First light came thin and colorless across Bennett Ridge. Croft Younce climbed the old logging road, his boots finding the ruts where tire chains had chewed through spring mud months before. The air tasted of iron and wet oak, the kind of cold that sat in the throat like a swallowed coin. Somewhere behind him, the town of Hollow Ground lay folded into its valley, its chimney smoke a dull smear against the gray October sky.
He had not planned to come up here. He had told himself, twice, in the bathroom mirror that morning, that he would wait. That he would let the sheriff's people do their work. But the mirror had given back a face he no longer trusted, and the road turned east at the bottom of the hill, and his truck had known the way before his hands did.
Bennett Ridge climbed in switchbacks through second-growth hickory and the bare white skeletons of tulip poplars. Croft walked where the grade permitted it, stepping off into the leaves when the gravel gave way to ice-slick mud. A towhee called once from somewhere deep in the underbrush and did not call again. The woods held their breath the way woods do when a man walks through them with intent.
At the second switchback he found the yellow tape. A single streamer, snagged on a low branch, already beginning to curl where the wind had worried it. Below it, the trail bent north into a stand of older oaks, their crowns still thick with copper leaves that had not yet let go. Croft ducked under the tape and pushed on.
The stand was where Jack Mercier had told him it would be. Bolted into the trunk of a white oak so wide Croft could not have clasped his hands around it, a green aluminum ladder climbed twelve feet to a small square platform. A wooden rail framed three sides, and a faded canvas blind hung from a crossbar, its hem frayed into pale strings. Croft stood at the base of the oak and looked up. From down here the stand looked like any other stand he had ever seen. A box on a tree. A place to wait.
He set his hand against the bark. The oak was cold, its ridges pressing into his palm like the back of a hand he had once known well. Marcus Vale had climbed this ladder. Marcus Vale had sat up there in the dark, watching the slope for a shape that moved against the leaves. Marcus Vale had fallen, or been pushed, and Croft had come up here to find out which.
He knelt where the rain had scrubbed the ground bare.
The soil beneath the leaves was a different color here. Darker. Croft pressed his thumb into it and felt the give of earth that had been turned over and tamped down again. He closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth. The smell that rose was rich, vegetable, faintly sweet, the smell of any forest floor after a rain. Whatever had been there was gone. Whatever blood had soaked into the leaf litter had been washed away by three days of drizzle and then by the men from the sheriff's office with their shovels and their bright orange bags.
Croft opened his eyes and looked up through the lattice of branches.
From here he could see the eastern slope falling away toward the hollow where Marcus Vale's trailer sat. He could see the county road below it, a pale scar between the trees.
Croft pressed his thumb deeper into the disturbed earth. The soil crumbled along the fault line of his nail, fine and dark as ground coffee. He thought of the sheriff's deputy who had stood in this same spot three days ago, plastic bag in hand, face professionally blank. The deputy's boots had left their own impressions, sharp-edged, squared at the toe. Croft's boots left rounder ones.
A sound came from the slope above. A twig snapping, then another, the careful rhythm of someone picking their way downhill through wet leaves. Croft straightened slowly, brushing soil from his knee. He did not call out. In Hollow Ground, the men who climbed to deer stands in daylight were either the law or the grieving, and the law had already come and gone.
The figure that emerged between the hickories was neither.
Lyla Vale came down the slope with the deliberate care of someone who had walked this ground in the dark so often her feet had memorized every root. She wore a faded plaid shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and her hair was pulled back in a knot that looked more functional than chosen. In her hands she carried a small bunch of wildflowers, the kind that grew in the clefts of the oak roots: bloodroot, maybe, or early trillium. Their stems were pale green and wet from the rain.
She did not see Croft at first. Her eyes were on the deer stand above her, on the faded canvas blind lifting in the small morning wind like a sheet hung out to dry.
A second figure came behind her, heavier-footed, breathing through his nose. Jack Mercier wore a canvas jacket the color of bark and a cap pulled low over his forehead. He moved the way men move when they have not slept well in a week, careful of their footing, careful of their hands. He had a thermos in one fist and a folded paper in the other.
Croft stepped back into the shadow of the oak's trunk. He wanted to hear this. Whatever Lyla had come to say, she had not come to say it to him.
Lyla stopped where the slope leveled out, twenty feet from the base of the tree. She knelt, setting the wildflowers down on the leaf litter with the precision of a woman arranging a body in a coffin. Her fingers worked the stems into the soil until they stood upright, three white blooms nodding in a place where nothing had nodded in days.
She did not look at Jack when she spoke.
"He cleaned it every Sunday."
Jack came to a halt a few paces behind her. "Lyla."
