The Hollows--A Novel

by Jess Montgomery

  “She said she came because she wanted to see her uncle— Grandfather—buried. To be sure he was gone at last. She told me something else, something encouraging—”

  “Hildy! Enough!” Mother screams. Her expression is taut with … jealousy. Yes, Hildy thinks—Mother doesn’t like her only child remembering Thea so warmly. And yet her only few warm memories of Mother come from before Thea’s visit.

  Merle says, “You’ve upset your mother, dear, and the sheriff doesn’t need to hear—”

  Cousin Thea fades, and whatever she was going to hear Thea again whisper to her withers to silence. The smell of burned eggs obliterates the warm, cinnamon scent. Hildy wilts back into her chair, the confidence she’d found remembering Cousin Thea hollowed out of her.

  All she can feel is her hand throbbing.

  Mother glares at her, and not only out of annoyance. Fear has turned Mother’s pupils to pinpoints. “I remember now,” Mother says. “She came to gloat over my dear father’s death!”

  “Why would she do that?” Lily asks.

  “Our fathers—though they were brothers—disliked one another greatly.”

  “Mrs. Cooper, why did your father and uncle dislike each other?”

  “I can’t imagine why it matters!”

  “As I said, at this point everything matters.”

  “They had different points of view on abolition. My father was against getting involved. He supported states’ rights. My uncle—Thea’s father—was adamantly supportive of abolition.” Red rises in Mother’s face, and she adds in a half whisper, “To the point that he was involved in … illegal activities.”

  Hildy stares in shock at Mother. She means the Underground Railroad. Hildy’d heard mutterings about it, here and there, that some folks in the area worked to sneak runaway slaves, who made it across the Ohio River at Portsmouth, northward. But this is the first that she’d heard any inkling she had kin who was involved.

  Mother goes on. “Well, it was an embarrassment to my father that his own brother defied the law of the day. It split them—and the family.”

  “And yet Thea Kincaide came here when your father died.”

  “To gloat!”

  “That seems odd—holding on to such bitterness when the last time you’d have seen her she would have been much younger.”

  Mother tilts her chin defiantly. “Clearly, my cousin was given to odd behavior.”

  “Would she have tried to come see you last night?”

  Hildy’s mind returns to last night, the old-fashioned woman she thought she’d seen in the street, when she’d come awake on Lily’s porch.

  “Of course not,” Mother says.

  Lily makes a note. Then she looks up at Mother. “I have to ask—to be thorough, mind you—where you might have been last night?”

  Lily’s question siphons the air from the room. For a moment, Hildy can’t breathe, recollecting how last night, after she got home late from her heartbreaking visit with Tom in Rossville, the house had felt empty—but she’d dismissed it as Mother not waiting up to harangue her, for once. But what if that—like the notion of being satisfied with Merle, or having the courage to be wooed by Tom—was another delusion? Like the phantom old-fashioned lady?

  “Well, of course I was here. As usual.” There’s not even a hint of nervousness in Mother’s voice.

  Hildy starts to question that assertion. Mother gives her a hard, warning look.

  “Hildy?” Lily’s voice is a soft nudge as pity flashes across her expression.

  Earlier, when Hildy’d made herself sound insane, going on about remembering Thea, and she’d seen belief on Lily’s face—what if she’d imagined that, too? Maybe it was just pity.

  Hildy’s courage slips away. She stares down. A blister is rising on her burned palm.

  “Very well,” Lily says. “I will no doubt need to ask more questions—but I’ll leave you in peace for tonight.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Hildy finally heads upstairs.

  Soon after Lily left, Merle had stiffly thanked them for dinner. Under Mother’s watchful glare, Hildy had hastily, wearily promised to go to his grocery the next morning. It seemed the easiest way to put an end to the dreadful evening—and surely, after a night’s rest, she’d find the courage to break off their engagement and go at last back to Rossville.

  As Hildy cleaned up from dinner, Mother scolded her for not being a better hostess to Merle, for her “display of nonsense” during Lily’s visit—but Hildy only half-listened, berating herself for not stopping Lily as she left, to tell her about spotting Fiona leaving the Kinship Inn with George. About the odd visit from Missy—and Margaret chasing down the poor woman and her boy. About the editorial from an anonymous WKKK member. She hadn’t even reported on submitting the sketch and sheriff’s notice—but that wouldn’t matter, now that they knew the dead woman’s identity.

