The floorboards announced her every step with a creak that sounded like old bones shifting under weight. Vera Cassidy paused in the hallway of June's grandmother's cabin, one hand on the doorframe of the bedroom she had not yet entered, and listened to the house settle around her. Outside, rain ticked against the porch tin, steady as a metronome, and the wind moved through the hollow with the long, low moan she remembered from childhood. The smell hit her first. Lavender sachets gone stale. The peppery bite of dried rosemary. And beneath it, something fainter, the particular paper-and-dust scent of a closed room nobody had aired in weeks.
She had told the funeral director she would come back tomorrow. She had told Maren Sloane at the wake she needed one night alone. She had told herself a great many things on the drive up from Knoxville, none of which had prepared her for the particular weight of standing in this hallway, fifteen years gone, sorting through what her sister had left behind.
The bedroom door resisted. Vera put her shoulder into it, and it gave with a complaint, hinges crying out dry and unmetalled. Inside, the room was smaller than memory had made it. A single bed, iron-framed, with a quilt she did not recognize. A walnut dresser with a water ring on its top. A rocking chair in the corner, still, as though someone had just stepped out of it. On the nightstand, a glass of water, half full, and a paperback novel turned facedown to mark the page.
Vera did not touch the glass.
She had been here since four in the afternoon. She had started in the kitchen, because that was the methodical thing to do, and because if she was going to do this, she was going to do it properly. Cups into boxes. Tins of spices into the donate pile, though she had kept the smoked paprika because June had loved it, and Vera had not yet learned how to stop thinking of June in the present tense. Dish towels. A drawer of takeout menus from places that had closed since the last time she had visited, which was to say, since 2009.
The living room had been worse. The photograph on the mantel. June at thirty, laughing, with a bouquet of zinnias from her own shop caught in the wind. Vera had put it facedown and felt like a coward for doing it.
Now the bedroom. Vera pulled the quilt back and found sheets that smelled of cedar and something floral she could not name. She folded them anyway, corners squared, because her hands needed a task that did not involve thinking.
Under the bed, two suitcases. One held winter clothes. The other held letters.
Vera sat on the floor with the second suitcase open across her knees and read until the lamp on the nightstand started to gutter. June's handwriting slanted rightward in the way it always had, a leftover from the Catholic school they had both attended before their mother had stopped pretending they could afford the uniforms. There were letters from Vera herself, sent over fifteen years, returned unopened with "addressee unknown" stamped across the front. There were letters from friends she did not know. There was one from a man who signed himself Dale, blocky capitals, your devoted friend, which sat in Vera's stomach like a stone she could not yet name.
She put them back. She closed the suitcase. She slid it under the bed again.
The linen closet was next. It was narrow and deep and smelled of lavender and dust. Vera reached for the first shelf and pulled down stacks of bedsheets, folded tight as though someone had pressed them in a vise. She set them on the hallway floor. The second shelf held tablecloths, old and yellowed at the folds. The third held nothing.
But Vera's knuckles, on the way out, caught a seam in the back panel that did not belong.
She stopped. She knelt. She ran her fingers along the panel's edge and felt the give of a false bottom, a quarter-inch gap where the wood should have been flush. Her breath caught somewhere behind her sternum.
She had not expected to find anything. She had come here to sort and pack and drive back to Knoxville with a car full of someone else's life. She had not come looking for secrets. And yet her hands were already working, fingernails finding the lip of the panel, prying it up with the careful patience of a woman who had spent fifteen years mapping forgotten places and knew exactly how the hollow kept its hidden things.
The cedar box beneath was the size of a bread loaf. Dark wood, hinges oiled, a small brass lock on the front. No key in the lock. Vera lifted it out and set it on the hallway floor where she could see it under the overhead bulb.
It was heavier than it looked.
Inside, three things.
The first was a leather-bound journal, dark green, the spine cracked, the pages swollen slightly as though they had once been wet. Vera set it aside without opening it.