"Every Sunday after church. He would sit at the kitchen table with the rag and the bottle of solvent, and he would take it apart in order. Bolt, spring, trigger group, barrel. He could do it with his eyes closed. I timed him once when I was a girl. Seven minutes from the case to the bare action."
"Lyla, you don't have to do this."
She straightened the flowers. A petal had folded inward, and she coaxed it open with her thumbnail. "He kept the patches in a coffee can. Used patches, oil-blackened, in a Folgers can on the top shelf of the closet. He threw them out every Easter and started fresh. You know what he used for a cleaning rod? A wooden dowel he cut himself. He said the steel ones would scar the bore."
Jack lowered himself onto a fallen log at the edge of the clearing. The wood was wet, and the wet soaked through his trousers immediately, but he did not flinch. He set the thermos down beside him. He did not open the paper in his hand.
"Hank told me he was up here sighting in a new scope," Jack said. "Said the rifle was a loaner from the store."
"Hank Bristow lies." Lyla's voice was level. "Marcus did not sight in scopes. He had a scope on that rifle since he was nineteen, a Leupold he bought with his first check from the mine. He had not changed the mounts in fifteen years. I know because he asked me to help him tighten them last spring, and I stood on a kitchen chair and held the stock while he turned the wrench."
She stood. The wildflowers were small and pale against the dark leaves. They looked like nothing. They looked like everything.
"The sheriff's report says he fell," Lyla said. "It says the ladder was wet and his boot slipped. It says there were no witnesses and no signs of foul play."
"That's what it says."
"There are no boot prints at the base of the tree. There should be boot prints. If a man falls from a deer stand, he lands, and he leaves prints. I walked the ground three days ago before they could come back and fake it. There is nothing under the stand except deer sign and that patch of turned soil you have been kneeling in."
Croft, in his shadow by the trunk, did not move. He could feel the bark against his shoulder blades through his shirt. He thought about the patch of turned soil. He thought about the smell of it, vegetable and faintly sweet. He thought about what Lyla had just said, and he understood that she had seen him there, that she had known he was there all along.
Jack looked up at her. His face was the color of old putty, and his eyes had the hollowed look of a man keeping his weight on his heels. "What do you want me to do, Lyla?"
"I want you to remember that you knew him."
"I remember him."
"Then act like it."
She bent and retrieved a brown paper grocery sack from where it had been tucked against the log. Inside the sack Croft could hear the faint clink of glass. She did not open it. She held it against her hip with one hand, and with the other she smoothed the front of her shirt as if she were about to walk into a classroom.
"I am going down to the trailer," she said. "I am going to clean his house. I am going to throw out the milk and take down the flag. I am not going to call Hank Bristow. I am not going to call the sheriff. If you want to help me, you can come. If you want to keep standing in the woods with a thermos and a piece of paper, you can do that too."
She turned and walked down the slope without looking back. Her boots found the roots and stones without hesitating, the way water finds its level. The wildflowers stayed where she had set them, three white faces turned toward the ladder.
Jack watched her go. He sat on the log for a long moment, the folded paper in his lap now, the thermos untouched. His jaw worked once, twice, the way a man's jaw works when he is chewing something that will not go down.
Croft stepped out from behind the oak.
Jack did not start. He turned his head slowly, as if he had known Croft was there the whole time, as if Croft had been one more variable in an equation he had been working since he drove into Hollow Ground.
"Younce," he said.
"Mercier."
Jack looked at the patch of disturbed soil. He looked at the wildflowers. He looked at the canvas blind lifting and falling in the small wind.
"She is not wrong," he said.
Croft walked to the edge of the clearing and looked down the slope. Lyla Vale was already at the bottom, climbing over the stile at the property line with the brown sack against her hip. She did not look up.
"She is not wrong," Croft said.
Jack picked up the thermos. He did not open it. He held it in both hands like a man holding a railing on a ship that had begun to roll.
"Hank Bristow called me yesterday," Jack said. "He said Marcus had been in the store the week before, that he had come in to ask about a new stock for the rifle. A polymer stock, recoil-reducing. He said Marcus was looking at the catalog when I came on shift."
Croft said nothing.
"Hank said he sold him the stock," Jack said. "He said the stock was in the trailer when the sheriff went through it. He said it was still in the bag."
"And was it?"
Jack looked at him. The look was the look of a man who had driven six hours from a city he hated to a town he did not know, because a man he had once called his brother was dead in a way that did not add up.
"I have not been in the trailer," Jack said. "Lyla will not let me in the trailer. Hank says he is respecting the family's wishes. The sheriff says the case is closed pending toxicology."
