The screen door of the Riverside Tavern screamed on its hinges, a thin metal wail that carried clear across the gravel lot and into the woods beyond. Maren Ashworth held the door open with one calloused hand and let the sound finish before stepping inside.
Afternoon light slanted through the front windows, cutting bright bars across the plank floor and illuminating the suspended dust that turned slow circles in the stillness. The usual late lunch crowd had thinned. Two men in seed company caps nursed beers at the far end of the bar and glanced up without interest. A woman Maren half recognized from the feed store sat near the door with a plate of fries going cold in front of her. Behind the counter, Lou Tate was wiping a glass with a rag that had seen better days, the same rag, Maren suspected, that had wiped every glass in the place for the last twenty years.
Lou saw her and nodded once, the way he did with everyone. Then he tilted his head toward the back booth, a gesture so small it could have been a trick of the light.
Sheriff Calvin Preece sat alone in the corner, a cup of coffee in front of him and a manila folder spread open on the table. His hat rested on the seat beside him, revealing a thin crescent of sweat-damp hair. He was reading something, lips barely moving, one thick finger tracking across the page. When the screen door finished its complaint, he looked up.
"Maren." He said her name the way a man says it when he has been expecting someone and is not glad about it. He did not wave her over. He did not smile. He closed the folder and rested a palm flat on top of it, a gesture so deliberate it could have been a warning.
"Lou," Maren said, without turning. "Coffee, please. Black."
Lou reached for a mug. Maren crossed the room. The floorboards gave a low groan under her boots, the kind of sound a house makes when it knows someone is listening. She slid onto the bench across from Calvin and set her hands flat on the table, the way her father used to when he wanted a man to understand he meant business.
Calvin studied her for a long moment. He was a broad man, gone soft around the middle, with the kind of face that looked like it had been carved out of a hillside and then sat on. His eyes were the color of creek water after a long rain, and right now they were doing their best to look anywhere but at her.
"Heard you were back," he said finally.
"Heard you were sheriff," Maren said. "Third one in your family. Congratulations."
"Word travels."
"Word doesn't have to travel far in this county."
Lou arrived with the coffee, set it down without a word, and withdrew. Calvin watched the mug settle, then exhaled slowly through his nose.
"I was hoping you'd come in," he said. "I was also hoping you wouldn't."
"That's a hell of a thing to say to a person, Calvin."
"It's a hell of a time to be saying anything to anyone." He paused. "How's the farm?"
"It's a farm."
"And Eliza?"
The question landed the way a stone lands in still water, sending rings out in every direction. Maren looked down at her hands. The knuckles were white where they pressed against the wood.
"Eliza's gone," she said. "You know that."
"I do." Calvin's voice had gone quieter, the measured drawl of a man choosing his words the way a man chooses his steps on a rotten porch. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't at the service. I was over in Buck Creek on that Hunter business and I couldn't get loose in time."
"It's all right."
"It isn't." He shook his head. "It isn't all right. None of it's been all right."
Maren wrapped both hands around the mug. The ceramic was warm, almost hot, and the heat pressed into her palms and up into her wrists. She let it.
"Your sister," Calvin said, and now his voice had the slow, careful cadence of a man reading from a script he had rehearsed in the truck, "was a good girl. Kind. Curious. The kind of girl who brought lost cats home and cried when the news was sad." He paused. "The kind of girl who asked too many questions."
"Calvin."
"I'm trying to say this right." He pressed his palm harder against the folder, as if to keep something inside it. "Your sister came to see me. Twice, the last month. Asked me about the old Preece records. Asked about the Holloway place."
Maren set the mug down. The little thud it made on the table was the loudest sound in the room.
"Why?" she said.
"She didn't say. Or she did and I didn't understand it at the time." He shifted on the bench, the vinyl creaking under him. "She said the house was trying to tell her something. I told her a house is a house, Maren, wood and nails and bad wiring, and she laughed at me. Not mean. The way you laugh at a child who doesn't get the joke."
