Bottomland

by Michelle Hoover

  “The deputy was in,” Ray said.

  I started. “You talked to the deputy?”

  “He’ll stop by in the morning.”

  Agnes hugged her knees. “You think they won’t come home.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But not by themselves,” she went on. “You think we need someone to bring them back.”

  I brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “Hush now. Hush.”

  The way home was silent and hard. The horses thrashed under the wagon’s weight, the roads full of muck. We threw blankets over our heads and the clouds grew darker yet. On the way to town, we had stopped to knock on doors, but the townsfolk kept to their porches, hands on their chins. Now here and there, a house stood gaping at the end of a long lane of dirt, the fields rutted. The Michaelsons, the Roberts, the Coors. After the war, they had pulled up stake when prices dropped and the banks had called in loans. Soon even some of the banks closed. Farther off, Carl McNulty walked his rows with a plow horse. One of his sleeves hung loose, pinned at the shoulder. Agnes tapped my arm. I had not seen Carl since he’d buried his mother a month after shipping home. He lived alone on that farm. As we passed, he took off his hat, looking up at the coming storm. Agnes waved to him, but I kept my hands in my lap. In another mile, a wooden sign hung nailed to a fence post, the words carved with a knife:

  EVACUATION SALE

  FURNITURE

  ALL MUST BE SOLD

  A growing line of trees, and there was the riverbank. The water rushed with rain, the only sound on the road save for the horses. In the distance, our house stretched with its many rooms, all of them dark. The girls had not come back. They had not come. Somewhere out there our sisters were lost, and the house seemed an empty place, the one I had lived in my whole life.

  The next morning, the deputy knocked on our door just as we were washing the breakfast plates. The blinds were drawn, the lamps dim. My brothers’ guns stood on their stocks in the hall. As if expecting an empty house, the deputy retreated down the steps before the first of us could answer.

  Ray led him to the parlor and lit a fire, though we had never spent such fuel in the daytime. The parlor smelled of Mother, or the musty smell of something long past Mother. The man took the largest chair, crossed one leg over the other, and Ray winced. The rest of us sat perched close enough to the fire to sweat. Agnes pulled at her collar, her chin quivering. I rushed her out of the room at once.

  “What could that man possibly do for us?” she sobbed. I put my arm around her, but still she shuddered. “Nothing, nothing.”

  “Come now,” I whispered. She tore away from me and ran up the stairs. I thought to call out to remind her, but she swept into the girls’ room and rushed down again, out to her porch. I returned to the others, their eyes on the ceiling. The deputy’s Adam’s apple seemed sharp as a wooden heel.

  “So,” the man broke in. “You have a missing girl.”

  “Two,” I said.

  “Two.” He straightened in his chair. “How old?”

  “Esther’s sixteen,” I said, “but Myrle just turned fourteen. We haven’t seen any sign of them since the night before last.”

  “They left nothing behind? No note?”

  “There’s a trunk missing,” I said. “A small one, though we aren’t sure whether it’s newly gone or been missing a long time. Father might have taken it away.”

  “Did you, Mr. Hess?” the man asked. “Did you take the trunk away?”

  Father didn’t answer, his eyes on the man. Ray turned his face to the wall.

  “There was a chair in their room as well,” I went on. “It was wedged against the door. I had to break it to get in.”

  “You saw it blocking the door even though you were on the other side?”

  “Well, no.”

  “But you said . . .”

  “Nan found a hammer under their bed,” Patricia hurried in. “Isn’t that strange?”

  “Is it?”

  Patricia drew up her shoulders. “Nan saw Myrle late that night too. She was standing by the front door. Tell him, Nan.”

  “She could have been sleepwalking for all I know.”

  “And they left Myrle’s bed unmade,” Patricia said.

  The man sighed. “You’re telling me that their door was wedged closed, a hammer was found, and a trunk is missing, and you saw the girls up and running about after their bedtime.”