  When Hildy started the dishes, she promised herself she’d leave after Mother went to bed, go down to Lily’s house, and explain all. By the time Mother had finally gone up to bed, and Hildy finished the dishes, exhaustion overwhelmed her. She finally applied a cold compress to her hand and headed upstairs.

  Now, as she enters her bedroom, all she wants is sleep. To not feel the pain in her hand. Or in her heart. Dreamless sleep, she prays.

  There on the desk, flickering in the light of the coal-oil lamp she carries in her good hand, she sees the mess of sketching pencils she’d pulled out earlier from under her bed.

  Hildy puts the lamp on the bureau and starts putting the pencils back in the old cigar box that had once been her father’s. She notes the thin rectangle of wood, once used to divide a bottom layer of cigars from the top layer. And it is wobbly.

  Hildy pries up the rectangle and stares at the contents at the bottom of the cigar box.

  Postcards.

  She picks one up, reads quickly.

  Postcards to her, from Thea Kincaide.

  Carte Postale

  April 12, 1906

  Bonjour, Mademoiselle Hildy, from Paris! Oh, the fashions, the cafes, the pastries, and the sights. How I trembled on the lift ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower—not fear, but joy at such a monument! At night, the city has a pulse of its own. I hope when you are older you can come visit me! You’ll be brave enough, I know.

  Love,

  Your cousin Thea

  CHAPTER 15

  LILY

  Wednesday, September 22—10:00 p.m.

  As Lily lets herself in through the mudroom at the back of her house, the parlor’s mantel clock chimes a faint 10:00 p.m. Twenty-four hours since the telegraph boy came to the house with the news of a dead woman near Moonvale Hollow Village.

  Dear Lord. More than twenty-four hours since she last slept.

  Lily rubs the heels of her hands into her eyes. So hard that she sees speckles. She longs to peel off her now smelly, filthy clothes, to release her feet from her boots, to soak in a hot bath upstairs with a heaping dose of Epsom salts. She tears up at the tasks such luxury will require: heating water on the stove, toting it upstairs to the washroom—created last year from the nursery, now outfitted with a cold-water sink and a clawfoot bathtub.

  She can’t bring herself to go to bed so filthy, either.

  She will settle for a cold-water sponge bath at the sink.

  Lily carefully locks the door behind her. The house is quiet. A coal-oil lamp flickers on the small kitchen worktable, its flickering light illuminating a plate with a sandwich and one of Hildy’s sorghum cookies. Mama’s handiwork. A guilty pang contracts Lily’s heart. She’d given little thought to Mama or any of the children on this long, wretched day.

  A day that had led, at long last, to the identity of the dead woman: Thea Kincaide.

  Hildy’s mother’s cousin. Hildy’s cousin, for that matter—first cousin once removed.

  Lily shakes her head, recollecting the haunting, awful scene she’d left at Hildy’s house, the shock that the news had brought to bot
h Hildy and her mother. And the sense Mabel Cooper is holding something back.

  If it has to do with Thea Kincaide, eventually she will share it. Lily will find a way to pry it from her.

  Now, though, she slowly extracts her swollen feet from her boots. Ah. A brief rush of relief. Then throbbing pain. Lily limps to the mudroom, leaves her boots to air out, locks the door again. Back inside, she washes her hands and face under the cold-water pump. Next she eats the bologna sandwich and the cookie, taking comfort as well as sustenance in each bite. She’s home too late to see her children or tuck them into bed, but at least she’s sufficiently revived for the nighttime rituals at hand: Unholster and unload her revolver. Put the bullets, and her sheriff’s star, in the red dish on top of her pie safe.

  The red dish that had once held her blue ribbons for prizewinning pies—oh Lord. The dish reminds Lily, as Mama had twenty-four hours before, that she needs to enter something in the county fair baking contest. A quick mental inventory of what she has on hand and how pressed she is for time. She’ll have to settle for making vinegar pie. It won’t be a blue-ribbon winner, but the tangy-sweet pie will do.