The screen door banged open behind them. One of the men at the bar had stepped out for a smoke, and a wedge of bright daylight fell across the floor before the door swung shut again. Maren did not turn around. Her eyes stayed on Calvin's face, on the small muscle working in his jaw.
"What did you tell her?" Maren said.
"I told her the truth. That the Holloway place has been a story in these parts longer than anybody can remember. That there have been owners, renters, squatters, and the building just sits there, waiting. That my grandfather warned my father and my father warned me, and now I'm warning you." He stopped. "I told her to stay out of it. I told her the town has a long memory for people who go poking around in that house."
"And she went anyway."
"She went anyway." Calvin's mouth twisted. "I told your father the same thing, once. He laughed me off, too. Said the Preece family had been scared of shadows since before the county was a county."
"Was he wrong?"
Calvin looked at her. For a long moment he did not say anything. The coffee in his cup had stopped steaming. The light through the window had shifted, creeping an inch further across the floor, and the dust motes in its path had thinned out. Somewhere in the back, a refrigerator hummed on and on.
"Your father," Calvin said slowly, "was a brave man. A stubborn man. He loved that piece of ground more than he loved his own peace, and he paid for it. So did your mother. So did your grandmother. So did her mother before her." He paused. "Now your sister. And now you."
"You think I'm next."
"I think you've been next since the day you were born in that house." He put both hands flat on the table, mirroring her, and for a moment the two of them sat there like figures at a wake. "I think the Ashworths have been next for seven generations. I think there's something in the ground on Holloway Lane, or in the walls, or in the water, that has been waiting for one of you to come home."
Maren's throat had gone dry. She picked up the coffee and took a sip that scalded the roof of her mouth and did nothing to clear it.
"Waiting for what?" she said.
"That's the part I don't know." Calvin's voice dropped, almost to a whisper. "That's the part my grandfather didn't know either. He wrote it down somewhere, all the things folks said about that house. The disappearances. The accidents. The way livestock stop giving milk and the way dogs won't go down the lane after dark. The way children stop speaking for a while, then start saying things no child should know." He tapped the manila folder with one blunt finger. "I got his notes. I got my father's notes. I got a folder of complaints from the county clerk that go back to eighteen sixty. And I can't make any of it fit together."
"So why are you telling me this, Calvin? If you've known all along, why didn't you do something?"
"Do what?" His voice had an edge now, a flash of the rough country man who had won three elections by promising to keep the roads graded and the trouble out. "Burn it down? The county won't let me. Lock it up? Folks have tried. The locks come off. Board it? The boards come down. There was a man, name of Harwell, tried to seal the place with concrete in nineteen seventy-two. Concrete cracked in a week. There was a woman in nineteen ninety who put a chain and a padlock on the front door and swore she'd come back every Sunday to check. She came back one Sunday and the chain was on the ground, neat as you please, and the padlock was rusted shut from the inside."
Maren stared at him. The light through the window had crept another inch, and now it caught the edge of the manila folder, turning it the color of old bone.
"Eliza," Maren said quietly, "what did she want to know?"
"She wanted to know who built it." Calvin spread his hands. "The first one. The one that started all the stories. She had a notion, a paper from somewhere, that said the house wasn't built by the Preece family or any of the names you'd recognize. She thought it was built before the county was surveyed. Before the state was a state."
"Who built it, then?"
Calvin looked at her. The look lasted longer than it should have, and his eyes had gone the color of a sky before a storm.
"That's the question your sister asked me," he said. "And that's the question that got her killed."
The words sat between them. Maren did not pick up her coffee. She did not move her hands. Somewhere in the back of the tavern, the refrigerator hummed on, and the screen door creaked once on a gust of wind that came and went without touching the dust in the air.
"You don't know that," Maren said.
"I don't know anything for certain, Maren. That's the truth. The only truth I've got." He leaned forward, and she could smell the coffee on his breath and the faint, familiar scent of pine sap that clung to every man who worked outdoors in the hills. "I know your sister went into that house three times in the last two months of her life. I know she came out different each time. I know the last time she came out, she walked past me on the street without speaking, and her eyes were the eyes of someone who had been shown something no human being should see."
"You should have stopped her."
