The transmission whined as the old Subaru bit into another switchback, the engine note dropping half a register the way it always did on the grade above the Little Elk. Vivian Beckett let her foot ease off the gas and coasted into the curve, her hands at ten and two the way her father had taught her when she was eleven and too small for the pedals. Six years since she had taken this road. Six years, and the mountain had not changed, but she had, and that was the part she had not been prepared for.
Fog moved through the trees in slow, low sheets, curling around the trunks of the hemlocks and dragging across the cracked asphalt like wet wool. The headlights carved a pale cone through it, and everything past the hood was a suggestion: a guardrail, a drop, the suggestion of a hollow opening up somewhere in the gray to her right. Somewhere down there, the town waited.
She had told herself she would not look. She had told herself she would keep her eyes on the road, the way Gus had taught her, and not start counting losses before she had even pulled into the drive. But Pine Hollow had a way of insisting on its own accounting, and the first of the tallies came halfway up the second pull, where the old feed store used to stand.
The sign was still up. BECKETT FEED AND SEED, EST. 1947, painted in her grandfather's hand, the lettering faded now to a dusty brick against the gray boards. But the windows were papered over from the inside with brown kraft, and the lot out front was nothing but a crop of volunteer sumac and a rusted spreader axle sinking into the gravel. The pump island had been pulled out sometime in the past decade, leaving a square of raw concrete and a single yellow nozzle stand leaning at an angle like a man too tired to stand up straight.
She eased past it without slowing down, but her throat had tightened anyway.
Half a mile on, the old theater came into view around the bend, its art deco facade pressed up against the slope of the hill like it had grown there. The marquee bulbs were off, all but one, a single warm point that buzzed faintly against the fog. The letters spelled out a single word, half-erased and half-rearranged by weather.
TODAY.
Not tonight. Not this week. Not any film she could name. Just TODAY, lit up for nobody, the way a lighthouse gets left on after the keeper has gone.
Vivian blew out a long breath and turned the heater up one notch, then one more, because the defrost had stopped winning against the fog that had crept inside the car with her. The windshield was beginning to clear in a slow oval. Beyond the glass, the town of Pine Hollow assembled itself piece by piece as she came down off the mountain.
It had been a small town when she left. Now it was a smaller one. The IGA lot had two cars in it, both with a thin rime of pollen on the hoods. The Methodist church on the corner had a new roof but a hand-painted sign that read SERVICES BY APPT. The old library, which had been a Carnegie and was the first building her mother had taken her into, was shuttered with a notice taped to the door in a font that looked like it had been generated on somebody's home computer.
She could not read the notice from the road. She made herself not slow down to try.
The Subaru hummed through a puddle of standing water, and the tires threw up a sheet of cold spray that freckled the passenger window. She could hear the wiper blades working over a small pit in the windshield, the one she had been meaning to fix for two years. Coffee in the cupholder had gone cold an hour ago, the smell of it sharp and a little stale in the warming car. She did not drink it. She had stopped being hungry somewhere back around Roanoke.
Pine Hollow's single stoplight was flashing yellow over the empty intersection of Main and Back-of-Beyond, the way stoplights flash in places that have decided to trust the drivers and the drivers have decided to trust each other, which was its own kind of arrangement. She took the left onto Back-of-Beyond out of habit and rolled past the hardware store, the beauty shop, the old VFW hall with its flag at half-mast for reasons nobody had bothered to post. A woman Vivian did not recognize was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy, and the broom made a soft, rhythmic hiss against the concrete that Vivian could hear even with the windows up.
She did not stop at any of them.
Instead she took the next right, onto the road that climbed again, narrower now, no centerline, just the memory of one. The fog thickened up here as the road bent under a canopy of oak and sourwood, and she drove by feel more than sight, the tires whispering over damp leaves, the headlights making a low tunnel of yellow in the gray.
The Beckett place sat at the end of a half-mile of gravel that had been graded sometime last spring and not since. The Subaru rocked over the ruts, the suspension complaining in a language she understood too well, and then the trees fell back and the house was there.
It was smaller than she remembered. That was the first thought, and she was ashamed of it as soon as it arrived. It had not shrunk. She had grown up in it, that was all. She had spent six years in apartments with ceilings she could not touch and kitchens that did not creak, and her eye had recalibrated.
Still. The porch sagged on its west corner the way it always had, and the rocker her father had refused to replace was gone from its spot, replaced by a plastic lawn chair with one busted arm. The screen door hung crooked on its spring. The tin roof was freckled with rust and bird droppings, and somewhere under the eaves a wren was running through its small, fierce repertoire, undisturbed.
