The screen door of Rosie's banged against the frame and the man who came through it carried the lake on his clothes. Black water soaked his canvas jacket to the elbows. His boots left a trail of pond mud across the checkerboard linoleum, two wet prints for every stride, and he did not look down to see them.
Maren Holst set her fork against the edge of her plate. The eggs had gone cold an hour ago. She had been turning them over with the tines of the fork, cutting them into smaller and smaller pieces without lifting any of them to her mouth, because her mother had always said to clean your plate and she was still working out which rules still applied now that Annie was the one being mourned instead of the one doing the mourning. Across the room, Tom Beaumont had gone still over his coffee. He had been reading the folded page of a small spiral notebook he carried everywhere, the same one since they were seventeen, and now the page stayed open but his eyes had moved to the door.
"Lord, Jessup," Rosie called from behind the counter. She was already reaching for a dish towel. "You tracked it clean through my dinin' room."
The fisherman ignored her. His name was Jessup Holler, and Maren knew him the way everybody in the hollow knew everybody, by face and by the kind of truck they drove and by what their daddies had done to their mamas or their land or both. Jessup's daddy's people had lost the south pasture to Annie's people in a boundary dispute so old nobody remembered what the original survey had been for. He was broad across the shoulders and his hands were still webbing with creek water, knuckles raw where the nets had bitten. He looked around the room the way a man looks around a room when he has not slept.
"Get the sheriff," Jessup said. "Somebody get the sheriff right now."
There were seven people in Rosie's at that hour. Maren. Tom. A pair of retired teachers from up the ridge who came in every morning at six for the early-bird special and stayed past nine nursing a single cup between them. A woman in feed-store coveralls waiting on a to-go order of biscuits. Two men in logging jackets at the back booth who had not spoken a word to each other since they sat down. Rosie herself, broad as a door and twice as immovable, holding the towel she had picked up but no longer reaching for him with it.
"Jessup." Rosie's voice was careful now, the way it got when she wanted answers and intended to get them. "What in the Sam Hill happened to you."
"I pulled my net at first light," he said. "Standard set, off the old mill point. There's a shape in it. There's a body in my net, Rosie."
The diner did not go silent the way a room goes silent in a movie. It went the way a room goes silent when a person hears a sound they have been waiting for without knowing they were waiting for it. The logging men looked up at the same time. One of the retired teachers put her coffee cup down on the saucer and left it there. Maren heard the small porcelain click of it like a thing happening very far away. Tom closed his notebook, folded it once, slid it into the back pocket of his jeans, and stood.
"Jessup." Tom's voice came out even. "Where is the boat now."
"Tied at my dock. I could not. I did not want to drag it in until somebody seen it. Until I knew what to do with it. I put a tarp over it and I drove straight here."
"You tied it at your dock," Tom said. "You left a body in the boat under a tarp at your dock."
Jessup blinked at him. The blood had not fully come back into his face. His lower lip looked split, though Maren could not see any cut. "I called my wife," he said. "I called my wife and I told her to keep the grandkids in the house. I drove here. I did not know what else to do."
Tom looked across the room at Maren. She had not moved from her stool. The fork was still laid across her plate. Her coffee sat in front of her at the temperature coffee reaches when you have not touched it since it was poured and the diner has not yet started a fresh pot, lukewarm and going thin.
"You all right," Tom said. It was not quite a question.
"I'm all right," Maren said.
She was not all right. She had not been all right since the night before last, when the phone had rung at the Holst place and the voice on the other end had belonged to a man from the coroner's office in the county seat rather than from her sister, and she had driven the seventeen miles from her mother's bedside to the church in the dark without putting on her shoes. But all right was what you said when you did not want to be looked at, and Tom knew that about her, and he left it there.
The bell over the front door rang again. Sheriff Dale Crouch came in with his hat already on and his hand already on the radio at his belt, the way he always entered a public place, like he was answering a call that had not been placed yet. He had a face that was friendly on the front of it and watchful behind, and today the watchful had won out. His eyes went to Jessup's soaked jacket, then to the wet prints on the floor, then back to Jessup's face.
"Talk to me," the sheriff said.