"I tried."
"Try harder."
"I told her I would arrest her if she went back in." Calvin's voice cracked on the word arrest, just slightly, just enough. "She looked at me, Maren. She looked at me the way a grown woman looks at a child who doesn't understand. And she said, 'Calvin, the house has been arrested. It's the rest of us who are free.' And then she walked on, and I let her go, because I am a coward, and because I have always been a coward where that house is concerned."
He reached across the table and laid his hand, palm up, on the wood between them. The gesture was so un-Calvin, so unlike the man she remembered from school assemblies and church socials, that for a moment Maren could not speak.
"I'm telling you this," he said, "because you deserve to know. And because if you go back to that house, I want it on the record that I begged you not to."
"I'm going back to that house, Calvin."
"I know."
"I'm going back because it's mine. Because my family built that ground and bled on that ground and are buried on that ground, and I will not let some old story, some old whisper, chase me off it."
Calvin nodded, once. He did not look surprised.
"Then take this," he said, and he slid the manila folder across the table. It was heavier than it looked. The paper inside rustled like dry leaves. "My grandfather's notes. My father's notes. And mine. Everything we could find. Dates, names, things that don't make sense. You don't have to read it. But if you do, read it alone, and read it by daylight, and for the love of God, do not read it out loud."
Maren did not pick up the folder. She looked at it, and then she looked at him.
"Why are you helping me?" she said. "If you believe what you say you believe, why hand me the rope?"
"Because you are the only Ashworth left," he said, "and because the only thing worse than a person who goes into that house is a person who goes into that house not knowing what walked in before her."
The screen door banged open again. This time it was Della Marsh, a wiry woman with iron-gray hair and a face that looked like it had been folded and refolded a hundred times. She had a canvas bag over one shoulder and she was breathing hard, as if she had walked fast.
She stopped when she saw them. Her eyes flicked from Maren to Calvin to the folder, and something in her face tightened.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, no. Not you too, Calvin."
Calvin withdrew his hand from the table. "Della."
"I told you," she said, crossing the room in three quick strides, "I told you the last time we spoke about this. The Preece family made its bargain a long time ago. You don't get to pass it along. You don't get to make it somebody else's."
"Della, sit down."
"I will not sit down." She looked at Maren. The anger in her face shifted, softened at the edges, but did not disappear. "Maren Ashworth. When did you get back?"
"Yesterday," Maren said.
"Yesterday." Della let out a breath. "And already you've got him digging up his grandfather's papers. Already you've got the whole town starting up again."
"I didn't ask for the papers."
"No. You never do." Della turned on Calvin. "What have you told her?"
"The truth."
"What truth? Your truth? Your grandfather's truth?" Della's voice was rising, and the two men at the bar had turned to look, and the woman by the door had stopped pretending to read her phone. "The truth is a story, Calvin. The truth is whatever the last person to walk out of that house wants to believe. And the last person to walk out of that house was Eliza, and Eliza didn't talk, did she? Eliza walked past me on the road and she didn't say a word, and that was the truth of her."
Maren set her coffee down. The mug made its small, soft sound.
"Della," she said quietly, "sit down."
Della looked at her. Something in the older woman's face gave way, just a crack, and she pulled out the bench across from Maren and sat, lowering the canvas bag to the floor with a thump that said it was heavier than it looked.
"I'm sorry," Della said. "I'm sorry, Maren. I'm a fool. I'm a tired old fool."
"You're not old," Maren said.
"I'm old enough." Della reached across the table and covered Maren's hand with her own. Her palm was dry and rough and warm, and Maren did not pull away. "Your sister was my friend. My friend, and my neighbor, and the closest thing I have had to a daughter since my own girl went. I failed her. I won't fail you."
Calvin sat very still. The manila folder lay between them on the table, the light from the window catching its corner now, and the dust in the air had thinned to almost nothing, as if the room itself was holding its breath.
Della poured herself a cup of Maren's coffee without asking. She drank it black and did not flinch, and Maren watched the long swallow move down her throat.
"That's the first cup of coffee I've had in three days," Della said.
