What the River Takes

Adelaide Voss hasn't set foot in Hollow Creek in a decade , not since she fled the river town with its black water and its buried quarrels. Now she's back, wrist in a brace, knuckles white on the wheel of a borrowed Hudson sedan, rounding the bend above town as dusk swallows the smokestacks. She tells herself she came to settle her grandmother's estate. She tells herself a lot of things. The town she remembers is gone. The cannery is padlocked. Main Street flickers with a single working streetlamp. And at the edge of the old quarry, a girl has drowned in water that hasn't run clean in years. Sheriff Huck Vassel, who never quite trusted her, isn't surprised to see her. Neither is Vivienne Lassiter, the journalist who never stopped asking questions. Nor is Reverend Caleb Thorne, whose sermons have been getting stranger since the flood. Boone Maddox wants her gone. Della Mott wants her gone permanently. And the Vassels , Huck, Nora, Jonas, and Iris , orbit each other with the wary precision of a family that has buried too many of its own. Down the hill, the Pikes keep their grief behind closed curtains, the Granges keep their ledger close, and Faye Brodie keeps watching from her porch like she has been waiting all along. When the quarry yields up something that should have stayed at the bottom of the river, Adelaide realizes she didn't come to settle an estate. She came because Hollow Creek has been calling her home , and the water is ready to collect. Some debts the river never forgives.