The second was a newspaper clipping, yellowed to the color of weak tea, folded into a square that had been creased and re-creased so many times the edges had gone soft. The headline read: BRIAR HOLLOW TEENS TRAGIC FALL. The date was 1999. Below it, a photograph she did not look at yet, because the print was small and the hallway light was bad and she needed to be somewhere with a better lamp before she let herself read whatever June had carried in her pocket for twenty-six years.
The third was a tape.
A reel-to-reel tape, three inches across, the kind Vera had not seen since her father had died and she and June had found boxes of them in his workshop. This one had a strip of masking tape along the spine, and on the tape, two letters in June's slanting hand:
NB.
Vera turned the reel over once. Then again. The tape moved freely, unspooling a quarter-inch at the pull, and somewhere in the silence of the hallway she could hear the rain still ticking against the porch tin, and her own breath coming in shallow draws she had not authorized.
She set the box on the floor. She sat down beside it with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up. The cedar smell was stronger here, and beneath it the must of something older, the kind of paper-and-dust smell she associated with the back rooms of county clerk's offices where the records nobody wanted to find got filed.
She did not open the journal. She did not unfold the clipping.
She sat for a long time in the hallway with the box at her feet and the rain at the window and the cedar box ticking faintly as it dried. The longer she sat, the more the hallway seemed to contract around her, as if the cabin were drawing a breath it intended to hold. She could smell the rain's petrichor now, the green and iron of it drifting in under the door, mixing with the cedar and the old paper dust. Somewhere beyond the porch, the wind pushed a tree limb against the tin roof and it scraped, a sound like a slow finger drawn across a window.
Vera reached up and found the light switch. The bulb in the ceiling was a forty-watt leftover from her grandmother's last years, and when it came on it threw a yellow circle that turned the hallway the color of old butter. It was not enough light to read the clipping by. It was enough light to see the box.
The tape.
She picked it up and held it at eye level, turning it slowly. The masking tape strip was a pale yellow against the black plastic of the reel, and June's two letters were written in a blue ballpoint that had faded to near gray. NB. Nora Bell? Nora Beth? Nora something. June had never been one for longhand, even when she was a girl. She had always used initials the way other people used whole sentences, as if anyone who mattered would know.
Vera stood. Her knees made the small wooden report they always made in damp weather, and she carried the box at arm's length down the hall toward the front room, where the lamp beside her grandmother's chair was a heavy brass affair with a bulb bright enough to skin a deer by. She set the box on the low table in front of the cold hearth and stood over it for a moment, breathing through her mouth the way she did when she was trying to keep her stomach where it belonged.
Then she went to find the recorder.
It took her twenty minutes. Her grandmother had not been a tidy woman in her last decade, and the closets and cabinets in the cabin held the layered archaeology of a long life left mostly undisturbed. Vera found a sewing machine in a plywood case. She found a treadle sewing machine under that. She found three Mason jars of buttons, a tin of needles so rusted the points had gone soft, a stack of National Geographic from the year Vera was born, a cigar box full of foreign coins, and a leather photograph album with the cover half-eaten by mice.
She found the recorder in a cupboard above the refrigerator, set between a chipped crock of wooden spoons and a box of waxed-paper sandwich bags. It was a Sony TC-200, a reel-to-reel the size of a small briefcase, with a leather handle that had cracked along the spine and a face plate the color of cream. She remembered it. June had bought it at a yard sale for eight dollars the year Vera left for college, and she had used it to record the sounds of the hollow, frog song and creeks and the bell on the Reillys' old milk cow, because she said somebody ought to keep a record of things going away.
Vera carried the recorder to the front room and set it beside the lamp. She plugged it in. The cord was old and stiff and the plug seated in the wall socket with a grudging click. She ran her thumb along the reel spindles. They turned smoothly. She threaded the tape.