Vivian turned off the engine. The Subaru ticked and settled. The fog breathed in through the cracked window seal, cool and pine-sharp, and she sat for a moment with her hands still on the wheel, the leather gone slick under her palms.
Then a screen door banged somewhere around back, and a dog she did not recognize came trotting around the corner of the house, an old brindle mutt with a white blaze on its chest and one ear that stood up and one that did not. It stopped when it saw the car. It stopped when it saw her. It considered.
Then it walked over and pressed its nose to her knee through the open window, and the warmth of it, the unexpected weight, undid something in her chest that she had been holding together since Knoxville.
"Hey," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she had meant it to. "Hey, old fella."
The dog's tail moved once. Twice. It did not move off her knee.
The screen door banged again, and she heard a cough she would have known anywhere, a wet, smoker's rattle that had been the soundtrack of her childhood summers. Footsteps on the porch, slow, deliberate, the gait of a man who had learned not to trust his knees on the steps.
"Well," said Gus Beckett, and his voice was rougher than she remembered, tobacco-rasped down to something like gravel in a tin pan. "You got here."
Vivian turned the key, the window slid down, and her father was standing on the top step in his blue work shirt and his unlaced boots, one hand on the rail, the other holding a coffee mug that looked like it had been washed in the same creek as the dog.
She had not called ahead. She had not been sure she was coming until this morning, and then she had thrown a bag in the back seat and driven, and that was the only plan she had.
"I got here," she said.
He looked at her for a long moment. The lines in his face had gone deeper. The white in his hair had won. He nodded, once, the way Gus Beckett nodded at things he had already decided.
"Coffee's on the stove," he said. "Dog's name is Boy. Don't let him in the house, he sheds."
Vivian got out of the car. The gravel crunched under her boots. The dog followed her to the porch step and stood there, looking up at her father, then back at her, as if waiting for someone to settle the matter of who, exactly, was going to feed him tonight.
Gus looked at the dog. The dog looked at Gus.
"Dog," Gus said, in the tone of a man naming a verdict.
Vivian climbed the steps. Her father did not step forward. She did not ask him to. She went up onto the porch, and the boards groaned under her weight the way they always had, and she could smell, underneath the rust and the wet wood, the smell of the house itself, of her mother, of the long quiet that had settled in here over the years.
"I should have come sooner," she said.
Gus took a sip of his coffee. He considered this.
"You should have," he agreed, in the same tone he might have used to observe that the porch needed a new coat of paint.
Then he turned and went back into the house, and the screen door banged shut behind him, and the dog looked up at her with one brown eye and one ear that listened, as if to say, well. That went about how you thought it would.
Vivian stood on the porch for another breath. Two. The fog curled around the corner of the house and pooled against the foundation like something trying to get in out of the cold. The wren under the eaves had moved on to a different phrase.
She picked up her bag from the front seat of the Subaru, slung it over her shoulder, and followed her father into the house, and the screen door banged shut behind her the way it had been banging shut for forty years, and she thought: this is the sound I will hear now, for a while. This is the sound I will have to get used to.
Inside, the hallway smelled of coffee and woodsmoke and the particular staleness of a house that has been closed up too long in the daytime. A telephone sat on the small table by the door, the same green rotary it had always been. A note in her father's blocky hand was propped against it.
She paused. She read it without picking it up.
It read: SHERIFF CALLED. WILL BE BY. G.
Vivian set her bag down on the runner, and the dog, without being invited, came in through the screen door behind her and lay down on the mat as if he had been doing it for years.
She looked at her father, who was already halfway down the hall toward the kitchen, coffee mug in hand.
"Sheriff Dale," she said.
Gus did not turn around.
"Dale," he confirmed, in the same flat tone, as if naming a weather pattern.
Then he disappeared around the corner, and the kitchen tap came on a moment later, and Vivian stood in the hallway of the house she had grown up in, with a strange dog on her feet and the muffled sound of the mountain breathing against the windows, and she thought, for no reason she could have put a name to, that this was the part of the story where she was supposed to know what to do next, and that she did not, and that she was going to have to do it anyway.
She found him in the kitchen at the small table beneath the window, his boots planted wide on the linoleum, the morning light falling across his hands and the mug he held between them. The same mug, she thought, chipped at the rim, the white glaze worn through to the gray clay underneath. He had been drinking from that mug for as long as she could remember. He had been sitting at that table for as long as she could remember. Some things in this house were not furniture. They were fixtures, like the bones of the mountain itself.