  “We’re not really sure about the trunk,” I told him.

  Ray cleared his throat. “I don’t understand what all these questions have to do with anything.”

  “It sounds to me as if the girls have run off,” the man said. “A night or two and they’ll be back.”

  “But it’s already been two nights,” Patricia said. “This will be the third.”

  “They wouldn’t run away like that,” I assured him. “Not our girls. They were terribly happy here.”

  “And you’ve searched for them yourselves?”

  “All day yesterday and most of the day before,” I answered. “Everywhere we could think.”

  “Everywhere is quite a lot.”

  “Wer ist dieser Man?” Father grunted.

  The man went on. “I’m saying that two girls, two at once, that’s a rare thing. Either they ran off because they wanted to get away or someone did something to them, but I don’t think we should be guessing at any wrongdoing just yet.”

  “They couldn’t have gone by themselves,” I said. “The window in their room is much too small and the house is locked at night, both inside and out.”

  “Locked?”

  “Father worries . . .”

  Father straightened. What could we say? That we were afraid of our neighbors? That the war had never left us? Father had insisted the locks kept us safe.

  “Locking your family in. Is that wise?”

  “They are young, those girls,” Father said. “Everywhere there are boys and other troubles. Doof! A man who locks his doors. His reasons should be evident.”

  The deputy blanched at Father’s speech. Kraut, he must have thought, though surely he knew who Father was. Our family had lived in the same house for more than thirty years.

  “If the question should be of anyone,” Father went on, “it should be the Elliots. That boy on their farm.”

  “The one who married this summer?”

  Father grunted again.

  “You’ve had some difficulties with the Elliots, haven’t you? Something about the waterway between your properties?”

  “Elliot is a sad old man,” Ray said.

  “He was confused,” I added. “He’s been ill since he lost his wife. But that trouble with the river is finished. I talked to the Elliots myself the day before yesterday, the both of them.”

  The deputy watched Father’s face. Father’s cheeks reddened, about to burst. “The girls’ mother?” the man went on. “She died a while back. Isn’t that right?”

  “In the last month of the war,” I said.

  Ray put a hand on Father’s shoulder. “I don’t see how this matters.”

  “I’ve heard of families like yourselves,” the deputy said. “Very strict. And two girls who have lost their mother, who are isolated on a farm and locked inside a house for months on end, I should think it’s more than evident that a neighbor boy, a married man, isn’t your greatest concern.”

  Father lunged at him. Ray tried to hold him back, but Father only stumbled into the bucket near the fire, and the room filled with ash. Patricia waved a hand in front of her face, and the rest of us took to our feet, every­one save the deputy, who covered his mouth with his handkerchief. Father stood breathing as if readying for another try. I pulled at his arm. He gave way, keeping his eye on the man as we walked out.

  I settled Father in his room and sat myself at Mother�
�s desk while he lay in his bed, his anger fading. “Never would I have thought,” he mumbled. He touched his forehead as if it pained him. “Where are they, Nan? That man and his boy are at fault. I am sure of it. Elliot never forgave us.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “Your mother and I, we believed we had found it. What is this word? Bliss.” The word sounded thick on his tongue. “We were supposed to have a place to live.” He snapped his fingers. “And it went.”

  “It hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  But already Father had closed his eyes. His chest rose and fell, sleeping now or pretending to. By strength of will, he could disappear from us in a blink whenever difficulties raised their head. I turned down the lamp. On the other side of the wall, the sound of Ray’s voice and the deputy’s questions. In the low light, the room seemed a sanctuary, Mother’s rosewater in its vial on her dressing table and her slippers beside the bed. Father rolled away from me and I reached for a blanket to cover him. Next to the headboard hung the hook where he kept his keys to the house, a set of four of which mine was only a copy. I dropped the blanket and reached for the hook instead. The ring seemed light as I turned through the keys, counting. I counted again. One of the keys was no longer there.