"What does Eunice Park say?"
Jack's mouth tightened. "Eunice is not talking to me. She is not talking to anyone. Ruth Granger drove out to the house yesterday and sat on the porch for two hours, and Eunice opened the door once, looked at her, and closed it again."
Croft looked down the slope again. Lyla was gone. The wildflowers nodded in the place where she had knelt.
"I am going down to the trailer," Croft said.
"I figured you would."
"I will tell you what I find."
Jack nodded once. He picked up the folded paper from the log and smoothed it against his thigh. It was a printout from the sheriff's office, the kind of paper that comes off a desktop printer with the perforated edge still on. Croft could see the sheriff's seal in the upper corner, smudged where the toner had not taken.
Jack folded it again. He did not hand it over. He did not offer it.
"Hank Bristow," Jack said, "told me that Marcus had been drinking. Told me he had been drinking the night he fell. Told me the man at the gas station saw him buy a half-pint of Early Times at seven o'clock."
"Did he?"
"I went to the gas station," Jack said. "I talked to the kid behind the counter. The kid said no one named Vale came in that night. The kid said a man came in, yes, but he bought cigarettes and a Hershey bar and left. The kid said he remembered because the man had a dog with him in the truck, and the dog was wearing a bandana."
Croft looked at the wildflowers. He thought about a man with a dog and a bandana. He thought about a man who cleaned his rifle every Sunday and asked his sister to hold the stock while he tightened the mounts.
"Hank Bristow," Croft said, "is going to be sorry he opened his mouth."
Jack almost smiled. It was not a smile. It was the ghost of a smile, the kind that lives in the muscles of the face long after the man has forgotten what smiling was for.
"I figured that too," Jack said.
Holt's Diner sat on the corner of Main and Vine, its plate glass windows fogged from the steam table inside. Croft had parked at the curb but had not killed the engine. He sat with his hands on the wheel and looked at the neon sign, OPEN, the O flickering every few seconds like a slow pulse.
"You don't have to come in with me," Jack said.
"I know."
"You don't have to."
"I know that too."
Jack opened the passenger door. The hinges protested, a thin metallic complaint that carried across the empty street. Croft turned the key and followed.
Inside, the diner smelled of bacon grease and scorched coffee and the particular staleness that lives in a place that has been wiped down ten thousand times with the same rag. A young woman with a ponytail stood behind the counter, her nametag reading RUTH in handwriting that might have been her own. Croft had known her since she was seven. She had been a quiet child. She was a quiet woman.
Two men sat at the counter. One of them was Hank Bristow.
Croft felt his jaw set. He did not move for a long moment, only stood in the doorway with the bell still shivering above his head, and watched the old man work a toothpick between his yellowed teeth. Hank Bristow was eighty-one years old. He looked every one of them and then some. His hair was the color of a dirty snow, combed straight back and held in place with something that was not quite grease and not quite Brylcreem. His hands, spread flat on the counter, were the hands of a man who had once swung a pick and now swung nothing but his own weight through the doors of buildings he owned.
Hank looked up. He saw Croft first, and the toothpick stilled. Then he saw Jack, and something shifted in his face. It was not surprise. It was something closer to a man who has been waiting for a bill to come due.
"Jesus Lord," Hank said, "if it isn't the prodigal."
"I'd like to talk to you," Jack said.
"Then talk." Hank waved a hand at the empty seat beside him. "Pull up a pew. Church is in session."
Croft took the stool on Jack's other side. He left a stool between them and Hank. Ruth came over with two menus she did not need to bring.
"Just coffee," Croft said.
"Me too," Jack said.
Ruth poured. The coffee came out of a glass pot and steamed in the air and smelled of chicory and something burnt.
Hank did not look at Croft. He looked at Jack. His eyes were the pale blue of a January sky, washed out, almost colorless, and they did not blink as often as a normal man's.
"I heard you been asking around," Hank said. "About that boy. Marcus Vale."
"I have been," Jack said.
"Folks talk."
"Folks do."
"They say you're trying to make out like he didn't fall."
Jack set his hands on the counter. His knuckles were scarred, the kind of scars that come from years of carrying lumber and turning wrenches. He did not clench them. He left them flat.
"I'm not trying to make out like anything," Jack said. "I'm trying to understand what happened."
"What's to understand? Boy drank too much. Boy went up on the ridge. Boy fell. It's a country song. It's a country song with no chorus."
Hank picked up his coffee and sipped. His hand did not shake. Croft watched that hand and wondered at it. Eighty-one years old, and the hand did not shake. The hand of a man who had once held the throttle of a continuous miner and could still hold it now if asked.
"I saw something," Hank said, "the night that boy died."