"Sit down," Gus said, without looking up.
"I just drove four hours," Vivian said. "I think I'd like to sit down."
"Then do it."
She pulled out the chair across from him, the one that always wobbled on the uneven leg, and sat. The wobble was still there. She pressed her palms flat against the table to steady herself, and the wood was cool and faintly sticky, the way old kitchen tables get when the seasons have worked the grain open.
"You want coffee?" Gus asked.
"I can see it."
"You want some."
"I can get it."
"You can get it," he agreed, and took a long drink from his own mug, and set it down, and said nothing.
Vivian got up and went to the stove. The old percolator sat on the back burner, the one with the blue glass knob that had been replaced twice and still didn't fit quite right. She poured herself a cup into a mug that had a chip on the handle. The coffee was strong and slightly burnt, the way he always made it, the way he had taught her to make it when she was nine years old and small enough to stand on a step stool to reach the counter. She thought about that for a moment. She let the thought pass.
She sat back down.
"Dad."
"Hm."
"Sheriff Dale."
"Hm."
"What about him."
"He's coming by."
"I read the note." She wrapped both hands around the mug. The warmth moved into her palms and up into her wrists. "You could have told me that on the phone."
"I told you to come."
"You told me to come. You didn't tell me why."
"You came."
Vivian took a breath. She let it out slowly, through her nose, the way she had learned to do in the years she had spent interviewing people who did not want to be interviewed. Patience. Patience. Patience.
"Dad. I left Pittsburgh at six in the morning. I called my editor. I rescheduled two appointments. I told them my father had called and that he never calls and that something must be wrong." She paused. "So. Something is wrong."
Gus looked at her then, for the first time since she had come in. His eyes were the color of creek water after rain, a kind of washed-out gray-blue, and the skin around them had gone soft and crepey in the way that old men's skin does, and she could see, even in the flat morning light, that he had not been sleeping. There were bruises beneath his eyes. There was a kind of thinness in his face she had not noticed at first.
"You look tired," she said.
"I'm old," he said.
"That's not what I asked."
"That's what I answered."
She took a sip of the coffee. It was terrible. It was perfect. It tasted like every morning of her childhood compressed into a single dark liquid, bitter and warm and faintly ashy.
"Dale called last night," Gus said.
He said it to the mug, not to her.
"About what," Vivian said.
"About a body."
The word landed on the table between them like a stone.
"Whose body," Vivian said.
Gus was quiet for a long moment. Outside, a truck went by on the road below the house, the engine growling up through the gears, then fading. A dog barked somewhere down the hill. The dog that had followed her in lifted its head from the mat, listened, and laid it back down.
"Dale will tell you," Gus said.
"Dale can tell me when Dale gets here. I'm asking you now."
"I don't know all of it."
"Tell me what you know."
He picked up the mug. He set it down without drinking. He looked at the window, where the mountain was visible through the thin curtain, green and still and enormous, pressing up against the glass like something that wanted in.
"Somebody's been digging," he said.
Vivian waited.
"In the old ground," he said. "Up on the ridge. Behind the Thornwood place."
The name sat in the kitchen like a third person at the table.
"Aldric's place," Vivian said.
"Aldric's place," Gus agreed.
"Aldric's been dead twelve years."
"I know how long he's been dead."
"So who is digging."
Gus looked at her. Then he looked away.
"Dale will tell you," he said again.
Vivian put her mug down.
"Dad. I have not been home in eight months. I have not been home in eight months because every time I come back here, I drive four hours up a mountain that does not want to be driven up, and I sit in this kitchen, and you give me the weather, and you give me the news from the diner, and you give me every fact about this county except the one fact I am asking for. And I love you. And I am tired. And I would like to know why you called me."
Gus did not move. His hands stayed around the mug. His shoulders stayed where they were. He had the stillness of a man who had spent forty years underground, who had learned to be quiet in the dark because the dark listened.
"Dale asked me to call you," he said.
"Dale asked you to call me."
"He said you'd want to know."
"Know what."
He looked at her again, and this time there was something in his face she had not seen before, or had not seen in a long time. It was not fear, exactly. It was something older than fear. It was the look of a man who has lived his whole life in a place and has finally understood that the place is going to ask something of him he does not want to give.
"Viv," he said.
He had not called her that since she was a girl.
