The Hollows--A Novel

by Jess Montgomery

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  To Janice, My Mother-in-Law, Who Once Wrote to Our Daughter:

  “It is impossible for a woman to learn too much, dream too big, or live too joyously!”

  PROLOGUE

  Tuesday, September 21, 1926—9:12 p.m.

  For near on ten miles, the old woman walks without ceasing.

  The full moon ladles light into the deep, clear night. The light trickles between trees—some already bereft of leaves—to softly pool in spots along her path.

  The path her daddy had taught her.

  She follows it now as then, harkening to his whisper welling up from seventy years past, and as she does, her hips and knees unstiffen into sprightliness. At each milestone—across the swinging bridge, past a large boulder tumbled down from the ridge countless ages ago—her breath and heart quicken, not so much from physical effort as from the excitement of the path springing back to life. At herself springing back to a younger life. Years and places and people fall away as if the path forgives her for forgetting it, as if it has always remembered her, has patiently awaited her return, knowing she would at last remember it, too, and come back to it.

  Knowing it would, in the end, claim her.

  There—a natural spring bubbles up, guarded by a stone well.

  There—the Friends meeting house, its simple angled roof cutting a wedge out of the moon. We have allies there, but we only stop if truly desperate; it is too obvious a place. She gasps. Daddy’s whisper, scholarly and somber and smoky from his pipe, is no longer within her but beside her, and she turns to look at him.

  In the spare second it takes to see he’s not there, she stumbles for the first time since escaping, comes to herself, to momentary full awareness of who she is now: an old woman, shivering in her thin nightgown and robe, her bare feet wrapped in cleaning rags she’d managed to sneak aside, clutching her daddy’s gold compass, the only item she’d kept from childhood. Except—oh! Her jagged fingernails—only recently neat and polished—dig into the palm of her hand, find that she’s clutching nothing.

  Perhaps she’d dropped the compass. Or perhaps she hadn’t brought it with her. Of late, it’s become so hard to know what’s real, what’s not.

  For some time, people and moments and events—living and dead, past and present—have been raveling free of one another, like pieces in a patch quilt whose connecting stitches have broken, the pieces all still there but floating separately, randomly, in her mind.

  Then she spots the wild pawpaw tree. Oh! It’s still here, this tree she’d loved to visit in the fall as a child.

  No, she loves visiting now, for isn’t she a child?

  She twirls—or tries to, for she also loved dancing as a child—and the resultant stumble brings her back to her elderly self. But she stares up with gratitude at the tree. Then she reaches for the just-now ripe fruit, the sight and touch of which sets her mouth to watering and her stomach to grumbling.

  After her quick meal, beyond the tree, she spots the rock face and the pile of boulders. On the other side of the rock face is the cave, where they should be waiting for her. John, Garnet, and the baby.… Her heart races; her pulse thrums; the patch quilt pieces tumble and tangle.

  No. They’re not there yet. She’s making this trek to find them. Warn them. Save them.

  Hurry, her daddy whispers.

  And so she keeps on, taking hidden ways, not stopping when far-off coyote calls pierce the close-up chittering of crickets and katydids, or even at a whiff of woodsmoke from a cabin, the scent stirring a longing for home and food and rest.

  Finally, by instinct borne of long and deeply buried memory, she turns up a rise and at last comes upon the train track.

  With her first step onto the crushed stone ballast between the wood ties, she cries out. Her feet are already gashed and swollen from her flight through the woods. Pain rattles up her legs to her hips. Her next step is onto a wood tie—easier on the bottoms of her feet than the ballast, but the ties are set too far apart for her to set her pace to them.

  She settles for walking as lightly as she can on the ballast, quick dancer steps, as if her calves and feet remember their time onstage, even if her mind does not.

  Except … a flash of memory of dancing shoes. Then of sturdy walking shoes, from recent days. Why wouldn’t Mama let her have her shoes?

  No, it wasn’t Mama who took her shoes—

  No matter. She will distract herself by counting each step. After a while, she no longer feels the crushed stone lacerating her feet, the cramps in her calf muscles, the spasming in her hips and back.

  She no longer deftly leaps forward. She simply walks, walks, walks without ceasing.

  Until she comes upon the Moonvale Hollow Tunnel.

  The tunnel is made of stones quarried and hewn from a nearby hollow. Trees grow on the earth mounded over its flat top. Moonlight skims the trees and drips generously enough to create the illusion of another full moon awaiting on the other side.

  The old woman stops. Halting brings awareness of pain and her legs tremble, give way, and she falls to her knees. She cries out—now as then, old woman and young girl, one and the same. A realization flickers—she has been seeing this tunnel her whole life, shimmering out of the corner of her right eye, like a misaligned stereograph slide.

  In this moment, the actual sight of the tunnel is a gut punch.

  Still, she must go in, through the darkness, to the moon on the other side. She rises shakily. She wants to move forward but for a moment forgets how to walk. There—a flicker of movement in the corner of her left eye. A twig, snapping.

  And so for a moment, the old woman gazes to her left, into the thicket.

  Stillness. Darkness. Silence. Nothing.

