The motel television cycled through the same footage for the third time.
Eleanor Vance sat on the edge of the bed, still wearing her coat, watching the reporter talk through a segment that had played twice already. The room smelled of industrial lemon cleanser and stale carpet, a combination she had come to associate with every roadside motel between Portland and the place she had spent most of her life trying to leave. The bedsprings creaked when she shifted her weight. Outside, a truck engine rumbled past on the two-lane highway, dopplering away into the dark.
On the screen, a helicopter lifted over a ridge of slate-colored rock. Beneath it, a glacier that had not moved in living memory had begun, quite visibly, to move in the wrong direction. Meltwater ran in bright threads down the moraine. The reporter's voice lifted over the rotor noise.
"Retreating faster than any model predicted," she said. "What was solid blue ice ten years ago is now a sluice of meltwater and exposed bedrock. And the melting has revealed, quite literally, what the mountain has been holding onto."
Eleanor's hand found the remote on the nightstand. She did not press anything.
The shot cut to a wide, glacial blue gash in the hillside above Cascadia Bay. She knew that view. She had walked the trail beside it as a girl, her boots crunching on the gravel where tourists now pulled over in summer to take photographs. The Boreal Glacier, named by some nineteenth-century cartographer with an ear for northern romance, had been a fixed point on every map of the town she could remember. In her childhood, her father had pointed up at the ice field and told her it was older than the town, older than the country, older than memory. As if memory, hers in particular, were something she should be embarrassed about.
Now a sheet of blue ice had pulled back like a curtain across wet stone, and underneath it was the unmistakable geometry of a human body.
The footage zoomed. The shape lay on its side, knees drawn up, one arm folded beneath the head in a pose that, from the right angle, looked almost restful. The clothing was visible, if not the face. A corduroy jacket the color of a dried leaf. Wool trousers. Boots cracked and gray as bone. The ice had pressed the fabric flat in a way that erased every wrinkle but preserved the form beneath, as if someone had laid a man out carefully and then poured glass over him.
The reporter spoke. Twenty-five to thirty years, the forensic pathologist was saying. Possibly more. The cold had not just preserved him; it had done something rarer. It had kept him waiting.
Eleanor reached for the mug on the nightstand, found it empty, and set it back down.
A lower-third banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen. CASCAY, she read. UNKNOWN CAUSE. The town was misspelled, but only by the width of a finger. Beside the banner, the stitched logo of a Boston affiliate she had once freelanced for in a former life. She could not remember the name of the assignment editor who had hired her. She could not remember most of those names now.
She had not been back in ten years. Not for her mother's birthday, not for the anniversary of her father's death, not for any of the carved-stone markers the family kept redrawing. The disagreement with Ruth had calcified into a kind of geography, a border line she had drawn for herself and then reinforced each time she thought about crossing it. Her father's last months, the choices Eleanor had wanted him to have and the ones her mother had made on his behalf when he could no longer speak for himself. The argument in the hospital hallway. The drive to Logan in the dark. The apartment in Somerville she had rented for a year, and then a second, and then a third. The jobs that came and went. The savings that became a small reserve and then something smaller.
Now she had come back. Not because of any invitation; she had not asked, and Ruth had not offered. She had come because the rent was due and the work had thinned, and because somewhere in the back of her skull a clock had begun ticking in a way she did not want to keep listening to. The news footage, she realized, had nothing to do with why she was here. The footage was just the world being weird and obvious at the same time.
She leaned forward and unzipped the duffel at the foot of the bed. Inside, folded around a pair of jeans, was a manila folder she had carried across four states. It contained the deed to her father's boat, a key to a property that may or may not still be hers, two clippings from a Portland paper that mentioned her byline, and a letter from a lawyer she did not remember hiring. The letter was dated last March. Its first line read: I write to inform you of certain developments concerning the estate of your late father.
She had not opened the letter past the first paragraph. She was afraid, though she would not have used that word.
Her phone, sitting on the carpet beside her boot, began to vibrate. She picked it up and looked at the number. The area code was familiar. The prefix was the town's.
She let it ring.