"Della Marsh, since when do you not drink coffee?"
"Since I started sleeping in my truck. Coffee reminds me of the kitchen. Of my girl. Of mornings when somebody answered when I called." Della turned the cup in her hands, a slow, absent rotation, like she was watching a wheel that did not need to go anywhere. "Three nights now. I sleep in the cab. I sleep with the windows up."
"Why the windows up?"
"Because she whistles. She whistles when the wind moves a certain way, and I cannot stand to hear a thing that sounds like her and isn't."
Calvin Preece had been very still for a long time. He had not touched the folder. He had not taken his hat off. Now he leaned forward, very slowly, the wood of the bench creaking under him like a joint popping, and put two fingers on the corner of the manila folder.
"I have to tell you something," he said.
Della set the cup down. Maren waited.
"Calvin," Della said, "if you're about to say what I think you're about to say, I'm going to need you to be very careful how you say it, because I have not slept in three nights and I have driven over every road in this valley, and I have spoken to every person in this town who will still speak to me, and the people who won't speak to me are the ones I'm most worried about. So. Be careful."
Calvin cleared his throat. The sound was thick and wet, and he swallowed it down like medicine.
"Last night," he said, "at the house."
"What about last night?"
"I went out there. I shouldn't have. I know I shouldn't have. But I went."
"Why?" Maren said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was something she had learned to do a long time ago, the trick of letting the body do the shaking while the mouth did the talking.
"Because I've been sheriff of this town for twenty-three years," Calvin said, "and my daddy was sheriff before me, and his daddy was sheriff before him, and not one of us ever slept in that house, and I thought, if I'm going to ask you to sleep in it, I ought to at least stand in it once."
Della made a sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes when they have bitten the inside of their cheek to the meat.
"And?" Della said.
"And there was a smell," Calvin said. "The smell of bacon. The smell of coffee. The smell of soap from the basin by the back door. And the lamp in the front room was lit, though there is no oil in that lamp, has not been oil in that lamp since before your ma died, Maren."
Maren did not move.
"And?" she said.
"And I heard singing. I heard your sister's singing. She was in the kitchen. I know she was in the kitchen. I could hear the cabinet open. I could hear the pan set on the stove. And I stood in the front room and I did not go in, and after a while the singing stopped, and the smell stopped, and I went out the front door and I drove home, and I sat in my truck in my driveway until the sun came up, and then I drove here."
Della's hands were flat on the table. Her fingers were spread wide, and the knuckles were white, and she was staring at a point just past Maren's shoulder, the point where the wall met the ceiling, the point where, if you looked long enough, you could see a water stain that looked like the shape of a woman with her head bowed.
"Why didn't you go in?" Della said.
"Because I am a coward," Calvin said. "Because I am a Preece, and the Preece men have been cowards about that house since 1923, when my great-grandfather signed a paper that he did not understand and then did not sleep for the rest of his life."
"What paper?" Maren said.
Calvin looked at her. For the first time since she had known him, the sheriff of Briarvale looked like a man who was not certain of his own name.
"I don't know," he said. "I've been trying to find out for thirty years. My daddy said he was told to forget, and he forgot. My granddaddy said the same. There's nothing in the county records. There's nothing in the church records. There's nothing in the family Bible except a page that's been cut out, and my grandmother cried when I asked her about it, and she died two days later, and I have spent my whole life not knowing what that paper said."
Della stood up. The bench scraped back, a harsh, loud sound that made the two men at the bar flinch and the woman by the door look up from her phone again. Della walked to the window and stood with her back to the room, looking out at the street, where the rain had thinned to a gray, persistent mist that turned the headlights of the passing cars into halos.
"I have a box," Della said.
The room changed. Maren felt it change the way you feel a barometric drop, the way you feel a storm before you hear it. Calvin sat up straighter. The two men at the bar stopped pretending to talk. The woman by the door put her phone in her pocket.
"A box?" Maren said.
"A box that's been in my family since before my family had a name in this valley. A box my grandmother kept under her bed, wrapped in a flour sack, tied with a string. I have never opened it. My mother told me not to open it. Her mother told her not to open it. It has been in my keeping for forty-one years, and I have moved it from house to house and I have never opened it."