Jessup told him. He told him the same way he had told Rosie, short and plain, the facts only. Standard set, off the old mill point. Pulled at first light. Body in the net. He had covered it. He had driven here.
"The old mill point," the sheriff said. "That's east side of the lake. Off Soren land."
"That's what I said."
Crouch was quiet for a moment. He did not write anything down. He did not touch the radio. He looked past Jessup at the rest of the room, taking the count of who was in it the way a man does when he is about to say something he does not want repeated.
"I'm going to need everybody in this room to stay where they are for the next few minutes," he said. "This is going to be a scene. The lake is closed as of right now. I want it closed within the hour, public and private, no boats, no wading, no swimming, no fishing, no exceptions. I'm going to call the deputies and the county. I'm going to call the state boys too. Until I hear different from somebody with a badge and a case number, that lake is shut."
The woman in the coveralls said, "My brother's wedding is Saturday. Rehearsal's out on the water."
"Then your brother needs a new rehearsal," Crouch said. He said it without heat. He said it the way he said most things, slow and rounded, every vowel given its full measure, like the words had to walk a long way to get out of his mouth. "I'm sorry, ma'am. I am. But that lake is closed."
Tom caught Maren's eye again. She had picked up her coffee cup. She was holding it with both hands even though it was not warm enough to need both. The black liquid in it was perfectly still, and in it she could see the small reflection of the overhead light and, behind it, the small reflection of the diner window and, behind that, the morning she had thought was going to be quiet.
"You need me out there," Tom said to the sheriff.
Crouch looked at him. Crouch had known Tom since Tom was a boy running barefoot up and down the Holst lane, and Tom had known Crouch since before that, in the way children know the adults of their hollows, by silhouette and by smell and by the sound of a particular diesel truck pulling into a particular driveway. They did not always like each other. They were often on the same side.
"I need you to stay out of it until I know what I am looking at," Crouch said. "Then I will tell you what I need."
"I'm not asking what you need. I'm telling you I can be on the dock in twenty minutes."
"I heard you, Tom. And I'm telling you no, for now. Go on home. Take Maren home. Y'all have had a week."
Maren set the cup down. The ring it left on the counter was a darker oval inside a wider lighter one, the way coffee rings always are, the way time always is, one shape inside another.
"I'm not going home," she said.
Crouch turned to her. He took his hat off and held it in both hands in front of him, the way men of his generation do when they are about to say something they mean. He had taken that hat off at her grandmother's funeral. He had taken it off at her daddy's. He took it off at her mama's two days ago, standing in the Holst cemetery with the wind off the ridge, and he had not put it back on until the last handful of dirt was on the coffin.
"Maren," he said. "I know what day yesterday was. I know what kind of morning this is. But that body is on a piece of water that everybody in this county thinks they have got a claim on, and until I know who it is and how they got there, I cannot have civilians out at that dock. I cannot have you out at that dock. You understand me."
"I understand you, Dale."
"Good."
"I am going to be out at that dock anyway."
Crouch looked at her a long time. He put his hat back on. He turned to Tom.
"Get her out of my crime scene," he said. "Get her out of it or I will have to ask you to leave the county."
Tom did not say anything to that. He put his hand on the back of Maren's stool, not on her, on the stool, so that she could feel he was there without him touching her, and he waited for whatever she was going to do next, which he could already tell was going to be something that made his whole week harder than it already was.
Tom watched her slide off the stool. She did it the way she did everything, like she had already decided before her body caught up to it, like the decision lived somewhere in front of her and she was only now walking into it. Her coat was still damp from the rain. She had not buttoned it since she came in. The shoulders of it sat wrong on her, the way a coat sits on a person who has lost weight they did not mean to lose, or who is wearing somebody else's clothes without knowing it.
Maren left two dollars on the counter. She nodded once at the man behind the register, a man whose name Tom had known since he was seven and could not now remember, which is the kind of thing grief does to a person, takes the small things and rearranges them. She walked past Tom without looking at him. She walked past the window where the rain had streaked the glass into something that looked like long pale fingers. She pushed the door open with the flat of her hand and the bell above it made its small tin sound, the sound of a place that had not changed since his grandfather ran it, the sound of a place that would not change after he was gone.