"Yes."
"I want you to understand something before he gets here."
"I understand a lot of things."
"I want you to understand this one."
He leaned forward, just slightly, and his elbows went onto the table, and his face came closer, and she could see the small broken capillaries in his cheeks, the places where the skin had been weathered and reweathered over the decades, and she could smell the coffee on his breath, and beneath it, faintly, the smell of the tobacco he had not smoked in fifteen years but that still lived somewhere in the lining of his mouth.
"This is going to be one of those things," he said.
"What kind of thing."
"One of those things where you wish you'd never come back."
She held his gaze.
"Dad," she said. "I never stopped coming back. I just spaced it out."
He looked at her for a long time.
"You look like her," he said.
Vivian did not say anything. The dog on the mat sighed and turned over. Outside, a wind came up the mountain and pressed against the window, and the curtain moved, and the light shifted, and the shadow of the mug on the table slid an inch across the wood.
"I know," she said, finally.
"He said you'd want to be here."
"He. Dale."
"Dale."
"Why would Dale think I'd want to be here."
Gus did not answer. He picked up the mug. He drank. He set it down. The truck outside had gone quiet. The dog outside had gone quiet. The mountain was quiet. There was only the sound of the clock above the stove, which she had not heard tick since she had come in, ticking now, patient and even, the way time moves in a house where nothing has changed and everything has changed and the difference between the two is the question a person learns not to ask.
She was still holding her mug. She was still sitting at the table. The sun came through the window and lay across her father's hands, and she thought about the way his hands had looked when she was a child, the knuckles swollen, the skin darkened, the small white scars where the coal had caught him. The hands had not changed. They had just thinned. They had just become the hands of an old man.
"Dad," she said.
"Hm."
"Is it the Thornwoods."
He did not answer.
"Dad."
"That's what Dale will tell you."
"I don't want what Dale will tell me. I want what you know."
He looked at the window. The mountain was there. It was always there. It had been there when she was a child and it would be there when she was gone. It did not care what they talked about in this kitchen. It had its own conversations, deeper and slower, the conversations of stone and water and the long patient root systems that held the hills together.
"Some things," Gus said, "you don't want to know until you have to."
"I have to now."
"I know."
"So tell me."
He shook his head, just a little. A motion so small it was almost not a motion at all.
"I called you," he said, "because I didn't want to be the only one in this house who knew."
Vivian put the mug down.
"What do you know," she said.
He looked at her.
"You'll see," he said.
And then the screen door banged, and a car door slammed out front, and there were boots on the porch, and a voice, smooth and unhurried, called out, "Gus? You in there? It's Dale."
Gus got up. He took his mug with him. He went out of the kitchen without looking back, and Vivian heard him cross the hall, and she heard the front door open, and she heard the two men greet each other in the low, careful way men of that generation greet each other on porches in the mornings, and she sat at the table in the kitchen with her hands around the warm mug and the dog at her feet and the clock ticking above the stove, and she thought about her mother, and the mountain, and the word her father had used, and the word the note on the hall table had not used, and she waited for the sheriff to come in.
Sheriff Dale Harmon came into the kitchen the way he came into every room in Pine Hollow, like a man who had been invited a thousand times and intended to be invited a thousand more. He filled the doorway for a moment, hat in hand, his silver hair combed back neat, his face carrying the particular weather of a man who had been awake since before four and intended to be cordial about it. He smelled of cold air and the peppermint he kept in his pickup's glovebox, a habit Vivian's mother had once told her was less a habit than a penance, since Dale's father had been a chewer of the worst order.
Vivian, you look good, he said, and his voice carried that low, unhurried warmth that made the words feel less like a compliment than a verdict delivered in his favor.
Vivian stood. Thank you, Dale.
He crossed the kitchen and took her hand in both of his, and for a moment the three of them stood there in the small bright room, the dog watching from her rug, the clock ticking its patient count, and Vivian understood that whatever her father had not told her, this man was about to confirm.
Sit down, Gus said. I'll get another mug.
Dale didn't sit. He looked at Vivian, then at the window, then at her again. I came by to see if you'd had a chance to settle in.
I drove up this morning, she said. I haven't had a chance to do anything but sit in this kitchen and be told things in pieces.
He gave a small laugh, the kind that was mostly breath. Gus has always had a gift for that.
Gus had a gift for a lot of things, Vivian said. None of them talking in a straight line.