When it stopped, it began again. She recognized the rhythm; it was the specific cadence of someone who had been calling since high school and had not yet adjusted their habits to any real authority in their life. Hannah Soren had called her this way on the day of her father's funeral, on the morning of her mother's sixtieth, on the night she had left town, on the morning after, and then on every notable anniversary thereafter. Hannah had kept up a one-sided correspondence across the border Eleanor had drawn, a kind of weather report from a place Eleanor had decided not to remember.
She answered on the fourth ring.
"If you are watching that," Hannah said, without preamble, "you are not sleeping enough. You look like you are not sleeping enough even when you are watching that."
"How do you know I am watching anything."
"You have always watched the news when you cannot sleep. You used to fall asleep to the local roundtable in Portland. It was, frankly, embarrassing."
Eleanor let out the smallest breath, a sound that, in a different company, might have passed for a laugh.
"Who is it," she said. "The body."
"I do not know yet." Hannah's voice rose and fell the way it always had, in arcs that came out of nowhere and resolved in a curl of brightness. "Sheriff got the call this afternoon. The ice calved last week, and then we got this warm snap, and then there he was. They brought him down the ridge on a stretcher. He is in the back of the clinic right now. Lena is being very calm about it, which is how you know Lena is unhappy."
"Lena," Eleanor said. The name snagged on something inside her. Dr. Lena Pratt had been the attending physician during the last eleven days of her father's life. She had also been the only person in the room, besides her mother, who had not looked away when Eleanor had raised her voice.
"Lena is fine. Lena is always fine. Lena is the steadiest person in this town and I am including the lighthouse in that assessment." A pause. "How close are you."
Eleanor looked at the curtain. Beyond it, the highway hissed. "Close."
"How close is close."
"Twenty minutes. Maybe less."
"That is not close. That is here." Another pause. "Are you coming to the house."
"I have the key."
"That's not what I asked."
"It is what I am willing to give you."
Hannah sighed. The sigh of someone who had decided to be patient with a person who had given her a great deal of practice at it. "Eat something. There is bread in the freezer and butter in the door. You look thinner than you did in the voicemail you sent me last spring."
"Goodbye, Hannah."
"Eleven tomorrow. The library. Bring the folder, if there is a folder. And watch the road. The bridge across the inlet floods when it rains and it has been raining for a week."
Eleanor hung up. She sat for a while longer, listening to the highway. The television had moved on to a story about a fishery dispute in Maine. She turned it off and the room became very quiet. The lemon scent and the carpet smell and the faint, briny draft through the window seam settled around her in layers.
She opened the manila folder and lifted out the letter. She did not unfold it past the first paragraph. She read the first sentence again, silently, the way one might test the temperature of bathwater with a single finger. Then she refolded it and tucked it under her pillow, against the springs, where no one would think to look.
Outside, the rain began. It tapped the roof in a pattern she had been sure she had forgotten.
She lay down on top of the bedspread, still in her coat, and listened to the Cascadia Bay weather report she had been receiving for ten years from the only correspondent who had never stopped dialing. She did not turn the television back on. She did not need to. The image of the figure in the blue ice, lying there with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be, was already printed on the inside of her eyelids.
Somewhere, out past the motel parking lot, past the wet road, past the inlet and the railroad bridge, the glacier had opened its hand. What it had been holding, she thought, was not necessarily a stranger. In a town this small, no one who died twenty-five years ago could have stayed a stranger for very long.
She closed her eyes and listened to the rain, and the rain did not say anything back to her, and she was glad of it.
The rain had not stopped by morning. It had simply changed register, shifting from the soft, intermittent tapping of the night before to a steadier, more insistent drumming against the motel's aluminum siding. Eleanor sat up on the bedspread, her coat wrinkled beneath her, and looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. 6:47 a.m. The green numerals stared back at her without opinion.
She had slept, or something close to it. The letter under her pillow was a small, hard rectangle of pressure against her shoulder blade, and she had dreamed of nothing she could remember, which was its own kind of remembering. She swung her legs off the bed and sat for a moment with her hands on her knees, listening to the rain and to the faint, distant hum of the highway, and to the almost imperceptible creak of the building settling around her.