Tom put his own money on the counter. He did not count it. He followed her out.
She was already across the parking lot. She was walking east, toward the water, and she was not walking the way a person walks when they have not decided where they are going. She was walking the way a person walks when the place they are going has been in them for a long time, the way a person walks toward a thing they have been circling for years.
Tom got in his truck. He did not start it right away. He sat with his hands on the wheel and watched her cross the road in his mirrors, watched her cut between the gas pumps of the place that used to be his uncle's and was now somebody else's, watched her step down off the curb on the far side and disappear down the shoulder toward the public landing. The landing was a half mile. He knew the road. He had driven it ten thousand times.
He started the truck.
The road to the dock ran past three houses he had not been inside since he was a boy, past a fence line that had not been mended in twenty years, past the place where the county had put up a sign about littering and the sign had been shot so many times it was no longer legible, only the holes in it, the geometry of somebody's anger made permanent in aluminum. He drove slow. The rain had stopped but the trees were still dripping, and the drops hit his windshield in no pattern he could predict, each one its own small accident. He passed a woman walking a dog that was too large for her. He did not look at her face. He was not interested in being looked at, not today, not with the kind of morning this was turning out to be.
Maren was already at the dock when he got there.
She had gone under the tape. She had not cut it, had not ducked it with any particular skill. She had simply stepped over it where it sagged between two iron posts that had been set into the concrete a long time before he was born, and the tape moved around her like a thing that had not decided yet whether it wanted to mean anything. She was already down the bank, into the reeds, the water at her ankles and her shins and then at her knees, the cold of it visible in the way her body locked, the way her shoulders rose and her hands came up off her sides. She was wading out toward the place where the deputies had been working all morning, the place where they had pulled something up out of the water that they did not want anybody to see.
Tom killed the engine. He sat in the truck.
From where he was parked he could see the tape, the two deputies at the far end of the dock pretending not to notice Maren, the sheriff's cruiser pulled up at an angle on the gravel lot with its light bar off, Crouch nowhere in sight. Crouch had gone back to town, or Crouch was in the woods taking a leak, or Crouch was standing behind a tree waiting for Maren to do exactly the thing she was doing, which was the thing he had told her she could not do. Tom could not tell. Crouch had been playing some kind of long game with the Holsts for as long as Tom had known him, and Tom had known him since he was eight years old and Crouch had come to the school in his patrol car to talk about stranger danger, and Crouch had picked Tom out of the line of children and asked him if he knew what a secret was, and Tom had said no, and Crouch had said good, and walked away.
Tom got out of the truck. He locked it. He did not lock it because he was worried about the truck. He locked it because locking things was something his hands knew how to do, and his hands needed something to do.
"Maren," he called.
She did not turn around. She was twenty yards out now, the water at her thighs, the reeds bending around her as she moved through them, her arms out a little for balance. She moved the way a person moves through water when they have done it before, when they know the feel of mud under their boots and have learned to trust it and not to trust it at the same time. She was heading for a place where the reeds were thicker, a place where the bank curved in and the water got shallow and the mud got black and smelled of iron and of things that had been down there a long time.
Tom walked down to the edge of the dock. He did not step off it. He stood with his boots on the dry boards and watched her.
"Maren," he said again, quieter now.
She stopped. She did not turn around. She stood there in the water with her back to him and her hands at her sides and the rain that was not rain anymore, just the last of it, dripping off the brim of his hat onto his shoulders, off the reeds onto the surface of the water in rings that spread and met other rings and disappeared.
"I have to do this," she said.
"I know you do."
"Then don't stand there."
"I'm not going in that water."
"You don't have to."
She bent down. Tom watched her go down on one knee in the mud, watched the water climb up her coat to her waist, watched her put both hands into the black at the bottom and begin to feel around in it with the patience of a person who has waited a long time to feel around in this particular kind of black. The deputies at the far end of the dock had stopped pretending. One of them had a radio in his hand and was speaking into it in a voice too low for Tom to make out. The other was walking back toward the cruiser.
Tom did not move.