  She looks back to the maw of the Moonvale Hollow Tunnel.

  There—her father.

  He hangs by his neck from a rope lashed around the trunk of a tree growing on top of the earth-covered tunnel, his body a dark silhouette over the light on the other side of the tunnel, the light brighter now and filling the whole opening, and his body shifts back and forth, a flutter’s worth of movement.

  A piercing wail. Not her scream, not yet. The wailing grows along with the light behind him, and only as that light grows to claim her father’s image, to take him from her again, does she cry out for him.

  Time, that cruel trickster, freezes her to the spot.

  Someone grabs her. Drags her from the track, from the growing light and noise, from her father. She struggles to wriggle free but only manages to twist enough to see the side of the man’s face.

  John!

  No—the shiny, taut scar from earlobe to dimpled chin, the houndstooth-checked cap—these are not John’s. Yet in his countenance of concern, the alarm in his kind gaze, she sees him after all. John.

  And she relaxes into his grasp as he pulls her to safety into the woods.

  This time, this time, she’d found him soon enough.r />
  CHAPTER 1

  LILY

  Tuesday, September 21—11:10 p.m.

  As promised, a man with a mule-drawn cart waits a mile or so from the turnoff onto Moonvale Hollow Road. Lily Ross spots them in her headlights as she eases around a sharp turn.

  She pulls off to the side, relieved to come to a stop. Ever since turning off from Kinship Road, her Model T rattled in protest at ruts and jags, wheels jittery on dirt and gravel at her initial fifteen-miles-per-hour speed. She’d had to slow to ten. No use losing a tire.

  Now as she stops, she sees the man—young, early twenties, one hand on the mule’s lead, the other thumbing his overall strap. Lily turns off her automobile, picks up her flashlight, opens her door. She steps out carefully, her sight needing a moment to adjust to the moonlit night.

  When it does, she notes the man gaping at her. Then grinning slowly. He can’t see, or maybe can’t read, “Bronwyn County Sheriff” emblazoned on the door.

  As she slips her key ring into her skirt pocket—she’s recently added pockets to all of her skirts and dresses, even her Sunday dress—she briefly pulls back her jacket and touches her revolver, holstered around her waist. Then she reaches back in her vehicle, grabs the sheet she thought at the last moment to bring with her, and tucks it under her arm. She shuts the door, turns on her flashlight, shines it directly at the young man. He’s still grinning. Must not have noticed the revolver.

  “Ma’am, you need some help?”

  She turns the flashlight onto her sheriff’s star pinned to her lapel. She takes a deep breath, notes the loamy dryness of the autumn air. Good. Rain would only disturb the body she has come for, the area around it. She hopes to see both as intact as possible. She turns her flashlight back on the young man.

  He’s no longer grinning.

  “My apologies, ma’am, Sheriff, no one done told me—”

  “You work for the B and R Railroad?”

  The young man straightens with pride. “Flagman. In training.”

  Lily nods, steps forward toward the mule and cart, waiting at the head of the dirt path that actually leads to Moonvale Hollow Village.

  “Don’t know how clean the straw bales in back are; if I’da known—”

  The mule fusses as Lily approaches. She pats the flank of the poor beast. More than likely tired out from a day’s work, and now called into service at night.

  Lily, too, is bone weary after a long day.

  * * *

  Just an hour earlier, she had been tempted to ignore the knock at her door—probably Missy Ranklin again, given to coming late at night to complain about her husband, Ralf, but never willing to file formal charges.

  On the off chance Missy might actually file a complaint that Lily could follow up on, Lily had answered her door. Instead of mousy Missy, a telegraph delivery boy greeted her. Lily’s hand had trembled as she reached for the thin slip of paper. The last telegram she’d received, just over a year before, had been from the powerful Cincinnati attorney, business mogul, and big-time bootlegger George Vogel; that telegram brought a cryptic message Lily had deciphered quickly enough: an offering to expel those responsible for her husband’s death from the region.

  This telegram, though, was from the deputy stationmaster for the B&R Railroad line in Moonvale Hollow Village: someone had fallen from the top of the Moonvale Hollow Tunnel onto the train as it headed east to west. A B&R Railroad man would meet her on Moonvale Hollow Road by the narrow dirt path that led to the village: population one hundred souls—depending on the ebb and flow of birth and death—existing only to serve as a rail switching yard and depot, and inaccessible by automobile. Folks can get in and out only by train, mule, or foot.

  She’d tipped the telegraph boy a dime to go fetch her closest friend, Hildy Lee Cooper, who lived a few doors down from the sheriff’s house. Hildy, who also worked as the jail mistress, could always be relied upon to come stay with Lily’s children—seven-year-old Jolene and five-year-old Micah—when duty sometimes called Lily away of an evening.

  A few minutes later, the boy was back—neither Hildy nor Hildy’s mother was at the Cooper house. Lily spared a moment’s worth of surprise to wonder where the two could be, so late at night—but the more pressing matter was the dead person along the rail line in Moonvale Hollow Village. Two more dimes sent the telegraph boy back out to fetch Lily’s own mama, residing at the end of the street.