Her hands were steady. She was mildly surprised by this.
She had a choice about the order of things, and she made it the way she made all her choices on the day she came back, which was the way she had made them ever since she got the call from Hank at four in the morning: smallest pain first, then the next, then the next, until either she had walked through the fire or she had not. She left the journal closed. She left the clipping folded. She sat down in her grandmother's chair, the leather cool against the backs of her thighs, and pressed the green button marked PLAY.
The reels turned. The tape moved. For the first few seconds there was only the soft hiss of old magnetic tape on a moving head, that pink-noise whisper that belonged to a different decade, and beneath it a faint, irregular scratching that Vera thought might be June's finger brushing the microphone as she set it down.
Then June spoke.
"Testing. Testing, one, two, three. Okay. Okay, here we go."
Vera had not heard her sister's voice in two years and eight months. The last time had been on the phone, a Sunday afternoon in October, and June had been laughing about a goat that had got into her flower shop and eaten half a corsage order for a funeral. Vera had been in a rented cabin in Tennessee, mapping a stretch of the Unakas, and she had laughed too, and then she had said she had to go, and she had not called again, because the work was heavy and the days were long and the call she needed to make kept getting postponed.
June's voice on the tape was younger. Not by decades. By something subtler, something Vera could feel in the back of her teeth. It had the bright, slightly breathless quality of someone in their early twenties who believes the world is mostly a thing that can be fixed, and it carried the soft Appalachian vowels June had never quite lost, the way she drew the short vowels out long and let the long ones fall.
"My name is June Cassidy. Today's date is. Let me see. The fourteenth of October, 1999. I am making this recording in the back room of the Cassidy cabin, on Briar Hollow, in Mingo County, West Virginia, and I am going to talk for a while about a person, and then I am going to take this tape and I am going to hide it, and I am going to come back for it when I know what I know."
A pause. A breath.
"I want to talk about Nora McKinnon."
Vera sat very still. She did not move at all. Her eyes were on the recorder, but she was not seeing it.
"Nora McKinnon is sixteen years old. She is in the eleventh grade at Mingo Central, although she has missed a lot of days this fall because of what she calls her nerves, which I think is her word for being scared. I have known Nora since we were small, because her family and ours have been in this hollow since before the roads got names, and her granddaddy and mine drank at the same bar in Whitesville and argued about trout. Nora is the kind of person who notices things. She is the kind of person who keeps a notebook. She has always been the kind of person who keeps a notebook, even back when we were kids, and she used to draw maps of the woods behind the schoolhouse, and she used to draw pictures of birds, and she had this way of looking at you like she was waiting for you to say the true thing instead of the easy thing."
June laughed, low and private, the laugh she had when she was embarrassed by her own sincerity.
"I am not making fun of her. I am saying that Nora McKinnon sees, and that is a different thing than looking, and most people in this hollow have spent their whole lives not seeing, which is fine for most of them, but it is not fine when something is in front of you that you are supposed to see."
A sound on the tape, a creak, a chair shifting.
"Three weeks ago Nora came to see me at the shop. She had come in from the back door, which she never does, and she was shaking, and she had a paper sack with her, and the paper sack had a notebook in it, and the notebook had been pulled out of a manila envelope that had the county seal on it, because Nora works in the county clerk's office after school, and the county clerk's office is where the things nobody wants found get put in the basement in boxes that are not supposed to leave the building."
Vera had stopped breathing. She caught herself and made herself take a breath that was so shallow it was almost not a breath at all.
"Nora said she had proof of something rotten. That is the word she used. Rotten. She said it like the word itself tasted bad. She said she could not tell me everything yet, because she was not sure who she could trust, and she said she was going to show me what she had at the overlook above the old strip mine on the night of the twenty-eighth, which was a Friday, and that I should come alone, and that I should not tell anybody, and that I should bring a flashlight."
A small sound, like a swallow.