Maren's hands went deeper. Her shoulders went down. Her face came close to the surface of the water and he could see, even from where he was standing, that her eyes were closed, that she was feeling with her fingers for something specific, something she had in her mind already, something she had come out here to find whether it was here or not.
She made a sound.
It was not a word. It was the kind of sound a person makes when the thing they were looking for is the thing they have found. It was small and it was total. It was the sound of a person being proved right about the worst thing they had ever guessed.
She stood up. She was holding something in her right hand. She held it up out of the water and the water ran off it in long pale sheets and the thing in her hand was a locket. It was silver, or had been silver once. It was rusted now in the way that metal rusts when it has been at the bottom of a body of water for years, the rust eating into it in patterns that looked almost like writing, almost like veins, almost like the pattern of something that had been alive long after the metal had stopped being what it was supposed to be.
Maren stood in the water with the locket in her hand and she did not open it. She held it out in front of her and looked at it. Tom watched her looking at it. The rain dripped off his hat. A bird started up somewhere in the trees behind him and then stopped. The deputy at the cruiser opened his door and got in and closed it and the sound of it carried across the water like a single clear note.
"Tom," Maren said. Her voice was the voice of a person who has walked a long way and has come at last to the place they were walking to. "Come here."
He did not want to. He wanted to stay on the dry boards of the dock and watch from there and not go down into the water and not see what was inside the locket because he had a feeling about what was inside the locket and the feeling was wrong, the feeling was the kind of feeling a person has when they know they are about to become part of something they cannot become part of and still come out the other side the same. But she had said his name, and when Maren Holst said a person's name it was the same as her pulling them by the sleeve, and he had not been able to say no to her since he was eleven years old, since the afternoon in the woods behind the school when she had cut her leg open on a piece of old fencing and he had given her his shirt to wrap it in and walked home in his undershirt in the cold and had not minded.
He stepped off the dock. He went down the bank. The mud took his boots and held them. He waded out to where she was standing and the water came up over his knees and the cold of it went through his jeans and into the long muscles of his thighs and he felt it all the way up into his chest, into the place where a person's breath lives.
She held the locket out to him.
He took it from her. His fingers left prints in the rust. He could feel the chain through the pad of his thumb, each link still there, each link still holding the next. He worked the clasp open with his thumbnail. The clasp gave with a sound like a small bone breaking.
Inside the locket, on the left side, there was no picture. The space where a picture would go was empty, the paper backing gone to a brown paste that had dried and cracked into a pattern like the mud at the bottom of the water. On the right side, scratched into the silver with what looked like the point of a pin or the tip of a small knife, were the words.
A.H., 16 forever.
Tom looked at the words. He looked at them the way a person looks at a thing they have been told about and have not believed until this moment, the way a person looks at the face of somebody they have been told is dead.
"It's hers," Maren said. "It's Annie's. She was wearing it the day she disappeared. She never took it off. She slept in it. She told me once that she would wear it into whatever came after."
Tom closed the locket. He held it in his hand. The chain hung down between his fingers and the water at the end of it caught the last of the gray light and threw it back up at them in a small bright arc.
The deputy's voice on the radio, somewhere behind them, was calling for Crouch.
The radio crackled again, and the voice that came through it was no longer the deputy's. It was Crouch himself, and the sound of it cut across the surface of the water like a stone skipped wrong and sent skipping back.
"They're on the road," the radio said. "Both lanes. Pull out at the turn by the old Renfro place and walk the last quarter mile in on foot. I want them in the water by dark if I can have it."
Maren's hand found Tom's arm. Her fingers were cold and certain and they closed around the muscle above his elbow with a grip that was not asking for anything, that was telling him to move. He looked down at her hand, then at her face, and what he saw there was not the face of a woman asking to be saved. It was the face of a woman who had been saving herself for longer than he had been alive.
"Tom," she said. "Tom, listen to me. We have to go."
He closed his hand around the locket. The chain pooled in his palm and the silver case lay against the lifeline, cool and heavier than it had any right to be for something so small. He did not put it in his pocket. He did not let go of it.
"Where," he said. It was not a question. It was the shape his mouth made when there was no time for the longer version.
