from the direction of the creek and it goes through the walls and it stops when I sit up in bed, and when I lie down again it starts again, and I do not know what to make of it.
Maren turned the page.
December 21, 1962. The shortest day. I lit the candle tonight. I do not know why I had not lit it before. There was a kind of ceremony to it that I did not want to cheapen by doing it for no reason, and so I waited until I had a reason, and the reason was that I heard the sound again, and louder, and I thought: I will not sit in the dark with this. I will see what there is to see. I lit the candle and the room looked the way it had looked, which is to say, like a room. There was nothing in it that was not there in the daylight. I sat for an hour. The sound did not come back while the candle was lit.
When I put the candle out, the sound came back, and it was louder.
Maren turned more pages. The entries came irregularly at first, then more regularly, then daily, then sometimes twice a day. They were not, she realized quickly, the entries of a woman keeping a diary. They were the entries of a woman keeping a record. The difference was in the tone. A diary admitted feeling. A record kept feeling out, in the way you kept the cold out, with weather-stripping and patience.
January 9, 1963. I have begun to bring small things into the room. A cup. A saucer. A book. I do not think I am nesting. I think I am establishing a place that is mine, in a house that is mine, against something that is not. I do not know what it is not. I do not know yet that it has a name. I will not give it a name until I have to.
February 2, 1963. I have not slept in the upstairs bedroom in nine days. I sleep on the settee in the parlor with the lamp on. The sound is quieter from there but it is not gone. I think it knows where I am.
Maren closed the journal. Her hands were steady, which surprised her, and she sat with the journal in her lap and looked at the dark room and at the dress on the floor and at the stack of journals on the table, four of them still tied, and she thought: sixty years. This had been going on for sixty years. Her grandmother had sat in this chair and written these words and tied them shut and stacked them and gone on with her life, whatever her life had been, and she had told no one, or she had told someone who had not believed her, or she had told someone who had believed her and had been unable to help, and Maren did not know which.
She put the journal back on the stack and tied the tape again, the way it had been tied, and stood, and stepped out of the room, and pulled the bookshelf to behind her, and stood in the parlor with the fire going and the dark coming on outside, and she did not go back to the settee and she did not go up the stairs. She stood at the mantel and put her hand on the wooden box she had not opened and left her hand there, and she thought about the photograph of the two women on the porch, the laughing one and the quiet one, and the letters on the back, E.A. and C.D., and she thought: C.D. is not in any of the family records she had ever seen. There was no C.D. There was her grandmother and her great-grandmother and her great-great-grandmother, and all the aunts and cousins, and none of them had been C.D.
She opened the box.
Inside the box there was a folded paper, and a key, and a small photograph, and a lock of hair tied with a black thread.
She unfolded the paper first. It was a letter, in her grandmother's hand, dated six months before Maren had been born, and it began: My dear Maren, and it was addressed to her by name.
My dear Maren,
If you are reading this, I am gone, and the farm is yours, and I have done what I could to prepare you, though I fear I have done too little, and I have left too much unsaid. I should have told you sooner. I should have told your mother, and her mother before her. The silence has been a kind of cruelty, I see that now, but I was raised to it, as my mother was raised to it, and so on back, as far as any record reaches, which is not as far as we have always pretended.
There is a room in this house you have not yet found. You will find it. You are stubborn enough. The door is behind the wallpaper in the upstairs hall, the section that does not match. It is not a door you can see. It is a door you can feel, if you put your hand flat against the wall and push, and you must push at the right time, which is after dark, and you must push as though you mean it, because the door will not open for a hesitant hand.
I have put the key in this box. The key is for the room, not for the door. The door opens from pressure. The key is for what is inside.
What is inside is not what you think. I will not write it down here, because what is written can be found, and what is found can be used, and there are things that should not be used. I will say this much: the room is not empty. The room has not been empty since before this house was built. Before the farm. Before the land was cleared. There was a thing here, and the house was built around it, and the room was built around the thing, and the family that has lived here has lived with it, and the family that has died here has died because of it, though not in the way you might suppose.
Your sister knew. I am sorry to tell you this way. I should have told you both together, but Eliza was always the braver one, and I thought she would tell you, and she did not, or she could not, or she tried and you did not hear. I do not know which. I only know that she came to me three months before she died, and she asked me what was in the room, and I told her as much as I have told you, and she went up the stairs, and she came down again, and she was not the same after. Not afraid, exactly. Quieter. As though she had made a decision she could not unmake.
I am telling you now because you are the last, and the last must know, or the last will repeat what the first did, and the cycle will not break.
The key in your hand. The room upstairs. The thing that is in it. I am asking you to do what I could not do, and what your mother could not do, and what my mother could not do, and what her mother could not do. I am asking you to end it, or to bind it, or to do whatever must be done, and I cannot tell you what that is, because I do not know. I have been too afraid to learn.
I am sorry, my dear. I am sorry I could not be braver. I am sorry I am telling you in a letter, after I am gone, which is the coward's way, and I know it. You deserved better. You have always deserved better than this family has given you.
Your grandmother,
E.A.
Maren read the letter twice, and then she set it on the mantel, and she picked up the photograph, and she looked at it. The photograph was old, the colors gone to brown and cream, and it showed a young woman standing in a doorway, and the doorway was not the front door of the farm. The doorway was narrow, and the wood around it was dark, and the woman was standing half in and half out, as though she could not decide. Maren turned the photograph over. There was nothing written on the back.
She picked up the lock of hair. It was tied with a black thread, and the thread was old, and the hair was dark, and she did not know whose it was. She did not want to know whose it was. She set it back in the box and closed the lid and left the key where it lay, on top of the closed lid, and she stood in the parlor with her hands at her sides and the fire popping behind her, and she thought: not tonight.
She went upstairs, and she did not look at the wallpaper, and she went into her bedroom and closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed and did not undress. She sat with her shoes on and her coat still over her arm, and she watched the dark window, and she listened.
The fire downstairs burned down to coals. The house ticked and settled, the way old houses do, and the wind came up outside and moved through the eaves with a low hum, and the chimney breathed, and somewhere out beyond the barn a fox made a sound that was not a fox, and she sat very still and did not think about the letter and did not think about the key and did not think about her sister coming down the stairs quieter than she had gone up.
She thought about all of it.
The dark thickened. The coals in the parlor below went to a dull orange, and the room dimmed around her, and she did not light the lamp. She sat in the dark and waited for sleep, and sleep did not come, and then she heard it.
Scratching.
It came from behind the wall to her left, the wall that shared a side with the hall, and it was a small sound, a careful sound, as though whatever was making it was trying not to be heard. A nail on wood. A small nail, a child's nail, drawn slowly across the grain. Maren's hands tightened on the quilted blanket in her lap. She did not move. She listened.
The scratching moved. It went from behind the wall to under the floor, and the sound changed, became muffled, became the sound of fingers drawn across the underside of pine boards, and it traveled from the foot of her bed toward the door, and it paused, and then it tapped. Three times. Very soft. Very patient.