The Hollows--A Novel

by Jess Montgomery

  “A woman—elderly, unidentified—was hit by the train. She fell, or maybe was pushed, from the top of the tunnel. At some point recently, her wrists were bound. I don’t know if that’s coincidence or connected to her death.”

  Bound wrists? Shocking. Hildy steadies her breath, then busies herself with spooning coffee into the kettle. She turns so that Lily can’t see how her hands shake.

  “A brakeman swears he saw someone—a person or a ghost at the top of the tunnel. The latter is nonsense, but he’s convinced someone in white was up there with her. Anyway, the first thing I have to do is track where the victim came from.”

  Hildy sets the coffee to heating. “How are you going to do that?”

  “I took the woman to Arlington Funeral Home. I kept the rags the woman had wound around her feet as makeshift shoes, as well as her nightgown, wrapped up in waxed paper. Mrs. Arlington gave me the paper—begrudgingly.” Lily gives a short laugh. Hildy, despite the grimness of the situation, smiles. Mrs. Arlington is known for being melodramatic about the least thing. “Anyway, I reckon Marvena will know of a hound dog that can track—”

  Hildy’s next words escape of their own volition. “Oh! I can go with you!”

  “You’re eager to see Marvena.” Lily sounds amused.

  Hildy’s not, but going along might mean a chance to see Tom, just one more time. Maybe he’d take back his words. Maybe she’d convince him to give her more time, to find the right time to tell Merle and Mother the truth.

  Shame at the secret she’s kept—not to mention her jealousy of Marvena, who slowly seems to have taken her place as Lily’s best friend—makes Hildy’s face burn anew. Then she thinks of the letter from Benjamin Russo she’d seen in the mail. For a second, Hildy had been tempted to read the letter, but that would violate privacy, even between best friends. All she knew of Benjamin was that he had been Daniel’s friend in the Great War and now works for the Bureau of Mines. Last spring, Lily told her that Mr. Russo had helped settle a disagreement between miners and management, convincing Wessex Corporation, the new owner of Ross Mining, to allow for talk of unionization.

  Finally, the coffee bubbles; the aroma is heavenly. Hildy carefully pours the coffee, so few grounds escape into the cup, as she says, “I’ve been working with Olive Harding. The schoolmarm, over in Rossville. You’ve met her—”

  “Oh yes. You brought her as a guest to a Woman’s Club meeting. And to church. She seems bright,” Lily says approvingly.

  Hildy nods, her hand shaking a little as she gives the cup to Lily. This is a tiny step toward sharing the full truth. “Two evenings a week, Olive tutors miners and their wives in reading and writing. I’ve been volunteering for a while now.”

  Lily looks surprised. “Well now. That’s good.”

  A positive response—and yet Hildy’s heart falls, as she realizes that as close as they’re supposed to be, Lily should already know. Then, too, it strikes her that Marvena must have never brought up Hildy’s presence over the past few months in Rossville.

  Hildy blinks hard. Just go, and sooner or later, it’ll be like you never spent any time here at all.… Tom’s last words come back, stinging as hard as when they’d spurred her to put on her dress, walk out of his house without saying a word or giving him a look, and drive home.

  It hits her: Tom is too much of a gentleman to ever tell anyone of their affair, and so long as she keeps her own mouth shut on the topic, she can marry Merle, settle into the proper life everyone seems to think she wants—that she herself had yearned for until a few months ago. And the good people of Rossville would look the other way. They had too much to worry about to care all that much about a brief fling between a miner and a town girl. It would be as if their love affair had never happened.

  Lily sips coffee. “It’s good. You should have some.”

  “I’m fine.” Hildy smiles, feeling their distance close a little.

  Lily shakes her head. “You should take care of yourself, too.”

  And there it is—the hollow gap between them, borne of the feeling that Lily sees her, may have always seen her, as too fragile. In need of being taken care of. Is that why Lily had been glad about the prospect of Roger marrying her all those years ago, of Merle marrying her now?

  Lily doesn’t seem to notice Hildy’s distress as she takes another sip. “Are there many?”

  Hildy startles. “What?”

  “Miners who need tutoring?”

  “Oh … oh yes. Only a few take advantage.”

  “It’s fine that you’re doing this, Hildy. You could have told me.”