Dale's smile thinned. He pulled out a chair, sat down across from her, and put his hat on the table brim-up, the way her father used to do, the way every man in these mountains used to do before the world stopped expecting them to take their hats off indoors. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped half a register.
You know what I'm here about, he said.
No, Vivian said. I know you're here. I don't know what for.
There's been a development.
She waited.
Old Thornwood Mine, Dale said. The one they sealed in eighty-seven. Someone's been working around it. Kids, maybe. Or someone looking for something they shouldn't be looking for.
And?
And this afternoon a body came out of it.
Vivian's hands had been resting on the table, the fingers loosely laced. She did not move them. She did not move anything. The clock ticked. The dog sighed on her rug. Somewhere outside, a screen door banged once and was still.
Whose, she said.
We don't know yet, Dale said. That's why I'm here. To ask your father, on account of what he knows about that mine. What he always knew.
Gus, who had been standing at the counter with his back to them, set a fresh mug down on the wood with a small flat sound. I know what everybody knows, Gus said.
Dale didn't turn around. Gus, this isn't a thing to dance around.
I ain't dancing, Gus said. I'm pouring coffee.
The room got quiet in a way that rooms in the mountains get quiet when the men in them have stopped pretending. Vivian looked at the sheriff, and the sheriff looked at the table, and the table looked at nothing.
Does the family know, Vivian said. Thornwood's family.
Eli, Dale said. Just Eli, these days. We called him down to the diner to talk to him, on account of it's his family's land. He's being cooperative.
Is he, Vivian said.
Dale looked up at her, and for a moment his face had nothing in it, no warmth, no performance, just the plain bone of a man who had been carrying something for a long time and was tired of pretending he wasn't. Cooperative is a strong word, he said. He showed up.
And you, Vivian said.
Dale nodded. And me.
He drank his coffee. He set the mug down. He looked at Gus, and Gus looked at the wall, and Vivian understood that the two of them had a long conversation ahead of them, one she was not invited to, and one she intended to listen for anyway.
You stay close to the house today, Dale said to her, rising. We don't know what we're dealing with yet.
I'm going out, Vivian said.
Dale paused. Where.
To the diner, she said. I'm going to see Alvera. I haven't eaten anything but toast since I got here.
He studied her for a moment, and she could see the calculation running behind his eyes, the quiet weighing of how much he could tell her to do without putting the weight of his office on her shoulders. He decided, or pretended to decide.
Don't go alone, he said.
I'll be fine, Dale.
I know you will, he said. Take your father.
Gus, at the counter, made a sound that was not quite a refusal.
Dale tipped an invisible brim toward her, put his hat back on, and went out through the hall. She heard the front door open, heard his boots on the porch, heard him say something low to her father that she did not catch, and then heard his truck start up the gravel drive, the tires crunching small stones under their weight.
She went to get her coat.
---
Alvera's diner had been in the same block of storefronts on the main strip of Pine Hollow since before Vivian was born, and probably since before her mother was born, though nobody could quite prove that. The fluorescent tubes above the counter buzzed at a pitch that only dogs and the very young could hear. The vinyl on the booths had split along the seams and been repaired with electrical tape the color of a bruise. The coffee came in white ceramic mugs that had been white once and were now the particular grey of things washed in hard water for thirty years. The pie was good. That was the whole menu, really, that and whatever Alvera decided to put on the chalkboard that morning.
Vivian pushed through the door at quarter past six and the bell above it gave its small iron complaint, and the warmth inside, and the smell of grease and onions and something with cinnamon baking somewhere in the back, wrapped around her like a hand. Alvera, behind the counter, looked up and her face did three things in quick succession: surprise, recognition, and the particular softening of a woman who had known you since you were four and had opinions about your bangs.
Vivian Beckett, Alvera said, like she was reading it off a marquee. Sit down anywhere. I'll bring you coffee and you can tell me why you look like you haven't slept since Boone.
Vivian sat at the booth nearest the door, because it was habit, and because from there she could see most of the room. The diner was about half full, which for a Thursday evening was a crowd. Two loggers from the lumber yard sat at the counter arguing about a game on the small television mounted above the register. A mother with a teenager who did not want to be seen with her was trying to coax the teenager into a grilled cheese. A man in a feed cap was alone in the corner booth reading a racing form and eating a slice of apple pie with the slow concentration of a man who believed in finishing one thing before moving on to the next.
And at the back booth, half-hidden by the angle of the wall and the coatrack that had been standing in the same spot since 1983, Sheriff Dale Harmon sat across from Eli Thornwood, and the two of them were not eating.