The Cascadia Bay television station would be starting its morning broadcast soon. She reached for the remote on the nightstand and clicked it on. The screen flickered to life: a local weather map, all greens and yellows, the precipitation band stretched across the coastline like a bruise.
The screen flickered to life: a local weather map, all greens and yellows, the precipitation band stretched across the coastline like a bruise. A young meteorologist with a too-bright smile traced the colored bands with her finger and spoke about an atmospheric river, about moisture plumes, about the rain that would continue through the weekend and probably into the next. Eleanor watched without hearing. She was looking at the logo in the corner of the screen, the blue and silver of the local affiliate, and she was deciding whether she was brave enough to keep the channel there when the weather ended.
She was not brave enough. She reached for the remote and muted the volume, but she did not change the channel. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands between her knees and watched the mouth of the meteorologist move without sound, and then she watched the screen fade to a graphic and then to a pair of anchors at a desk, and she watched the male anchor look down at his notes and then up at the camera with the particular expression that meant someone had found something.
She turned the volume back up.
The female anchor was speaking first. "Cascadia Bay Police and county search and rescue teams have confirmed that a body recovered yesterday afternoon from the toe of the Shull Glacier has been transported to the county coroner's office in Astoria." Eleanor's hands tightened on her knees. "The remains, which had been partially exposed by recent accelerated melt, have not yet been formally identified, though investigators say they appear to be those of an adolescent or young adult at the time of death."
The screen changed to a photograph, a still image lifted from what looked like amateur footage: a patch of gray ice, a smear of color against the gray, something that might have been fabric caught on a rock outcropping. The footage was shaky and the resolution was poor, and Eleanor had to lean forward to see it clearly. Then the image changed again, to a closer shot, and this one was crisp enough.
The jacket was small. It was the blue of a robin's egg that had been left out in the sun too long, faded almost to a suggestion of color, and the zipper was brass and the zipper pull was shaped like a leaf. There was a rip in the left shoulder, and a patch on the right elbow that Eleanor could see even from the motel room in the bad light of the morning broadcast.
She knew that patch. She had sewn it on herself, in a classroom that smelled of glue and cafeteria steam, on a December afternoon in 1998. Hannah had brought the jacket to school because the heater in her mother's car had died and the bus had been late, and the wool lining had come loose at the elbow, and Eleanor had offered to fix it because Eleanor's mother had taught her to sew and because Hannah was the kind of person who would let you. The patch had been cut from a scrap of flannel that had once been a pair of Eleanor's old pajama pants, blue and white checked, and Hannah had laughed and called them matching forever.
The broadcast continued. The anchor was speaking again. "Investigators are asking anyone with information regarding persons missing from the Cascadia Bay area between 1985 and 2000 to contact the county sheriff's office. The case is being treated as a potential homicide."
Eleanor did not hear any of that. She was sitting on the edge of the motel bed with her hand still on the remote and her other hand pressed flat against her mouth, and her eyes were open, and she was looking at the screen, and the screen was looking back at her, and somewhere underneath the motel, underneath the rain, underneath the town, underneath the glacier, a girl she had known when she was eleven years old was waiting to be identified by people who had never sewn a patch onto her sleeve.
The remote slipped out of her hand and fell into the bedspread.
She had seen this broadcast before. She had seen it seven months ago in her apartment in Brooklyn, on a different television, in a different room, in a different life. She had been sitting at her desk with a cup of coffee that had gone cold in her hand, because she had been working on a piece about municipal corruption in the outer boroughs and she had not been paying attention to the news. The headline had crawled across the bottom of the screen and she had glanced up without thinking, the way a person glances up at a clock, and then she had seen the jacket.
It had only been on the screen for four seconds. A still image, lifted from the same amateur footage, the same patch on the same elbow. She had set the coffee down so hard that it had sloshed onto the legal pad beneath it, and she had watched the four seconds again, and then she had called the station, and then she had called her mother, and then she had packed a bag.