  “Well, Mother and Merle don’t think so. They say I need to stop.”

  “Marriage demands compromise,” Lily says brusquely. “Trust Merle.”

  Hildy fights tears welling in her eyes. The Lily from before Daniel’s death, from before she became sheriff—and friends with Marvena Whitcomb—the Lily who Hildy had loved as her best friend, even as a sister, for her whole life, would not have been so harsh with her.

  She swallows back a lump, manages to say, “Lily, I want to go with you to Rossville, to help you, and maybe while I’m there let Olive know that my availability to tutor may change—”

  “This isn’t a social call. I’ll be out for hours with Marvena, and I need to go while the trail is fresh as possible, before it rains.” Lily pushes her cup away. “I also need to talk to someone at the newspaper.” Lily rubs her eyes, and Hildy feels a pull of sympathy for her friend’s weariness, her frustration at needing to do too many things at once. “I need an announcement to run today about the woman—where she was found, what she looks like, a request for anyone who knows anything to come forward. I need the doctor’s assessment, too. I also need to start tracking as soon as possible—”

  “I can fetch the doctor. Write the piece up. And make a sketch of the woman. Get them in the Kinship Daily Courier.”

  “Hildy, her body—she’s in no condition for you to see—”

  “If you won’t let me go with you to Marvena’s, least let me do this!” Hildy snaps. She slams the coffee kettle against the stove top. “Let me do my job while I can, before I’m married and have to trust Merle!”

  The women stare at each other, both shocked at Hildy’s uncharacteristic outburst. Their silence is cracked by the creaking of the floor above—Jolene turning restlessly in her bed. The poor child had had a nightmare earlier, so fraught she couldn’t describe it. Hildy had soothed her back to sleep. Lily hasn’t said anything about Jolene being troubled, and Hildy wonders if she should mention it.

  Lily looks weary. So instead, Hildy says, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to snap. In a few hours, Mama will be up and can get Jolene off to school. She can take care of Micah and Caleb Junior. And I can sketch the poor woman, make a good guess as to how to…” Hildy pauses, then stumbles on—“to fill in her face. You know I’m good with sketches.”

  Yet for a moment, Lily looks blank, and Hildy is hurt to realize that Lily has forgotten how Hildy had loved to sketch when they were younger—animals, plants, flowers, people.

  Then Lily nods, apparently remembering. “This is different.” Lily puts her hand on Hildy’s arm. “This woman—her face and body—well, it was enough to make at least one of the railroad men retch.”

  Hildy pulls her arm away. “I was with Daddy when he died earlier this year. I was there with you, last year, when you lost the baby. There after the mine collapsed. When the bodies were pulled out. And I stayed, Lily. I stayed.”

  Lily stares at her for a moment, then nods. “If you can get it in first thing this morning, there will still be time for the announcement to run in this afternoon’s paper.”

  “Well. To fit it in, I may have to get the paper to drop the society news piece for the Woman’s Club. We’ll never live down that scandal!”

  For a moment, Lily smiles softly. For a moment, the distance between them closes, and their friendship is as strong as it’s always been.

  CHAPTER 5

&nb
sp; LILY

  Wednesday, September 22—4:00 a.m.

  Here, the full moon does not penetrate the canopy of trees covering Devil’s Backbone, up which a scant half mile nests the log-and-mortar cabin of Marvena Whitcomb.

  Still, Lily doesn’t bother turning on her flashlight as she steps out of her automobile, for she well knows the path ahead. May as well save the flashlight’s power. She tucks it and the automobile key in her rucksack, alongside the dead woman’s nightgown and rag shoes.

  Yet, at first, the dark clutches Lily. She forces her breath to steady and slow until her gaze softens and coaxes shadows from shade, then shapes from shadow. The night’s soft coolness hints of both past summer warmth and the icy winter to come. A smell of loaminess lingers, coaxed forth by yesterday’s rainstorm. Lily had seen the storm clouds roiling eastward, rued that they skirted her part of Bronwyn County, prayed for a good rain to urge on the last of her garden’s tomatoes and squash and pole beans for one more round of home canning, before the first hard frost took its futile harvest.

  Now Lily prays for the weather—ever changing in Ohio—to stay dry for at least another day, until, she hopes, she can track from whence the dead woman had come.