  Lily sighs as she picks up the coal-oil lamp and heads to the parlor, where she puts her notebook on the rolltop desk next to the typewriter, and her unloaded revolver on the mantel.

  She crosses to the front of the parlor, about to go upstairs, but then sees mail on the desk. Lily quickly sifts through: a Sears Roebuck catalog and—Oh. A letter from Benjamin Russo. Daniel’s old friend.

  The Cincinnati postmark is from more than a week ago. Lily swallows hard, recollecting that in the wee hours of this morning Hildy had mentioned doing chores—including bringing in the mail. She must have seen the letter. Heat rises in Lily’s face. Had Mama seen, too?

  Lily picks up the envelope. Now, after everything the past twenty-four hours had brought, her hand trembles. Cincinnati … Suddenly the far-off city seems too close. Had Benjamin moved there, from the Bureau of Mines in Washington, D.C.? Or been on a visit?

  She tries to remember—had Benjamin ever written to Daniel? If he had, it doesn’t stand out in her memory. She should throw the letter away … but she finds the letter opener in her hand, and seconds later she’s quickly scanning the letter:

  Dear Mrs. Ross,

  I write to let you know that I have been moved to the Cincinnati location of the Bureau of Mines, and will, along with three other engineers, be setting up a field post in southeastern Ohio. I might take up lodging in Athens with my colleagues, though Kinship offers more economical options and better access to many mining communities, as well as other charms. We have yet to work out the details.

  I trust that Marvena, your mother, and the children are doing well? Below please find my Cincinnati address in case I can ever be of help in any way.

  Respectfully yours,

  Benjamin

  Lily’s face flushes. Charms? What is charming about Kinship—unless he means the rare moving picture show at the opera house, or the hotel basement’s liquor-fueled poker games she opts to ignore. Yours? She’s reading too much into that. After all, he’d referred to her as Mrs. Ross, as was proper, and asked after the children. The letter falls from her still-shaking hands. Lily chuckles at herself. Silly. Becoming undone over a perfectly courteous letter—

  “Mama?”

  Lily startles and turns in the chair. There’s Jolene, sleepy eyed and dark curls askew, emerging from under the dining table, a teddy bear in hand.

  Oh. Lily’s heart softens and tumbles, downy feathers shaken from a pillowcase.

  Lily scoops up her daughter. She means to quickly embrace her, gently admonish her for being down here rather than in bed, then send her back upstairs. But Jolene’s arms and legs latch around Lily in an embrace of deep relief, the sort that can only follow fear. As Lily breathes in the sweet scent of her daughter’s hair, her resolve to quickly put the child to bed unravels. Lily’s reciprocal embrace tightens at an image flashing of the silvery, shimmering boy.

  “Mama.” Jolene pulls back a little, and Lily lightens her grasp. Jolene wrinkles her nose. “Mama, you’re stinky!”

  “Jolene!” The reprimand comes from Lily’s mama, who, as she comes downstairs toting a lantern, gives both daughter and granddaughter a stern look.

  Lily laughs. “Yes, yes, I am, sweetheart—Oh!” Lily gasps, seeing the mottled purple and blue bruise underneath Jolene’s right eye. “Oh, child, what happened?”

  Jolene’s eyes well up and her chin quivers. “Mama, I already got a whipping at school, and Mamaw gave me a talking-to.”

  Lily carries her daughter into the parlor, sits down on the settee, holding Jolene in her lap. She looks at Mama. “Turn up the lamps. I want a clear look.”

  Mama lights the chandelier and turns it to full brightness, then eases herself stiffly into a rocker. Lily cradles Jolene’s little face in her hands. No serious gashes; the child should heal quickly enough. Lily exhales, slightly relieved. “Tell me what happened, Jolene.”

  “It was Junior Ranklin! At recess, he shoved me down, and snatched the ribbon from my hair, and started kicking me, and I got up and ran, but he came after, and shoved me into the fence—” Jolene starts crying and hiccupping all at once.

  The county school for grades 1–8 is just outside Kinship proper, up a lane off Kinship Road, and abuts a farm. The farmer has put up a fence to keep his cows from wandering into the school yard and ragamuffins (as he once put it) from spooking his cows.