She had not spoken to her mother in eighteen months at that point. The phone had rung six times, and her mother had picked up on the seventh, and Eleanor had said only, "I am coming home," and her mother had said nothing for so long that Eleanor had thought the call had dropped, and then her mother had said, "Okay," in a voice that sounded like a door being opened.
That had been seven months ago. The body had not been identified in seven months. The case had gone cold and then warm and then cold again, according to the local blog Hannah had once run, and Eleanor had read every post, and she had rented a room at the motel on the edge of town, and she had walked the beach for an hour each morning, and she had eaten dinner alone at the diner on the harbor, and she had not gone to the house on Maple Street because she was not yet ready to go to the house on Maple Street.
Now, on the screen in front of her, the broadcast was ending. The anchors were smiling their practiced goodbyes, and the female anchor was wishing everyone a good morning, and the screen was going to soft static, and Eleanor was still sitting on the bed with her hand over her mouth, and she knew that she could not sit here any longer. She knew that she had been sitting here for seven months, waiting for permission to begin, and that the permission was not going to come from anyone but her, and that the letter under her pillow was not going to be the thing that moved her, and that the glacier was not going to wait.
She got up.
She crossed the room to the window and looked out at the rain, which had not stopped, and which did not look like it was going to stop. The parking lot of the motel was empty except for her rented car, and beyond the lot the road curved away toward town, and beyond the town the mountain rose into the clouds, and she could not see the glacier from here but she knew it was there. She knew it the way she knew the sound of the sewing machine in her mother's kitchen, the way she knew the particular weight of a wool coat in winter, the way she knew that her father was gone and her mother was alone and Hannah had been gone for twenty-five years, and that the patch on the jacket had been cut from her own old pajamas.
She pulled the letter from under her pillow. It was a single sheet of lined paper, folded twice, the handwriting on the outside of the fold careful and unhurried. She did not open it. She had read it seventeen times since it had arrived at the Brooklyn apartment three days after the body had been found. She had read it on the train, and in the airport, and in the rental car on the way into town, and she had read it again the night before in the dark of the motel room, by the light of her phone, while the rain had tapped against the aluminum siding like a person trying to get in.
The letter was from Sheriff Dale Mercer. It was three sentences long, and it said, in the careful official hand of a man who had grown up in a town like this and who knew how to be careful with words, that the county coroner had requested a family member of Hannah Soren to provide a DNA sample, and that Eleanor's name had been on a list in the back of a drawer in the town clerk's office, and that if she was willing and able, she could come to the station at her convenience.
Eleanor folded the letter and put it in the pocket of her coat.
She looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. 7:14 a.m. The green numerals blinked at her without opinion, the way the numerals had blinked at her every morning for seven months, and the way they would blink at her tomorrow whether she went to the station or not. She thought about the rain, and about the glacier, and about the patch on the jacket, and about her mother alone in the house on Maple Street, and she thought about Hannah's laugh on a December afternoon, bright and warm and airy, the way it had sounded when she had called them matching forever.
She picked up her keys from the nightstand, and her bag from the chair, and she walked to the door of the motel room, and she opened the door, and the rain came in at her, cold and insistent and smelling of salt and pine, and she stepped out into it and pulled the door shut behind her, and she did not look back.
The walk to the station took eleven minutes. Eleanor counted them in her head, the way she had counted things as a child, the way she had counted the steps between the porch and the road, between the road and the school, between one part of her life and another. The rain had settled into a steady, vertical pour that did not waver in the wind because there was no wind, only the low ceiling of cloud and the smell of the harbor, brine and diesel and the faint metallic tang of the old cannery. Her shoes were wrong for this. She had bought them in the city, leather-soled, meant for pavement and the polished floors of lobbies, and they slid on the painted crosswalk lines and on the wet manhole covers and on the slick of fallen leaves that plastered themselves to the asphalt like small drowned hands.
She did not fall.
The station was a low brick building on the corner of Main and Chestnut, set back from the sidewalk behind a wrought-iron fence that had been painted black once and was now the color of a bruise. She had played on that fence as a girl. She had hung from the top bar and dropped to the sidewalk and hung again, and Hannah had dared her to do it higher, and she had done it higher, and Hannah had laughed that bright airy laugh that sounded, even now, like a window thrown open in a stuffy room. The memory came without permission and stayed without welcome.