  I closed my fingers and hurried to the parlor. The deputy sat with his hands folded in his lap. As if waking, he raised his eyes to mine. “Your brother explained that the youngest had been spending quite a lot of time in bed in recent months. He seemed to think she was sick or acting like it. Did you have the doctor come?”

  “Ray, there’s something . . .”

  My brother put up his hand. “This is a working farm. We can’t always have a man out every time one of the girls gets uncomfortable.”

  “She was sad over losing her mother,” Patricia said. “That’s what I think.”

  “But you said the mother died more than a year ago. Just before the end of the war?”

  “Myrle’s always been weakhearted,” Ray said. “Our mother treated her as if she might break. Nan, tell him.”

  I gripped the keys. “They’d been upset about Mother’s death. Both of them, but Myrle especially. We thought she was getting over it. She was going to school again, sleeping through the night. But in the last few months . . .”

  “Was she too sick to run away?”

  “They didn’t run away,” Ray snapped. “Something happened to them.”

  “But you have no idea what that something was?”

  “Ray . . . ,” I started.

  “You might not understand,” my brother went on, “but this town holds certain suspicions about us since the war, and they’ve acted them out.”

  “The war is over.”

  “It hasn’t been so long.”

  I opened my hand. With a clatter, the ring of keys swung from my finger. “One of Father’s keys is gone.”

  The room went quiet. My brother stopped his pacing, and Patricia stiffened, no longer kneading the skirt of her dress. Lee turned his head. “It’s gone,” I repeated.

  “How can it be gone?” Patricia asked.

  “What is this?” the deputy said. “What key?”

  I reminded him about the locks, the keys on the hook, the copy I had myself. “The ring was on the hook as always,” I said, “but one of the keys was not.”

  The deputy set his hat on his head. “That settles it. Your girls are runaways. They took the key when you weren’t looking. There’s little we can do about that except wait.”

  “But you can send out a search,” Patricia said. “Can’t he, Ray? The girls could be hurt.”

  “What about the chair?” I asked. “They couldn’t have barricaded themselves in their own room and gone out the door at the same time.”

  “I still have doubts about that chair. It could have been just sitting there for all you know, already broken, and the door stuck.”

  “But you haven’t seen the room,” I said.

  “I’m done with my questions. You’ll get a letter from them in a week, maybe two, or they’ll simply show up, and then it’ll be settled. They’re nearly grown, those girls. Remember that.” With his final word, the deputy stood and worked his way between the chairs. I followed him. “I can let myself out,” he said.

  In the parlor, the bucket Father had stepped in lay on its side, a circle of ash on the carpet. Patricia touched her lip as if to clear away a crumb, and Lee sat nodding. I thought to take the chair the deputy had left, but the cushion held the hollow of his frame.

  “What did Father say about the key?” Ray asked.

  “He was already asleep when I found it.”

  “But we can ask.”

  “You know how steady he is in his habits. He would never have removed it himself, not with the other keys still there.”

  “He must have noticed it missing.”

  “Not last night. With the girls gone, he wouldn’t have thought to lock the house. I didn’t.”

  Ray eyed the ceiling. “Where’s Agnes?”

  “On her porch, I suppose.”

  “Tell her to come in and stop her sniveling. She needs to help with supper.”

  Outside the window, the deputy made his way across the yard, looking over his shoulder once, then again. If I thought it would do any good, I’d have locked the door at his back for good. But how then could Esther and Myrle ever return?

  I found Agnes on the screen porch, sitting on her mattress, a book on her knees. Every year when the cold weather came, we had to beg her to sleep in the upstairs room. From the rafters, she had hung her drawings. Most of them were of family, but a dozen showed the Elliot house, dark and small in its lot across the river. Her head lay against the wall, her eyes closed.

  I sat with her in the bundle of sheets and pillows. “Agnes, what’s wrong?”

  “I heard what that man said. About their running away.”

  “He wasn’t much use, was he?”