  “It’s all right, baby girl. Take your time.” Lily looks up at Mama. “Could I trouble you to warm her some milk? And add a dollop of brown sugar.”

  Mama rises from her rocker and heads to the kitchen.

  Lily refocuses on her daughter. “Go on,” she gently urges.

  “Well, I said give me back my ribbon, and he said I didn’t deserve nice things like that, ’cause you couldn’t help his mother, like Daddy did, that his daddy wouldn’t listen to you. Junior said that you shouldn’t be sheriff at all because you’re a girl.” Jolene’s face crumples up as she wails out the rest of her tale. “And then he tried to punch me, but I caught his arm, and kicked him right between his legs, and he doubled over howling, like I’d stabbed him, and grabbed himself, and he ran—well, sort of—for Teacher!”

  Mama comes into the parlor with three mugs. She puts one on the side table and brings the other two to the table in front of the settee. Lily picks up a mug, helps Jolene take a drink. “Sweetie, I want to make sure—Junior picked on you first, and you ran away?”

  “Yes, Mama. But I got pinned at the fence.”

  “All right, sugar.” Lily gives Jolene her warm sweet milk. “You didn’t start the fight. You tried to walk away. You couldn’t, so you finished the fight. You did what you should have.”

  Mama stares. “Lily, girls shouldn’t—”

  Lily stops her mother with a hard look. She’d been about to say “fight.” “No one should fight—unless they have to.” Lily looks back at Jolene, tilts the little girl’s face up so they can look in each other’s eyes. All that blue and purple around the child’s eye—Lily quivers with anger at the Ranklin boy. And how dare the teacher punish her daughter! “You listen to me, child. You did what was right. You defended yourself. I want no less from you.”

  “Miss Ellen said girls shouldn’t fight, no matter what, and that I’d given Junior a black eye! He told her I’d hit him!”

  Lily frowns. “You said you kicked him.”

  “I did. But I didn’t hit him! You have to believe me.” Jolene starts crying again.

  “I do,” Lily says. “Let’s do a little detective calculating, you and me. Did you notice if Junior already had a black eye, when you were at the fence?”

  Jolene nods. “He did, Mama. I’ll never forget how he was looking at me.”

  Lily’s heart drops. Oh God. Seven years old and already Jolene has a memory of assault seared into her mind.

  “Jolene, how long did it take for your eye to
turn black from him hitting you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mama says softly, “Her eyes were red when she came home. I thought it was from crying and rubbing her eyes. I read the note the teacher sent home, and gave Jolene an early supper, and sent her up to bed. I didn’t realize it was purple until now.”

  Lily ignores her mother for the time being. “Jolene, you did what was right. Never let anyone hurt you like that. You can have a day off of school tomorrow.” She looks at Mama, whose expression is so guilt stricken that Lily’s anger at her softens a little. Mama nods—yes. Yes, she will take care of the children again tomorrow. “And I will talk to Miss Ellen—and point out to her that Junior’s black eye couldn’t have been from you. There wasn’t enough time between you defending yourself and him telling Teacher. And I’ll buy you a new hair ribbon. A whole passel of them!”

  Jolene looks up at her mother, relieved. “Really?”

  Lily smiles and nods. “Really. But now, young lady, you need to get to bed!”

  As Lily carries Jolene upstairs, her own words echo in her mind: You defended yourself. And yet she’d spent a good portion of her day at the Hollows Asylum, where her only defense had been, at least at first, to act placid.

  * * *

  After tucking Jolene and her teddy bear back in bed, Lily comes back downstairs to find Mama at the dining table, sipping on her milk. Lily’s mug is at the spot catty-cornered from Mama.

  A bottle of Vogel’s Tonic, lid off, is on the table.

  Lily sits down, pours a splash into her mug. “You know this is really alcohol, watered down to be barely legal under the Volstead Act.”

  Mama nods. Taps her mug. Lily’s surprised but pours in a dash. Mama nods—go on! Lily smiles, pours more into both mugs. For a few minutes, they sit quietly together, sipping.

  “I’m sorry,” Mama says quietly. “I read the teacher’s note, that she’d given Jolene a light switching, for hitting the boy. Jolene’s becoming such a tomboy, like you were—”