"The pines. There's a cut through the old Renfro orchard, past the smokehouse that's still standing. My mother used to smoke hams out there in the fall. The chimney's down but the walls hold. We can get there before they reach the water if we go now, Tom, if we go right now."
Behind them, somewhere down the slope and through the scrub, a door opened and closed. The deputy's boots hit the gravel of the road with the heavy, deliberate cadence of a man who had been told to walk and was choosing not to.
Tom took one step back from the water. The mud took his boot and then released it with a soft, wet sound, like a mouth. Maren was already moving, her shoulders low, her tread quiet on the ground in a way that said she had walked out of places before.
They had not gone twenty yards into the pines when the second shape stepped out from behind a black gum and fell into place at Maren's shoulder as though he had been there all along.
Wyatt Renn was a man of about Tom's age but narrower, the kind of narrow that comes from a life spent more on the move than at a table. He wore a canvas jacket the color of old brick and the left pocket of it hung lower than the right from the weight of the camera inside it. The camera itself was a battered Pentax with a scuff along the top of the prism and a strip of black electrician's tape wrapped around the lens barrel where the rubber grip had peeled away. Wyatt had been carrying that camera since he was sixteen. He had taken his first picture of Annie Holst with it, on the day she turned fifteen, standing in the dooryard of the Holst place with her arms full of cut sweet peas.
Wyatt did not look at Tom. He looked at Maren.
"I told you I'd be here," he said. His voice was low and quick and had the rising lilt at the end of sentences that was the particular music of this hollow, the way a question could rise even when it wasn't one. "I told you when you called. I said I'd be up here before the sun hit the ridge."
"Wyatt," Maren said. It was all she said. His name in her mouth had the shape of something she had been holding in for a long time and had just let go.
Wyatt turned then and looked at Tom. His eyes were pale and sharp and they did the work of a man who was used to sizing up the world through a viewfinder. He took in Tom's face, Tom's clothes, Tom's boots, the locket that was visible now in Tom's open hand.
"You're the writer," Wyatt said. It was not a question. "The one Maren wrote to."
"I'm the one," Tom said.
"Then put that in your pocket and keep moving." Wyatt jerked his chin toward the path that wound ahead of them through the trunks of the pines. "Crouch has got two of his boys up on the county road and one of them is Renfro's nephew and the other one is a man named Pruitt who used to deliver feed out here and now carries a badge because his daddy wore one first. They'll be at the water in fifteen minutes if they don't stop to talk first, and they will stop to talk first because Crouch told them to. He wants time. He wants time so the scene looks the way he wants it to look when the rest of them get here."
Tom put the locket in his pocket. He felt the weight of it settle against his thigh through the denim and the weight was wrong, the way a stone in a shoe is wrong, the way a phone ringing at three in the morning is wrong.
Maren was ahead of them now, her stride lengthening as the path opened up between the trunks. The light in the pines at this hour was the color of a bruise, purpled and dim, and it fell on her in pieces through the canopy. Tom could see the back of her neck where her hair had come loose from whatever had been holding it. He could see the muscle that ran from her ear to her shoulder working as she walked.
Wyatt fell in beside Tom. He did not look at Tom as they walked. He looked ahead.
"I've been working this case for nine years," Wyatt said. His voice was low enough that the pines took some of it and gave some of it back. "Nine years this October. I started the week after she went missing. I was nineteen. I didn't know what I was doing. I drove down to the library in the county seat and I asked for the archives and the librarian gave me a look like I'd asked her for her kidney but she took me back into the room where they keep the bound volumes and she left me alone in there."
He paused to step over a root that had humped itself up out of the path. Tom stepped over it after him. The root was cool and wet under his hand when he put it out to balance.
"I started with the week she disappeared," Wyatt said. "Then I went back a year. Then I went back another year. Then I went back to the year she was born. I copied down everything I could find about the Holst family, about the land, about the water. I copied down the marriage notices and the birth notices and the death notices and the foreclosures and the tax sales. I copied down the minutes of the town council from nineteen sixty-two on. I copied down a piece in the Sentinel from August of nineteen seventy-nine about a man who got lost in these woods for three days and came out speaking a language nobody recognized. I copied down a piece from nineteen forty-one about a woman who lived alone up past the bend and who was found one morning sitting at her kitchen table with her hands folded and her eyes open and no mark on her and the doctor said she had been dead for six hours but the coffee in the pot was still warm."