"Why not?" Maren said.
"Because I was afraid of what was inside," Della said. "Because I was raised to be afraid of what was inside, and I have spent my whole life being a woman who is afraid of what is inside a box under her bed."
She turned from the window. Her face was different now. The tiredness was still there, but there was something else, something that looked like the moment before a person steps off a curb into traffic.
"I opened it this morning," Della said. "I opened it at four o'clock this morning, in the cab of my truck, in the parking lot of the gas station on Route 19. I opened it because I have not slept in three nights, and because Eliza is dead, and because you, Maren, are the last Ashworth, and because whatever is in that box has been waiting for one of you to come home."
She walked back to the table. She did not sit down. She reached into the canvas bag, the one that had sounded heavy when she set it down, and she took out a bundle wrapped in a flour sack, the cloth yellowed and soft with age, the string around it knotted in a way that looked like it had been tied by a person who knew how to tie knots that did not come undone by accident.
She set it on the table. The bundle made no sound. The flour sack had the faint, clean smell of old cloth, of attics, of grandmothers.
"Open it," Della said to Maren.
Maren looked at the bundle. She looked at Calvin. Calvin's face was gray. Calvin's hands were flat on the table, the same way Della's had been, and his fingers were trembling, a fine, almost invisible tremor that Maren could see only because she was looking for it.
"Maren," Calvin said, "you don't have to."
"Yes, she does," Della said. "She does, because I am seventy-three years old and I am done with boxes under beds. I am done with flour sacks. I am done with my grandmother's fear and my mother's fear and my own fear, and I am done with a town that pretends not to know what it knows."
The two men at the bar had come closer. They were standing at the end of the table, and Maren did not know their names, but she knew their faces. She knew their fathers' faces. She knew the way the men of this valley stood when they were about to hear something that was going to change the weather.
The woman by the door had come in from the cold. She was standing just inside the entrance, and the mist was beading on her coat, and she was watching Maren's hands.
Maren reached across the table. The flour sack was softer than she expected. The string was brittle, and it crumbled a little under her fingers, and she thought, suddenly, of the string her grandmother had used to tie up the rhubarb in the fall, the red twine that came in a ball on the back porch, the twine that smelled like the kitchen and the woodstove and the sound of her grandmother humming while she worked.
She undid the knot. The string fell away in two pieces. She opened the flour sack.
Inside was a photograph. A faded, sepia-toned photograph, the corners soft with handling, the surface clouded with age. A photograph of a group of children standing in front of a building, and at the edge of the group, standing slightly apart, her hand on the shoulder of a small girl in a white pinafore, was a young woman Maren did not recognize at first.
Then she did.
The young woman was her grandmother. Maren's grandmother, Cora Ashworth, the woman who had raised her, the woman who had died in the house in 1989, the woman whose face Maren had not seen in a photograph since the funeral.
Cora Ashworth was smiling. She was standing in front of a building Maren had never seen in person, though she had seen it in a painting that hung in the back room of the church, a painting that was always covered with a cloth, a painting she had been told never to touch.
The building was the Briarvale Orphanage. The building that had burned to the ground in 1957. The building that no one in town would speak of, the building that was never mentioned in the newspaper, the building that the schoolchildren of Briarvale were taught had never existed.
The small girl in the white pinafore was looking up at Cora Ashworth. The small girl had Maren's eyes. The small girl had Maren's mouth. The small girl had Maren's stubborn, quiet jaw, and she was holding Cora's hand as if it were the only solid thing in the world.
On the back of the photograph, in a hand Maren did not recognize, in ink that had faded to a rust color, were three words.
THEY KEPT HER.
Maren set the photograph face-down on the table.
She did not pick it up again. She did not turn it over to read the words a second time, did not study the small girl in the white pinafore, did not look at her grandmother's hand on that small girl's shoulder. She set it down, and she left her hand on it for a moment, and then she lifted her hand, and she went to find Della Marsh.