  After he left again, in the scant time it took Lily to put water on the stove to boil, rush upstairs to change into one of her older dresses and work boots, and then hurry down again, Mama was letting herself and Caleb Jr.—Mama’s change-of-life baby, same age as Lily’s son—into the kitchen through the mudroom door.

  Lily gave her little brother a quick hug and then tucked him in under a quilt on the parlor’s settee. She retrieved her notebook and pencil from the rolltop desk, pulled open the top drawer to grab her flashlight, then hurried back to the kitchen. As Mama finished making the coffee, Lily got her revolver and sheriff’s star from the top of the pie safe. While Mama poured Lily a cup of coffee, Lily explained, “I’ve been called out to investigate an accident on the rail line in Moonvale Hollow Village.”

  Mama’s eyes widened; both knew of the remote village, the source of ghost stories children told one another, but neither had ever visited. There’d been no reason. The village had been founded by Adam Dyer just before the Civil War, on land his family had passed down generation-to-generation, the original claim given in lieu of cash as recompense for serving in the Revolutionary War. Two generations of Dyers had hardscrabble farmed the ornery land, riddled with hollows and ridges, until coal companies needed a quick shortcut through the area from points east to a bigger depot from which they could go to Cincinnati and Columbus. Cleverly, Adam Dyer leased out his land for a rail line—only wide enough for one track—and Moonvale Hollow became a remote village. Dyers had always been synonymous with Moonvale Hollow.

  Until, of late, Perry Dyer—Lily’s opponent for the role of sheriff in the upcoming election. Perry, sole heir of the rail lease rights and village property, had moved with his wife, Margaret, into Kinship a year before, shortly after Perry’s father died. Talk was that Margaret had a strong preference for big-town life and, with her father-in-law gone, she could finally have her way. Perry, who’d opened a hunting supply store in Kinship, had pounced on the opportunity to run against Lily this fall. His editorial in the Kinship Daily Courier, which had only recently become a daily, another sign of the area’s growing prosperity, made clear his position: he knew the county inside out, even the most remote pockets, and though Lily’s tenure as appointed sheriff was a quaint novelty, it was time for a real sheriff to take office. Meaning, a male sheriff.

  Lily said, “I’m sure this investigation will go quickly. Just a matter of some official paperwork with the rail company.”

  Mama had looked relieved, said, “Good—you have the meeting first thing tomorrow morning to prepare for the debate with Perry Dyer, and the Woman’s Club meeting coming up, and don’t forget you need to get your pie into the county fair—”

  Lily groaned.

  “So you’re running for sheriff in your own right.” Mama cast a pointed glance at the top of the pie safe, from whence Lily had just grabbed her revolver and badge. Pushed to the back of the top was a red glass dish in which nested Lily’s old best-in-show county fair pie ribbons, once a point of pride, now gathering dust. “They still want to know you’re a woman.”

  “According to Perry Dyer, that’s not a favorable asset.”

  “Well, worse’n a woman in a man’s role is a woman who acts too much like a man.”

  An argument Mama had made, years before, when Daddy had taken tomboy Lily on hunting and fishing expeditions. Lily gave Mama a reassuring smile. Mama had, after all, come quickly, dragging herself and Caleb Jr. out of bed and down to Lily’s home—the county sheriff’s house. As Mama did, every time Lily asked.

  Even so, with her work and all the
tedious campaign tasks necessary for election for a full four-year term in her own right as sheriff, Lily barely had time to bake and cook for her own children. She didn’t want to bake a damned pie for a contest. But she knew Mama was right, so she would—later. Right then, she gulped the strong boiled coffee, knowing she’d need it to stay alert for her drive to the designated meeting spot, and the investigation to follow.

  * * *

  Now, at the mule cart, Lily hoists herself up and sits on the driver’s bench. The mule heaves forward, but Lily pulls gently back on the reins. She looks at the young man, still gaping at her.

  “You planning to drive us there, or walk behind?”

  He glances over his shoulder, winces. He’s holding his right shoulder tight to his collar. He looks back at her nervously. “Anyone else comin’?”

  Lily bites her lip to stifle her sigh. It is, after all, 1926 and in the big cities—from what she reads in the newspapers, anyway—standards have relaxed, but here in rural Ohio, it’s still improper for an unmarried man and woman to be alone together.

  “Son,” she says, though at twenty-eight she’s barely older than he, “like it or not, I’m the sheriff of Bronwyn County.” She’d been appointed a year and a half before to serve in her deceased husband’s stead, then won a special election last November. “I can question you while you drive us, or I can drive myself, and ask you later when you catch up on foot—and delay further your train getting back to running. I can reckon what your boss would prefer.”

  The flagman in training hesitates, but as she lifts the reins he hoists himself into the cart, plops on the driver’s bench, and grabs the leads from her.

  A few jolting steps forward and they’re down the path, ducking so their heads won’t knock into a broken, dangling limb of an oak. Overhead, tree limbs clutch one another, forming a tunnel of branch and leaf. Meager moonlight sifts onto their path, wide enough for the cart and mule. Lily glances over her shoulder. Already, she cannot see the dangling limb, or the rutted road where she left her automobile.