  With her next step up the rutted lane, she considers how her left foot feels. She’d lost her little toe when she was sixteen, rending when caught between rocks the last time she ever jumped with her brother from the Kinship Tree into Coal Creek. Since, her foot aches when a storm approaches.

  Now her foot feels fine, portending a dry spell. Good.

  Lily treks confidently up the incline to Marvena’s settlement. She’s come up here many a time since last fall, enough that she’s lost count, for Marvena is a reliable source for the goings-on in this part of the county.

  Lily smells the cabin before she sees it. A whiff of woodsmoke stirs mouthwatering thoughts of Marvena’s customary offerings—soup beans and corn pone and dried-apple stack cake. She should have taken Hildy’s offer of sandwiches, saving herself from both hunger and Hildy’s disappointment. Her friend seems so ill at ease of late. She needs to get over her wedding jitters, settle down with Merle. Then she’ll be fine. Safe.

  Safe. That’s what Lily wants for Hildy. For Mama and the children. For everyone. Surely someone, somewhere, must have wanted that for the dead woman, too. Surely someone is worrying about her, will want to know what happened to her. Another reason not to dismiss her death so easily as mishap.

  Lily steps into the clearing at the center of which is the cabin, leaning slightly forward as if eager to hear or smell what might be lurking in the woods. A coal-oil lantern glows inside the one window. For a moment, Lily is pleased that Marvena might already be awake—it doesn’t do to startle her, for she is swift to clutch knife and shotgun. Then her thoughts leap to Frankie—Marvena’s daughter, who is seven years old, same as Jolene. But while Jolene seems to Lily to be remarkably healthy and even happy-go-lucky in spite of losing her father, Frankie is often sickly, fragility casting a pale glow from within the child.

  A snort and snore snags Lily’s attention. Guibo, the gray mule asleep in the pen by a shed. The mule, fencing, and shed are all new since Marvena had become an official organizer for the United Mine Workers of America this past spring. With increased hiring in Rossville and other coal towns, the weekly paper becoming a daily, and the growth of Kinship—just over five thousand residents now—prosperity has seemingly reached every nook of Bronwyn County. Even Marvena’s. Lily is glad for her, for all the folks in the community, but she is wary of the giddiness that comes with this newfound prosperity, as if it is permanent, as if it can never disappear.

  A shadow emerges from under the porch, stretches its forepaws, shakes his head side to side. Shep, Marvena’s hound dog. He holds his nose aloft, snuffling, but also looking around confused, unsure of the source of the new smell, the smell of Lily. She smiles, the sight of Shep a surprisingly welcome bit of lighthearted relief in this long, morose night.

  Another shadow, much bigger, loosens and stirs on the porch and Lily pulls short, as the shadow lunges forward, holding a shotgun.

  Lily puts her hand lightly on her holster. Shep seems unconcerned, but then a scratch between his ears and a food scrap would be enough for him to befriend anyone. Lily’s heart races. Someone here fixing to attack Marvena and Frankie? Or maybe has already attacked? Lily grips her revolver.

  The man’s shotgun lifts. “Can’t see you. Can hear you. ’Nuff to aim at.”

  Ah. Jurgis Sacovech, the miner who had helped Marvena’s common-law husband as a union organizer and now, after her husband’s death, aids Marvena. Friend, not foe, but still Lily is alarmed. If Jurgis—who lives with his mother, Nana, down in Rossville—is here, it must mean Marvena needs protecting.

  “It’s Lily Ross!” she calls out.

  Jurgis lowers his shotgun, and Lily hurries up the steps.

  By the time she’s on the porch, Jurgis has lit a lantern. Lily notes Jurgis’s sleepy-eyed look, his off-by-one misbuttoned shirt, his hair tousled out of its normally neatly oiled style, his missing belt, his sock feet.

  Oh. Jurgis is not at Marvena’s cabin for any purpose other than pleasurable. He lights a cigarette, lifts his eyebrows as he inhales, as if daring Lily to question his presence. Except then—why the shotgun?

  “Everything all right here?”

  Jurgis nods. “There was a bit of trouble today at the mines, is all.”

  Lily keeps her expression placid, lets silence unspool. It’s often the best way to get people to tell more than they mean to.