Inside, the linoleum was the same pattern it had been when she was seven. Brown and tan swirls that looked like the inside of a shell. The air smelled of coffee that had been on the burner too long and of paper and of the particular institutional must that she associated with every public building she had ever walked into, from the town clerk's office to the city clerk's office to the offices where she had sat across from men in suits and tried to ask the right questions.
Sheriff Dale Mercer was behind the counter, reading something on a computer screen. He was a tall man, narrower than he had been at twenty, with the careful posture of someone who had learned to take up less space than his body required. He looked up when the door chime sounded. His face did something complicated that she could not read, and then it settled into the professional face of a man who had been elected three times and intended to be elected again.
"Eleanor," he said. He did not say her last name. In a town this size, last names were for strangers and for the obituaries.
"Sheriff."
"Come around. There's no one else here. Clara took the kids to her mother's." He gestured to the gate in the counter. "I appreciate you coming in. I know it's early."
She came around. The gate stuck the way it always had, and she had to lift it and push, and the hinges gave a small cry of metal that sounded, in the quiet of the empty lobby, like a thing that had been waiting to be heard.
The back office was smaller than she remembered. The desk was the same. The chair was the same. The framed photograph on the wall was of a different sheriff, a man named Pesch, Walter Pesch, who had been sheriff when she was a child and who had retired and died and whose portrait had been hung in the place of honor behind the desk. Vincent Hale had been a deputy then. He was the deputy still, though his hair had gone the color of galvanized steel and his hands shook when he held his coffee cup. He was sitting in the side chair when she came in, and he stood when she entered, and the gesture was old-fashioned enough that she felt the age of it in her chest.
"Ms. Vance," Vincent Hale said.
"Sit down, Vince," Sheriff Mercer said. "Eleanor, sit. Please."
She sat. The chair was vinyl and it sighed under her, the way chairs sighed in this building, the way everything in this town seemed to sigh under the weight of its own memory. Vincent Hale sat back down. Sheriff Mercer came around the desk and sat on its edge, one foot on the floor, one foot dangling, and he looked at her with the look of a man choosing his words the way a man chooses his footing on a rock.
"Before we do the sample," he said, "I want to tell you what's going on. I think you should know."
"All right," she said.
"Three days ago, a hiker found a pack on the north side of the glacier, above the tree line. The pack had been there a while. It was under a rock overhang. The hiker brought it down and called us. Inside the pack we found a jacket with a patch on the shoulder."
He paused. He looked at her.
"It was Hannah's patch," he said.
Eleanor did not move. The rain tapped on the window behind Sheriff Mercer, and the fluorescent light above the desk hummed at a frequency she could feel in her back teeth, and somewhere in the building a door closed, and the building settled, and the photograph of Walter Pesch on the wall looked down at her with the painted eyes of a man who had been dead for eleven years.
"The coroner went up yesterday," Sheriff Mercer said. "They found remains. Partial. The DNA is degraded, but not gone. We've sent what we have to the state lab. They'll work on it. But the coroner asked us to get a familial sample, to confirm, before they start the longer process. That's standard."
"Hannah," Eleanor said.
"Yes."
"She was my friend."
"I know."
"She was my friend," Eleanor said again, and this time her voice did something she had not authorized, a small roughness at the edges, and Sheriff Mercer heard it, and Vincent Hale heard it, and neither of them said anything for a moment.
"Your name was on a card in the side pocket of the pack," Sheriff Mercer said. "A library card. Your name was on it. And in the back of the drawer in the town clerk's office, we found a list. It was an old list. Emergency contacts. Hannah had updated it in 2019. Your name was the first one."
She had not known that. She had not known that Hannah had put her name first, in 2019, three years after Eleanor had left, three years after the fight with her mother, three years after she had stopped answering Hannah's calls for a month and then had answered them again, and then had answered them less, and then had not answered them at all for the better part of a decade. Hannah had put her name first. Hannah had kept her card. Hannah had gone up the mountain with Eleanor's name in her pocket, and the mountain had given Hannah back, and the giving was this: a jacket with a patch, and a library card, and a chair in a sheriff's office that smelled of old coffee, and Eleanor sitting in it with her hands in her lap and her shoes wet and the rain going on and on against the window.