"I told her I would. I told her I would be there. I am going to be there. I am making this tape first because I have a feeling, and my feelings are not usually right, but when they are right they are very right, and I would rather have said it out loud somewhere where it could not get lost. If you are hearing this and you do not know me, my name is June Cassidy, and I live in Briar Hollow, and the girl who asked me to meet her at the overlook is named Nora McKinnon, and what she says she has is proof of something rotten, and I am supposed to meet her on the night of the twenty-eighth of October, nineteen ninety nine, and I am scared, and I am going anyway, because somebody ought to."
The tape kept moving. There was a long hiss. Vera waited for June to say something else. She watched the reels turn. The left reel was nearly full now and the right was nearly empty, and the tape wound from one to the other with the slow inevitability of a clock hand.
"Nora said one more thing. She said that if I did not come, if I did not come to the overlook, then I should find this tape, and I should listen to it, and I should know that whatever happened to her happened because she kept a notebook, and whatever happened to me happened because I was the person she"
The scream came from so deep inside the tape that for a half-second Vera thought it was a sound in the cabin, in the walls, in the tin roof. It was not. It was a woman screaming, and it was a woman being hurt while she screamed, and it cut across the last word of June's sentence like a saw drawn across a rope, and then the tape went on hissing and hissing against an empty head, and the reels kept turning, and the cabin was silent except for the rain and Vera's own breath, which she was no longer able to keep shallow or steady or anywhere inside her.
She did not move for a long time. The lamp threw its yellow circle on the table and the recorder sat in the center of it like a small coffin, the reels still turning slowly because she had not pressed stop. The hiss filled the room. It filled the hallway. It filled the spaces between the floorboards and the gaps under the doors. It filled her.
Eventually she reached out and pressed stop. The reels halted with a small mechanical sigh, and the sudden silence was so loud she could hear her own pulse in her ears.
Nora McKinnon. The overlook. The night of the twenty-eighth. Proof of something rotten.
Vera sat in her grandmother's chair with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the recorder and the rain ticking on the tin and the dark coming on outside, and she understood, with a clarity that had no mercy in it, that her sister had gone to that overlook, and that whatever Nora McKinnon had shown her there had not come home, and that Vera was going to have to find out what it was, because nobody else in the hollow was going to.
Vera put on her coat and left the recorder on the table.
She did not lock the cabin door behind her. There was nothing left inside it worth taking, and nothing left in her worth the trouble of a thief, and if a thief came in while she was gone, she thought, let him listen to the tape. Let him carry it down the mountain and try to find someone to play it for. The thought had the shape of a laugh but not the sound. She made the sound anyway, into the dark of the porch, and the dark did not repeat it back.
The road down off the ridge had been paved once. It had forgotten. The asphalt came up in scallops along the edges where the roots had shouldered through, and the center strip was a long, cracked spine of gravel and tar that crunched under her boots with the sound of someone chewing on a hard candy. The mist on her face thickened. Somewhere below her a dog was barking at something in the woods, and the barking had that reedy, end-of-the-rope quality of a dog that had been barking a long time and had begun to suspect the woods could bark back.
She walked with her hands in her coat pockets and her collar turned up against the back of her neck and her mind turning the same screw over and over until the metal of it should have been smooth. Nora McKinnon. The overlook. The night of the twenty-eighth. Proof of something rotten. A woman screaming on a tape that had stopped playing half a minute before it should have. The math behind every question she had not yet asked. She could not get the math to close.
Main Street was two blocks of brick and clapboard set into the side of the valley like teeth in a jaw that had come unhinged from the rest of the face. Two blocks of false-fronted shops that had once been, in her grandmother's telling, the second-largest mercantile hub in three counties, and that were now, in the telling of the highway, the kind of place you drove through with your lights off and your doors locked, if you drove through it at all. The lampposts were spaced at sixty-foot intervals and half of them had been dark since the autumn. The other half cast down cones of orange that fell short of the gutters on both sides.