Vivian could see the sheriff's hat on the seat beside him, and she could see Eli's hands flat on the table, and she could see, in the small involuntary motion of the sheriff's shoulders as he leaned in, that whatever was being said at that table was not being said softly. She could not hear the words. She could read, in the set of Eli's jaw, and the way Dale kept lifting his hand off the table and putting it back down again, that the words were not friendly.
She was considering, for about the third or fourth time that day, whether to do the thing she knew she was about to do, when someone slid into the seat across from her.
The vinyl hissed against the vinyl.
Vivian looked up.
the a Drummond sat across from her in a green wool coat and a thin gold chain at her throat, and her face was the particular face of a woman who had somewhere else to be and had decided, just now, that here was more important. Her eyes were bright in a way that bright eyes are not always a good sign.
Vivian, the a said, in her low, careful voice, the one that carried the faint clean trace of a city she had not entirely given up.
the a, Vivian said. I didn't know you were back in town.
I live here, the a said. Some of us live here. She unbuttoned her coat, then buttoned it again, a small fidget. I need to tell you something.
Vivian glanced toward the back booth. Eli had stood up. Dale had put a hand out, palm down, in the universal gesture of a man asking a younger one to wait. Eli sat back down. Dale leaned in.
Vivian looked away from them and at the a.
What, Vivian said.
the a glanced toward the counter, toward the loggers, toward the door, and then back at Vivian, and Vivian understood that the a Drummond, who was not a woman given to fuss, was fussing.
Old Thornwood Mine, the a said, very quietly. The one they sealed in eighty-seven.
Vivian's hand stilled on the table.
I know the one, Vivian said.
We pulled someone out of it this afternoon, the a said. Somebody's been down there. Recent. The seal had been broken.
Who, Vivian said.
We don't know yet, the a said. The water in there, the cold, it makes the timeline difficult. But Vivian. the a paused, and looked at her across the table with the frankness that was the only real luxury the a permitted herself. This is not a fresh death. This has been down there a long time. Long enough that whoever did this thought nobody would ever look.
The bell above the door did not ring. Nobody came in. The television murmured. The cinnamon smell drifted from the back. Vivian thought about her father's mug in the kitchen, and the way his hand had been shaking around it, and the way he had not said the word. She thought about the envelope in the attic, and the name on it, and the letter, and the seal on the mine, and the year it had been put there.
Eighty-seven, she said.
Eighty-seven, the a said.
The year her mother died. The year the mine was sealed. The year her father, according to the letter upstairs, had done something he had not been able to live down.
Vivian, the a said, leaning in across the table, the gold chain catching the fluorescent light. Your father. Does he know about this.
Vivian met her eyes.
He knew before anyone did, she said.
the a sat back. The vinyl creaked under her. She looked, for a long moment, like a woman who had come in to deliver a piece of news and had received, instead, the answer to a question she had not known she was asking.
Behind them, at the back booth, Eli Thornwood's voice carried, sudden and sharp, the word no loud enough that Alvera looked up from the coffee pot and the loggers turned on their stools. Dale's hand came up again, palm down, and Eli leaned forward, and Vivian could see, even from where she sat, that whatever was being said at that table had crossed from the place where men argue into the place where men confess.
Vivian, the a said, very quietly. Stay close to him.
I just got here, Vivian said.
the a nodded. Her face softened for the first time that evening, and the softness made her look, for just a moment, like a different woman entirely, one who had not spent the afternoon in a mine, one who had not carried what she had carried down from it.
Stay close anyway, the a said.
The bell above the door rang. Cold air came in. A man Vivian did not recognize walked past their booth and slid into the back booth beside Eli without a word. Dale looked up at him. The three of them sat together in the corner, half-hidden by the coatrack, and Vivian could see the sheriff's face now, in the small slice of light that reached him, and it was the face of a man who had just been told something he did not want to know was true.
Vivian, the a said.
Vivian looked at her.
The mine, the a said. Eighty-seven. I need you to think about what your father might have told you. Even the smallest thing. Anything he said in his sleep. Anything he said about that year. Anything he said about the name on the envelope.
Vivian felt, suddenly, the weight of the day. The drive. The kitchen. The mug. The dog. The clock. The note on the hall table. The letter in the attic. The walk down the stairs. The mine. The year.
I'll think, Vivian said.
Don't take too long, the a said. The mountain's opening, and I don't know yet what it's going to let out.