"I can do the sample," she said. "Whatever you need."
"It's a cheek swab," Vincent Hale said. He had the kit ready on the desk beside him, in a paper envelope with the state seal. His hands shook when he picked it up. He opened it. He read her the consent. She signed.
The swab was cool and soft against the inside of her cheek. She held it there for the ten seconds he asked her to hold it. She counted. She looked at the photograph of Walter Pesch on the wall, and she thought about Walter Pesch, who had been kind to her when she was a girl, who had once given her a ride home from the library in his cruiser because it had been raining, and she had not thought of him in twenty years, and now she thought of him and his painted eyes and his painted patience, and she held the swab and she counted.
When it was done, Vincent Hale put the swab in the envelope and sealed it and wrote her name
on the envelope and sealed it and wrote her name on the line he indicated, and the pen he gave her was a cheap ballpoint with a county seal on it, and the ink came out blue, and her name in his handwriting was neater than her own.
Vincent Hale set the envelope on the corner of the desk where he had set the first one, and there were two envelopes now, side by side, with his handwriting on both, and she did not ask whose the other one was because she already knew whose the other one was, because the other one had come up off the mountain in a jacket with a patch on the shoulder and a library card in the pocket and a face she had not seen in ten years and would not see again in any way that mattered.
Sheriff Dale Mercer stood in the doorway of his office. He had not come in while Vincent Hale was reading the consent. He had waited in the hall, or the next room, or wherever sheriffs wait when they cannot be in the room with what is happening, and now he stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands and he did not put it on. He looked at Eleanor Vance. He looked at the chair. He looked at the envelopes on the desk. He looked at the photograph of Walter Pesch on the wall, and something moved across his face that she could not read, and then it was gone, and he said her name.
"Eleanor."
"Sheriff."
"Dale," he said. "You're home, Eleanor. Call me Dale."
She did not call him Dale. She said, "How long has Hannah been back?"
He came into the room then, and he did not sit at the desk. He sat in the chair beside the desk, the one Vincent Hale had sat in, and he leaned forward with his hat in his hands and he did not look at her eyes.
"Three weeks," he said. "Clara found her."
Clara Mercer. The clerk. The one who had made the phone call to the number that had been disconnected and then had not been disconnected after all, because somewhere in the city Eleanor had kept the line and paid the bill and not answered it. Clara Mercer had been the one to find Hannah Soren in the woods above the town, and Clara Mercer had made the call, and the line had rung in Eleanor's apartment at four in the morning on a Tuesday, and Eleanor had picked it up because she had not been sleeping, because she had not been sleeping for a year, because the mountain had been calling her in a way she had refused to name, and the voice on the other end had been a stranger's voice, and the stranger's voice had said her name.
Eleanor had come home. She had come home the way the mountain gives things back: slowly, and against her will, and with the cost already counted out.
"Three weeks," she said.
"We tried to reach you sooner," Dale Mercer said. "The number in the file was old. Clara got the new one from your mother's phone records, and I want you to know that I told her not to do that. I want you to know that I told her it was not her place. I want you to know that I told her that and she did it anyway because Clara is Clara, and because your mother had been calling us asking us to find you for six months before we even knew there was anything to find you for."
Eleanor looked at the floor. The floor was the same floor she remembered. The same scuff by the door. The same place where she had once spilled a coffee that Sheriff Pesch had given her in a paper cup that said APPRECIATE OUR TROOPS on the side.
"My mother," Eleanor said.
"Your mother has been sick, Eleanor."
The word sick landed in the room like a stone in still water. She had not known. She had not let herself know. She had not asked, because asking would have meant a phone call home, and a phone call home would have meant her mother's voice, and her mother's voice would have meant the thing that had happened at her father's bedside, and the thing that had happened at her father's bedside was the thing she had been running from for ten years, and now the mountain had given her back, and her mother was in it, somewhere, the way Hannah was in it, the way all of them were in it.