Maren had slowed ahead of them. She had not turned around. She was listening. Tom could tell by the angle of her head.
"I have eleven notebooks," Wyatt said. "I have two boxes of photocopies and one box of microfilm prints. I have a list of every person who has lived on or near the Holst property since eighteen ninety. I have a map I drew myself of every trail and every fence line and every spring and every sinkhole in this hollow. I have interviewed eighty-three people. I have been run off the Holst land six times. I have been threatened with arrest twice. I have been told to leave the county four times. I have been offered money once. I have kept going."
He stopped walking. Tom stopped with him. Maren had stopped ahead and now she turned and looked back at them through the trees.
"You can look at it all," Wyatt said to Tom. "It's yours if you want it. Everything I've got. The pictures too. I have four hundred and twelve pictures of this land and this water and the people who live on it. I have pictures from the year Annie disappeared. I have pictures from this summer. I have pictures from last week. You can have them. I want you to have them. I want them to go somewhere that is not my closet."
Tom looked at him. "Why me," Tom said.
"Because Maren wrote to you," Wyatt said. "Because you came. Because most people who get a letter like the one she wrote do not come. They write back and they say I am sorry for your loss and then they put the letter in a drawer and they go on with their lives. You got on a plane. You got in a car. You drove up a road that doesn't want to be driven on. You walked down to a pond that has already taken one person and you stood at the edge of it and you let it look at you. That is not nothing, Tom Beaumont. That is not nothing at all."
Behind them, somewhere back down the slope, a vehicle had stopped. Doors opened. Doors closed. Voices carried up through the pines, but the words were lost. The shape of the words was the shape of men being told what to do.
Maren came back to them. She stood between them and she looked at Wyatt and then she looked at Tom and what Tom saw in her face in the failing light was something he had not seen there before. It was not relief. It was not gratitude. It was the expression of a person who had been carrying a thing alone for a very long time and had just felt the weight of it shift, not because anyone had taken it from her but because someone else had put a hand under it.
"The smokehouse," Maren said. "We can get there in four minutes. We need to go."
Wyatt nodded. Tom nodded. They turned and walked.
The pines closed around them as they went deeper into the cut. The trunks stood close and straight and the ground beneath them was a soft carpet of needles that gave under their weight without sound. The light grew thinner. The air grew cooler and it smelled of resin and wet earth and somewhere, beneath those smells, the faint mineral tang of the water they had left behind them.
Maren walked first. Wyatt walked second. Tom walked last. The camera swung softly against Wyatt's hip with each step. Tom's hand was in his pocket and his fingers were closed around the locket and the silver was warm now from being held.
They reached the smokehouse just as the last of the light went out of the pines. The walls were standing, just as Maren had said. The roof was mostly gone. The chimney lay in a heap of old brick at one corner, already going back to the earth. Inside, the floor was dirt and the only furniture was a block of oak that might have been a chopping block once and was now just a place to sit.
Maren sat on the block. Wyatt leaned against the wall. Tom stood in the doorway of what had been the door and he looked out at the dark that was filling the hollow.
The radio on Crouch's belt, somewhere down by the water, gave one more crackle and then went quiet.
In the quiet, Maren spoke. Her voice was low and steady and it came out of her like a thing she had been keeping in a box.
"I left," she said, "because I thought I could get far enough away from it that it would stop being mine. I was wrong about that. It came with me. It has come with me every day since I left this place. It will come with me until I find out what it is."
Wyatt reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. He did not say anything. Tom did not say anything. The three of them sat in the dark of the broken smokehouse and they listened to the hollow breathe and they waited for whatever was coming next to come.
In Tom's pocket, the locket lay against his thigh, and the words scratched into its inside, A.H., 16 forever, pressed against his skin through the denim, and the silver was warm, and the hollow was dark, and somewhere down at the water the deputies had reached the edge and were standing where he had stood, and the water was looking up at them the way it had looked up at him, patient and ancient and unsurprised.