The town of Briarvale was small enough that finding Della required no address, no telephone call, no appointment. Della Marsh lived in the white house at the bend of the road, the one with the blue shutters that had been blue for as long as Maren could remember and were peeling now in long curling strips. The walk from the kitchen to Della's door took Maren eleven minutes by the road, or seven if she cut through the back pasture and climbed the low stone wall behind the Marsh property. She chose the pasture. The grass was wet. Her boots left dark prints in it.
Della opened the door before Maren could knock. She was a tall woman, narrow in the shoulders, broad in the hands, with hair the color of iron and eyes that had the habit of settling on a person and staying there. She had been the unofficial healer of Briarvale for forty years. She had delivered half the children in the valley, including Maren, and she had set the bones of men who had broken them falling off barns and out of trees and, in one case, off a wife who had caught him with another woman and pushed him out a second-story window. Della knew things. Della had always known things.
"You found it," Della said.
Maren did not ask how Della knew. Della always knew. It was one of the qualities that made people trust her and one of the qualities that made people wary of her, often in the same breath.
"I need to talk to you," Maren said.
"You'd better come in."
The inside of Della's house smelled of dried lavender and bacon grease and something older, something that lived in the wood of the floorboards. Della led her into the kitchen, which was warm and cluttered and lit by a single bulb hanging from a cord. Della did not offer coffee. Della did not offer a seat. She stood by the counter with her arms folded across her chest and looked at Maren with the steady, appraising gaze of a woman who had stopped believing in the necessity of pleasantries sometime around the death of her own daughter, in 1961, when the girl was nine and the fever was three days long and the doctor could do nothing and the preacher could do less.
"Sit down," Della said, after a moment. "You look like you're about to fall over."
Maren sat.
"The photograph," she said.
"Yes."
"The girl in it."
"Yes."
"That was Eliza, wasn't it."
Della did not answer right away. She moved to the stove, lifted the lid off a kettle, set it back. A pointless motion. The kettle was not on. Della was buying herself a moment. Maren waited.
"Your grandmother," Della said, finally, "was not the woman you thought she was."
"I know," Maren said. "She lied. She kept something."
"She kept more than something." Della turned from the stove. Her face was the color of old paper. "She kept a thing that should never have been kept, and she fed it, and the feeding made it strong."
Maren's hands were in her lap. She made herself keep them still. "Fed it what?"
"Whatever you fed it." Della's voice had gone flat. "Attention. Fear. Love. Grief. It didn't matter. It ate what was given and it grew. And when it had eaten enough, it started to ask."
"Ask for what?"
"For more."
The kitchen was quiet. The bulb above them hummed. Somewhere outside, a dog was barking in three short bursts, the way dogs bark at things they do not understand.
"You knew," Maren said. "You knew about the house."
"I knew about the house before your grandmother knew about the house." Della moved to the table and sat across from Maren. Her hands, folded on the wood in front of her, were the hands of a woman who had once been strong enough to pull a calf from its mother and was now strong enough only to fold laundry and wash dishes and remember. "I was six years old when the orphanage burned. I was one of the children in it."
Maren stared.
"There were eleven of us who came out. Eleven out of forty-three. The rest burned, or they didn't burn, depending on who you asked. The official story was fire. The unofficial story was something else." Della paused. "Your grandmother was sixteen when it happened. She worked there. She was one of the ones who opened the doors."
"Opened the doors to what?"
"To the children in the basement." Della's eyes were steady. "There was a basement. The fire didn't reach it. The smoke didn't reach it. The doors were locked from the outside, and your grandmother held the keys, and she opened them when the fire was already in the walls, because a woman came to her, a woman who had died in 1902, a woman who had founded the orphanage in 1898, and the woman told her to open the doors, and she did."
Maren did not speak. She felt the room narrow around her, the walls pressing closer, the light from the bulb dimmer than it had been a moment before.
"There were six children in the basement," Della said. "Six children who had been there since before the fire started, six children who were not burned, six children who were not afraid. They walked out through the smoke and they stood in the field and they did not cry. Your grandmother took one of them home. She said she would care for it. She said it was an orphan. She said it had nowhere else to go."