  “But Nan . . .”

  “What?”

  “Remember those magazines Esther keeps under her bed?”

  “You weren’t supposed to know about those.”

  “I looked for them last night, and they were gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think Esther took them.”

  “Took them where?”

  She shrugged. “They had those pictures, the big cities. New York, Chicago, Boston. Esther liked the ones of Chicago best.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’d go there. Chicago is nearly three hundred miles.”

  “But she was always talking about it. Like she knew the place.”

  “Why would you believe anything Esther said?”

  She took hold of my wrist. “I’ll show you.”

  Agnes led me to the back of the house. The yard sat in shadow, mostly mud and brambles, little reason for us to wander there. A stand of trees leaned together above the curve of the roof and the grasses never grew taller than an inch. Agnes stopped under the girls’ window. “Don’t you see?” she asked. I strained my neck. Underneath the window frame, hidden from anyone in that room looking out, a gash showed fresh with splinters, as if something heavy and sharp had rubbed against the wood. Below it, the wall of the house appeared scuffed, a line that reached to the ground from the gash itself.

  “What did you girls do to that window?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “This could be from rainwater for all we know. It could have stained the wall.”

  Agnes closed her eyes, dismissing me. Chicago, she’d said. The name sounded the same as choking. Now with the window looking so strange, the missing key, and the way the deputy had turned everything around—I couldn’t bear to think it. The girls may have left because of something we’d done.

  “Agnes, when the deputy was here, why didn’t you say anything?”

/>   “I didn’t want to tell anyone. I didn’t even want to go to town. They’ll all be talking about us again.”

  The shadows deepened at the back of the house. Standing on her toes, Agnes strained to see the window. The scuff on the wall might disappear altogether in another rain or two, but the gash itself seemed a kind of violence.

  “I suppose we’ll have to tell the others,” I said. “Before dinner we will.”

  Around the table that evening, we ate what we could in silence. My brothers chewed with their mouths closed, and Agnes held her knife between the tines of her fork, the fork switched from left to right, as Mother had taught us for a cut of meat. “Chicago,” Ray sniffed. The idea of one or the other of my brothers heading to the city to search seemed impossible. A hired car to Clarksville, then the Cedar Rapids and Chicago lines. A week or more to even try, Ray complained, and with all the work needed before winter. The price of a ticket alone was more than a steer at auction. How could the girls have paid for it? Deep within the house, Father groaned in his sleep. One by one we turned an ear to the hall. Never make too much. Father had taught us that too. But now spoken or not, there was something that made fools of us—why the girls would ever want to travel, why they might do so without telling. “No, we won’t go,” Ray decided. “It’s just some idea Agnes has got.” He rested his knife across his plate as if that finished it. The others took their napkins from their laps as they stood and dropped them on their chairs. Long after Agnes had cleared the plates, I stayed alone in the dining room and scratched at the table with my thumbnail until I’d damaged the surface. I scratched again. Who would notice such a little thing? And who would ever think I was the one who had done it?

  When at last I went into the kitchen, Agnes and Ray crouched over the table by the stove, the crowns of their heads nearly touching. Patricia crossed the room in squat steps, stacking dishes in the pantry as loudly as she could. The stove burned, the light flickering. Agnes had laid out a handful of pencils and paper on the table, her face hard as she worked with her cheek inches from the surface. The photograph at her elbow showed our family together, a proper sitting Father had insisted on after Mother went, though it cost a good day’s work. The older of us stood in a row in back. In front sat Father and the girls. Esther peered straight ahead with that furious look of hers, her hair a mop and her nose sharp. Not much was pretty in that girl, but oh, she was fierce. Esther knew you, the photograph said, and believed she was the better by twice. Myrle sat on Father’s other side in a cream dress, a band of pearl buttons from her stomach to her throat. Her hair was held with pins, her hands folded. She leaned into Father, as if she might just rest her head on his shoulder.