Jack did not move. Croft did not move. The clock above the kitchen door ticked. Somewhere in the back, a fryer hissed.
"I was coming back from the VFW," Hank said. "I was coming back because they had a raffle, and I won a raffle, and the raffle was for a case of Jim Beam, and I am not a man to leave a case of Jim Beam at the VFW. I drove up the ridge road because the ridge road is shorter. I saw a set of lights."
"What kind of lights?" Jack said.
"Headlights."
"From what?"
"From a truck."
"What kind of truck?"
"The kind with headlights."
Jack looked at Croft. Croft looked at the coffee. The coffee had a film on it that caught the fluorescent light.
"I saw one set of headlights," Hank said, "leaving the ridge road, around nine o'clock. I saw it turn onto the hard road by the old quarry entrance. I saw it head north."
"North toward what?" Jack said.
"North toward town."
"How fast was it going?"
"Too fast for that road."
"How do you know it was leaving the ridge road? How do you know it wasn't coming up?"
Hank set his cup down. He set it down carefully, the way a man sets down a thing he is not yet finished with. He picked up his toothpick and worked it between his front teeth.
"Because," he said, "I know that road like I know my own face. There's a bend by the overlook. A man coming up that bend has his lights low, on account of the grade. A man going down has them high. Those lights were high."
"Did you see the driver?"
"I did not see the driver."
"Did you see the make of the truck?"
"I did not see the make of the truck."
"Did you see a dog?"
Hank stopped. The toothpick stopped. His hand, the one that did not shake, stopped in the air halfway to the cup.
"What kind of question is that?" Hank said.
"An honest one," Jack said.
Hank looked at Croft. He looked at Croft for the first time since they had sat down. His pale eyes were colorless and did not blink.
"Croft," he said. "You going to sit there and let this man ask me about dogs?"
"I'm going to sit
"I'm going to sit here," Croft said, "until I finish my coffee."
He drank. The coffee tasted of mineral and dust and the particular staleness of a pot left on a burner too long. He swallowed and set the cup down.
"That wasn't my question, Croft."
"I know what your question was."
Hank's hand with the toothpick had resumed its work, but slower now, the way a man's hand slows when he is thinking about a thing he does not want to think about.
"I asked you," Hank said, "if you were going to let this man sit in my diner and accuse me of things."
"I didn't accuse you of anything," Jack said.
"You asked me about dogs."
"You saw headlights."
"I saw headlights."
"And you didn't see the make of the truck."
"I didn't see the make of the truck."
Jack leaned forward. The chair under him creaked in a way the chair under Hank had not.
"And you didn't see a dog."
"I didn't see a dog."
"Because there wasn't a dog."
"Because I didn't see one."
Jack sat back. He looked at Croft. Croft looked at the table. The table had a pattern of small rings on it from a hundred thousand cups set down without care.
"Croft," Jack said. "Your mother. When she went up to the deer stand. Did she take the dog with her?"
The diner went quiet in a way that had weight to it. Hank's hand with the toothpick stopped. The fluorescent light buzzed on. Somewhere in the back, a refrigerator hummed its one note.
Croft set his cup down a second time.
"I think," he said, "we're done here."
He stood. His knees popped. The sound was loud in the quiet room, louder than a thing like that ought to be.
"Sit down," Hank said.
"I think not."
"This is my establishment."
"This is your establishment," Croft agreed. He took his coat from the back of the chair. He did not put it on. He held it over his arm the way a man holds a coat when he has decided he is going to need it soon. "And I've been a customer in it for forty years."
"Sit down, Croft."
"I have to go up the hill."
Hank rose. The chair he sat in did not creak. It had been broken in to his weight long ago, the way a piece of furniture gets broken in to a man who has sat in it through three marriages and two funerals. He stood the way a man stands who has practiced standing in rooms where men watch him stand.
"You go up that hill," Hank said, "you won't like what you find."
"I know what I'll find."
"Do you."
"I know what I'll find because I've found it before."
Croft walked to the door. Jack was on his feet now too, but Croft put out a hand. The hand did not touch Jack. It just hung there in the air between them like a thing with meaning.
"Stay," Croft said. "Finish your coffee. Pay the man."
"Croft."
"I'll be back by dark."
He opened the door. The bell above it rang its thin note. The air outside was cold in the way that October air is cold when the sun has not yet committed to warming anything. Croft stepped off the porch. The gravel of the parking lot crunched under his boots in a way that carried back into the room.
He did not look back at the window. He knew what he would see there. Hank would be standing where he was standing. Jack would be sitting where Jack was sitting. Neither of them would move for a long time.