The diner was at the corner where Main bent to follow the creek. A flat-roofed cinderblock box with a red neon sign that read EAT in letters that had worked fine in 1962 and only worked in pairs now. The two middle ones had been dead so long the local kids had given them names. Vera had forgotten the names. June had probably remembered.
Through the window she could see the counter and two of the booths and the curve of the cook line and the steel pot of a coffee urn at the back. The urn was on, throwing a thin curl of steam into the already heavy air. At the counter there was no one. At the booths there was no one. Only one car sat in the lot outside, an old blue pickup with a Reilly Farms sticker on the rear window, half-faded by five Appalachian summers, and she knew whose it was before she got close enough to read the other sticker on the dash, the one shaped like a hand giving the finger, with the words MOONSHINE NOT WELFARE printed underneath in crooked letters.
She went in. The bell over the door was a brass thing with a clapper that had not rung true since 1987, and it gave its familiar liar's note. The smell of coffee and old grease and the ghost of ten thousand bacon breakfasts came up to meet her, and she could not decide whether the smell was comfort or accusation. It had been her grandmother's smell. It was still her grandmother's diner, technically, though her grandmother had not been able to sign her name to the deed for years before the heart finally quit.
Hank Reilly was in the back, behind the counter, with a sleeve of his gray work shirt pushed up to the elbow and a rag in one big-knuckled hand and the glass pot of the dual brewer in the other. He was polishing it the way he polished everything, in slow careful circles that would have looked like devotion if you didn't know the man. He had been polishing that brewer every Friday night since his wife had left him, and the brewer was going to die of clean long before he did.
He looked up when the bell rang. He did not startle. Nothing startled Hank Reilly. The only thing that ever took him by surprise was kindness, and that was because it came so seldom he had forgotten what shape it had.
"Vera Cassidy," he said. The rag kept going around the brewer.
"Hank."
"You look like something chewed you up and didn't swallow."
"Thanks," she said. "You alone?"
The rag stopped. He considered the room as if she had asked him to count the moons of Jupiter. "Ain't nobody here but me and the coffee and the mouse that lives in the wall behind booth four. Mouse and me have an arrangement. I don't chase him. He don't show himself to the customers."
She sat down on the stool nearest the brewer. She did not take off her coat. She set her hands flat on the counter, one on each side of where her grandmother had always set her elbows when she was working the register, and she looked at Hank Reilly, who was eighty if he was a day, and whose hands had built barns and pulled calves and set bone and done every kind of work a man could do in this hollow for four generations, and who had known her since she was a girl and had let her cry in his hayloft one summer afternoon when she was twelve and had never mentioned it since.
"Hank," she said. "Do you remember Nora McKinnon."
It was not a question. It was not a question the way a stone dropped into a well is not a question. It was something that fell into the silence between them and kept falling.
His hand froze on the handle of the brewer. The rag was caught between his fingers and the pot, half twisted, and he did not move it. The fluorescent above the counter was the kind that flickered at a frequency you only noticed in your periphery, and it flickered now, and the shadow of his hand on the steel did not flicker at all.
"Vera," he said.
"Hank."
"You come up here at midnight and ask me that."
"Yes."
"Some questions open doors that don't close again in this town."
She let that land. She did not pretend to consider it. She watched his hand on the brewer. She watched the rag. She watched the small muscle just under his left eye that had been jumping since she'd walked in, and that he was pretending she could not see.
"I know that, Hank. I knew it before I came up here."
He set the brewer down on the burner with a soft click of glass on hotplate. He folded the rag into thirds and then into thirds again, the way he had been taught by his mother, who had been taught by hers, who had probably been taught by someone who had stood in the same spot at the same counter and done the same thing in the same way for a hundred years. He set the folded rag on the counter beside the brewer. He looked at her.
"How old are you now, Vera?"
"Thirty-six."