  Sure enough, after a moment he clears his throat. “Marvena is working with a fellow named Clarence Broward to integrate the mines—and the local union. New company has brought in some Negro miners from their operations down south—new seams have been opened up and we can use all the help we can get. This Broward fellow, from the United Mine Workers, well, he took that as an opportunity, came down about a month ago. Good man—but some of the fellows don’t like him just because of his race. Which is stupid, if you ask me. We’re all risking our lives.”

  “I see,” Lily says flatly. Why hadn’t Marvena forewarned her? She doesn’t think there should be a fuss over integrating, either, but she also reckons that her, Marvena’s, and Jurgis’s opinions are likely in the minority. And forewarned is forearmed. “Well, I haven’t heard of any trouble over this in Kinship or other parts of the county.”

  “What’re you in need of, this hour?” Jurgis’s voice is low, careful. Doesn’t want to stir Marvena or Frankie.

  “Tracking hound.”

  Jurgis chuckles. “Well, if’n you need to track a possum a few yards, Shep might do.”

  Lily scratches between the dog’s ears. “Wasn’t thinking of Shep.”

  She means the hounds of the men Marvena employs in her side business—moonshining. Men of distant and uncertain kin to Marvena, a varietal of cousin—second or third removed—and distrustful, working for her only because she toils harder than any of them and knows the secrets for shine made safely. “An elderly woman died, hit by a train. Maybe accident. Maybe murder. Nothing to identify the woman, so I need to track her to her kin.”

  At that, Jurgis takes a slow drag on his cigarette. “Well. I reckon it’s up to Marvena.” He gazes with sympathy at Lily. “You look wore out. Sit a spell.”

  Lily smiles as Jurgis goes back inside—he sounds like his mother, Nana. But she remains standing. No time for resting. She needs to focus on this case, wrap it up quickly, return her concentration to the election, but instead she thinks, So. Marvena and Jurgis. Jurgis and Marvena.

  She should be glad, for she’s harbored, since Daniel’s death, even as she became friends with Marvena while they solved his murder, the fear that Marvena had deep down never let go of Daniel. That because Marvena and Daniel had been friends—and, for a time, lovers, long before Lily knew either of them—in some way Marvena too was Daniel’s widow.

  But here is Jurgis. It makes sense. They are a goo
d fit for each other.

  Yes, she should be glad.

  And yet Lily’s heart slumps. No one understands her quite the way Marvena does, and the understanding binds them. Marvena is moving on from her losses. Suddenly Lily is weary from still carrying the weight of hers.

  Lily sits after all, bones settling like a sigh into the porch swing. She sways forward, back, forward, and soon it feels as if she’s not moving of her own volition, as if the soft, dark night itself is rocking her, as if the squeak of chain on rivet is tenor harmony to a lullaby of sounds—Shep at her feet snuffling and sighing, a nearby critter scurrying, a far-off owl crying.

  She stares into the darkness of the forest. The path she’d hiked up is no longer distinguishable in the shadows—shifting, twitching, but giving no clear shape. Lily adds a sharp gasp to the night chorus as she realizes that she’s looking for the shimmery, silvery ghost boy.

  As the night remains closed and dark, a knot within her eases, and at last she closes her eyes. Just for a moment, what could that hurt? A notion long idling at the back of her mind edges forward—what might it be like, to have her own stretch of land, her own farmhouse, her own porch to sit on at night, so she can stare into enveloping darkness?

  A door screech startles Lily, and she opens her eyes to Marvena staring down at her, amused. Lily frowns as if irritated at being caught catnapping, but truth be told, she’s glad to see even a glimmer of a smile on her friend’s mouth. In the past year, sorrows carved an extra ten years into Marvena’s face, and, as Lily roughly rubs her palms to her cheeks, she reckons the same could be said of her.

  “You got something to track her with?” Marvena’s already dressed for the task—boots, a hand-me-down oversized brown coat, a drab once-white blouse and long blue skirt, cinched up with a man’s belt into which Marvena’s poked extra holes, a rucksack slung over her shoulder. An old canvas hat, the over-wide brim slouching ridiculously over her eyes. Somewhere in the midst of all that, Lily knows, is a revolver and a knife.