"She kept it," Maren said.
"She kept it," Della said. "She kept it for forty years. She fed it. She fed it with her own hands. She fed it the way you feed a child, with soup and bread and the attention of a woman who had no children of her own and wanted one badly enough to take one from the ground." Della's voice had not risen. It had gone lower. "And the thing grew. And the thing learned to look like a child. And the thing learned to speak like a child. And your grandmother, who was not a stupid woman, who was in fact a sharp and careful woman, began to suspect that what she had taken from that field was not a child at all."
"The girl in the photograph," Maren said. "Eliza."
"Eliza was not your grandmother's child. Eliza was not anyone's child. Eliza was what your grandmother had been feeding, walking around in the shape of a girl, wearing clothes your grandmother had sewn for it, speaking in a voice your grandmother had taught it." Della unfolded her hands. She pressed them flat on the table. "Your grandmother died in 1989. The thing in the house had been wearing Eliza's face for nineteen years at that point. It wore it well. It had worn it so well that by the time your grandmother died, the thing in the house had begun to believe it was Eliza. It had begun to remember things Eliza would have remembered. It had begun to want things Eliza would have wanted."
"It wanted me," Maren said.
"It wanted someone to feed it," Della said. "That is all it has ever wanted. That is all it will ever want. It is a hungry thing. It has been hungry for a hundred years. It will be hungry for a hundred more."
The dog outside had stopped barking. The silence was worse.
"And Eliza," Maren said. "My sister. The real Eliza."
Della looked at her for a long moment. "There was no real Eliza," she said. "There was only the thing. There was only ever the thing. Your grandmother had no children. Your grandmother took the thing from the field and called it her daughter and fed it and dressed it and taught it to walk and talk and pass for human, and the thing was so good at passing that it fooled everyone in this town, including me, for almost twenty years." Della's voice cracked, just once, on the word twenty. She recovered. "Your grandmother died, and the thing had no one to feed it, and so it did what hungry things do. It went looking."
"It came to my mother," Maren said.
"It came to your mother," Della said. "It wore a different face by then. It wore the face of a baby. Your mother took it in. Your mother fed it. Your mother raised it. Your mother called it Maren." Della stopped. She looked at Maren with an expression that was not pity and was not kindness and was something Maren could not name. "And you fed it too, every day of your life, every time you felt the loneliness and the wanting and the strange hunger that lived in the house, every time you sat at the table and ate the food it had set in front of you and felt the emptiness fill up just a little. You fed it without knowing. You fed it because you loved your sister, and your sister was not your sister, and your sister was not a girl, and your sister is still in that house, and your sister is still hungry."
Maren stood up. The chair scraped against the floor. The sound was loud in the small kitchen.
"I have to go back," she said.
"You don't," Della said. "You can stay here. You can stay in this house tonight and tomorrow night and every night after that. You can lock the doors and not go back and let the thing in the house find another field to walk in, another family to fool, another hundred years to pass for human."
"I can't."
"You can," Della said. "You can because I did. I was six years old in that orphanage. I was one of the eleven who walked out. I came back to this town and I built a life and I had a daughter and I lost her and I kept going, because that is what people do. We keep going. We do not go back to the house."
Maren shook her head. "I have to."
"Why?"
"Because it's in the house," Maren said. "Because it's wearing my sister's face. Because my grandmother fed it and my mother fed it and I fed it, and now it's hungry again, and the only way for it to stop being hungry is for someone to stop feeding it, and I am the last one left."
Della looked at her.
"Go, then," Della said. "Go back to the house. Do what you have to do. But do not feed it. Do not feed it a single thing, not a kind word, not a memory, not a moment of grief. Do not feed it your fear. Do not feed it your love. Do not feed it the sound of your own voice in that house. If you feed it, it will grow. If you do not feed it, it will shrink. If you do not feed it for long enough, it will go back to the field. It will go back to the place where your grandmother found it, in 1957, and it will wait there for the next person who opens the door."
"How long?" Maren said.
Della did not answer.
"How long does it take?"