"I remember when you were twelve. I remember your grandmother, and I remember yours before her, and theirs before them. I have been cleaning this pot and walking these woods for seventy-some years, and I will tell you one thing I have learned, which is that this town is older than any of us and meaner than any of us and patient like a stone in a creek bed is patient. It does not forget. It does not forgive. It just waits."
"I know what the town is, Hank."
"Do you know what you're asking."
"I'm asking you a name. I'm asking if you remember the woman by that name."
He looked at her for a long time. The mouse in the wall behind booth four made a small papery sound and was silent. The coffee urn whispered to itself.
"I remember her," he said, finally. Not loudly. The way you say a thing you have carried for a long time and are not happy to set down. "I remember her the way you remember a tree you saw split by lightning. You remember it because it was there, and because it should not have been, and because something about the way it stood afterward was not the way a tree ought to stand. Nora McKinnon was that kind of tree in this town. She had no kin here. She came in one summer and she was here, and then one fall she wasn't. That was all most people saw. That was all I let myself see."
He paused.
"There was more," he said. "There was always more."
"Tell me."
"I don't know what to tell you, girl. I don't know what you know. I don't know what you think you heard. And I don't know, sitting here at this counter on this night, whether I am doing right or wrong to even say her name out loud in this room."
Vera did not speak. She had learned a long time ago that when a person like Hank Reilly begins to talk, the worst thing you can do is interrupt, because interrupting him is not interrupting a man, it is interrupting the process of him deciding to trust you with the next sentence.
He drew a breath. He let it out through his nose. He picked up the rag again and then set it down again, as if his hand had forgotten what it meant to do.
"Your sister," he said.
"Yes."
"She came to see me three days before she left."
Vera felt the cold in her chest move down into her stomach.
"She asked me about Nora McKinnon. She asked me the same way you are asking me. She came in the back door of the diner on a Tuesday afternoon when the lunch rush was over and I was cleaning the grill, and she sat on the stool right where you are sitting, and she asked me if I remembered the woman. And I told her the same thing I am telling you, which is that some doors don't close again. And she looked at me with that look she had, the one that was always too old for the face it was sitting on, and she said, 'Hank, I have already gone through the door. I am just trying to find my way back to the hallway.' And I did not know what to say to that. I have thought about it every day since."
The fluorescent above the counter buzzed. The neon EAT outside threw its red through the front window and lay down across the back of his hands and across the brewer and across the counter in a wash the color of a warning.
"What did you tell her," Vera said.
"I told her about the overlook. I told her there was something Nora had shown me once, years ago, that I had never been back to see, and that I did not want to go back to see, and that if she was the woman I thought she was, she would not go back to see either. And she thanked me, and she left, and three days later your grandmother called me on the telephone and said June had gone up to the cabin and she didn't think she was coming back."
He looked at her.
"That is what I told her," he said. "That is all I have. That is what I have been carrying for three weeks and a day."
The mist had thickened outside. The orange cones of the lampposts were gone in it. The blue pickup with the Reilly Farms sticker had become a darker shape in a paler dark, and the hand giving the finger was just a smudge in the smear of the window.
Vera put her hands flat on the counter again. She looked at Hank Reilly, who had been her father's friend and her grandmother's friend and June's friend and hers, and who had done a kind thing he did not want to do because she had walked in and asked him to.
"Hank," she said. "Where's the overlook."
He shook his head.
"You go up there," he said, "you don't come back the same way you went up. If you go at all, you go in daylight. You go on foot. You don't take the tape recorder. You don't take your cell phone. You don't tell anyone you are going. You go up there, you find what Nora found, you find what your sister went looking for, and then you come on back down and you don't say a word about it to a living soul, and you leave that place alone for the rest of your life. That is the only way I know to walk that road and walk it again."
He picked up the brewer. The rag began its slow circles again.
"Now," he said, "I got to ask you. Do you want a cup of coffee before you go."