"How sick," Eleanor said.
"Sick enough that Clara called us," Dale Mercer said. "Sick enough that I drove out to the house on Ridge Road last Tuesday to sit at her kitchen table and drink the tea she made me even though her hands shook when she poured it. Sick enough that when I left she stood at the door and watched me go, and I turned back at the end of the drive and she was still standing there, Eleanor. She was still standing there in the doorway in her slippers, and I have known that woman since I was a boy, and I have never seen her look the way she looked."
Eleanor's hands were in her lap. Her shoes were wet. The rain was going on against the window, and the sound of it was the sound she had been hearing in the city for ten years without knowing it was this sound, this particular sound, the rain on the glass in the sheriff's office in the town she had been born in.
"Is she at the hospital?" Eleanor said.
"She's at home," Dale Mercer said. "Dr. Pratt is coming twice a day. Lena is good, Eleanor. Lena is very good. You know that."
She knew that. Lena Pratt had been the doctor at the end of her father's life. Lena Pratt had been the one who had come out to the house at three in the morning when Eleanor's father could not breathe. Lena Pratt had been the one who had told them there was nothing left to do. Lena Pratt had been the one who had looked at Eleanor across the bed and said, in that smooth, articulate voice of hers, the words Eleanor had refused to forgive, and Eleanor had gone to the city, and the city had not fixed it, and now Lena Pratt was coming twice a day to her mother's house on Ridge Road.
"I should go to her," Eleanor said.
"You should go to her," Dale Mercer said. "But first I have to ask you a thing, and I want you to hear me out before you answer, and I want you to know that whatever you answer I will accept it, and I will not ask you twice."
He set his hat on the desk. He looked at her. His eyes were the color of the rain on the window.
"The body that came off the mountain," he said. "It has been three weeks and the state has not been able to identify her, because Hannah Soren has no living family that we can find, and the dental records we have are twenty years old, and the DNA they took from the house is degraded. We need a familial sample. We need someone who shares blood with Hannah. We need you, Eleanor. We have needed you for three weeks, and we have not had you, and I am asking you now."
The rain went on. The envelope with her name on it sat on the corner of the desk. The photograph of Walter Pesch looked at her from the wall with its painted patience.
"If it's her," Eleanor said.
"We don't know if it's her," Dale Mercer said. "That's the point. We don't know. The jacket is hers. The card is hers. But Hannah Soren was a person who lent her jacket to anyone who was cold, and Hannah Soren was a person who would have given her library card to a stranger if the stranger asked, and the mountain has given us back something that looks like Hannah and might not be Hannah, and we cannot put her in the ground until we know. We cannot put her in the ground as Hannah if it is not Hannah. We owe her that. We owe the Soren girl that much, at least."
Eleanor looked at him. She looked at Vincent Hale, who had not moved from the desk, who had not spoken, who was holding the envelope with her DNA in it as though it were made of something more fragile than paper.
"You can take the sample," she said. "You already took it."
"That's not the question," Dale Mercer said. "The question is whether you will consent to the comparison. The question is whether you will let us match your blood to whatever it is we found up there. The question is whether you are willing to know."
She was quiet for a long time. The rain went on. The room smelled of old coffee and the wet wool of her coat and the paper of the envelope in Vincent Hale's hands.
"Hannah kept my name in her pocket," Eleanor said. "Hannah kept my library card. Hannah went up that mountain with me in her pocket, and whatever she found up there, she found it carrying me with her. I have been carried by Hannah Soren for thirty years. I have been carried by her since we were girls. I am not going to stop her from being identified now. I am not going to let the mountain keep her because I am afraid of what the answer is."
She stood up. Her shoes were wet on the floor. She looked at Dale Mercer and she looked at Vincent Hale and she looked at the photograph of Walter Pesch, who had been kind to her, who had driven her home from the library in the rain.
"Do the comparison," she said. "Whatever it costs."
Dale Mercer nodded. He did not thank her. He stood up and put his hat back on, and the hat was the wrong hat for the room, and he knew it, and he wore it anyway, because sheriffs wear hats, and a sheriff had to put on his hat to do what came next.