Croft got into his truck. The truck was a Ford. It was old. The seat was cracked and the steering wheel was worn smooth at ten and two from years of a man's hands holding it there. He put the key in. He turned it. The engine caught on the second try, the way it always caught on the second try, the way a man catches himself when he has stumbled and decides to keep going.
He did not turn on the radio.
He drove north.
The hard road ran straight for two miles and then began to climb. The climb was gentle at first, the way a man climbs a hill when he is still deciding whether to keep climbing. The trees on either side grew closer together as the road narrowed. Their branches met overhead in places. Where they met, the road darkened. Where they did not meet, the road was lit in pale yellow strips by the sun that had not yet burned off the haze.
Croft drove. He passed the old Varner place. The Varner place had not been lived in for nine years. The chimney had fallen in. The roof had followed. What was left was a rectangle of weathered boards and the memory of a family who had once eaten dinner behind those walls.
He did not slow down.
He came to the turn for the ridge road. The sign for the ridge road was missing. It had been missing for twenty years. A local boy had taken it for a prank and had never been made to give it back. Everyone in Hollow Ground knew where the ridge road was.
Croft turned.
The ridge road was not a road. It was two ruts and a centerline of weeds. The weeds were brown now, gone to seed. The seeds caught in the undercarriage of his truck and made a sound like small teeth chewing on something they could not quite get through.
He drove for a mile. He drove for two miles. He came to the overlook.
The overlook was a place where the road widened out because the hill on the east side had slid away in some long-ago rain. A man could park here and look out over the valley below. A man could see Hollow Ground from here. He could see the diner. He could see the church. He could see the school. He could see the place where the mine entrance had been before they sealed it with concrete and a chain and a sign that said KEEP OUT in letters that had faded to almost nothing.
Croft parked. He turned off the engine. He sat in the truck and listened to the engine tick as it cooled, the way a man listens to a clock when he is waiting for something he does not want to arrive.
Then he got out.
The air up here was different from the air in town. It was thinner. It tasted of pine and of cold and of the particular loneliness of a place that has been left alone for a long time. Croft walked to the edge of the overlook. He stood there. He looked out.
Below him, Hollow Ground sat in its valley the way a man sits in a chair he has been sitting in too long. The roofs of the houses were gray. The streets were gray. The sky above the town was gray. It was the kind of gray that does not promise to clear.
Croft looked north.
The ridge road continued north from where he stood. It went up another half mile through a stand of white oaks to the place where the deer stand was. The deer stand was his father's stand. His father had built it in the year Croft was born, out of two-by-fours and cedar posts and a piece of carpet he had cut from an old truck mat. Croft's father had hunted from that stand for thirty-one years. Croft had climbed up to it as a boy. Croft's mother had climbed up to it twice that he knew of, and once that he had not known of until Jack Mercier had asked his question in a diner two miles down the hill.
Croft began to walk.
The walk was not long. He walked it slowly. His boots made no sound on the pine needles. The pine needles were thick underfoot. They gave a little with each step and then came back up, the way the ground gives when a man walks on a grave.
He came to the white oak. He looked up.
The deer stand was there. It looked the way it had always looked. The wood was grayed. The ladder was still there. The rail was still there. The carpet was still there, though it was dark now with weather and age.
He put his hand on the ladder. The first rung was cold under his palm.
He climbed.
When he got to the platform, he stood on it. He looked out in the direction his mother would have looked. North. There was nothing north but more ridge and more trees and, eventually, the state line.
He looked down.
There, on the carpet of the platform, in a place where the carpet had been disturbed, was a dark stain. The stain was the color of old iron. It was the color of things that had been there a long time.
Croft knelt. He touched the stain with his finger. The stain was dry. It had been dry for a long time. It had been dry since before he had come up the hill. It had been dry since before Jack Mercier had come to Hollow Ground. It had been dry, he suspected, since the night his mother had walked out of the house with the dog and not come back.
He sat back on his heels.
He knew what the stain was.
He had known what the stain was since before he had climbed the ladder.
He sat on the platform of his father's deer stand and he looked at the stain and he did not move for a long time. The wind moved around him. The branches of the white oak moved. A crow called from somewhere in the pines, once, and did not call again.
Then he took out his phone. He did not call Jack. He did not call Hank. He did not call Lyla. He called Eunice Park.
Eunice answered on the second ring.
"Croft," she said.
"Eunice," he said. "I need you to come up to the ridge."
"What did you find?"
He looked at the stain.
"Something," he said, "that shouldn't be here."
He hung up. He sat on the platform. He waited for the light to begin its long fade down the side of the ridge.
Somewhere below him, in the valley, a dog began to bark.