SIENNA POV
The folder sat on the passenger seat because I didn't trust it in the trunk.
Stupid, maybe. It was just paper, printouts, mostly, plus three photographs I'd developed myself at the drugstore on Remsen Street because I didn't want the images anywhere a cloud could reach. Forty-six pages in a manila folder with a rubber band around it, the kind of folder you buy in bulk for school projects and never use for anything important. I'd used this one for the most important thing I'd ever done, which was try to understand how my mother died.
The rational part of my brain said, it's safer in the trunk. The other part, the part that had been running quietly underneath everything for the past eighteen months like a second heartbeat I couldn't slow down, said, keep it where you can see it. So I kept it where I could see it, wedged between the seat and the center console, the rubber band slightly frayed from how many times I'd taken it off and put it back on.
I'd read it so many times I could recite it. I read it anyway, at red lights, at rest stops, once in a McDonald's parking lot at two in the morning somewhere in Connecticut when I couldn't sleep and needed something to do with the feeling.
The folder didn't give me answers. It gave me the shape of the questions, which was different and, for now, enough.
✦
Black Hollow appeared at dusk, which I later understood was not a coincidence.
I'd driven up from the highway on a two-lane road that wound through second-growth forest for longer than seemed reasonable, the kind of forest that had grown back over something older, the trees too uniform, the gaps between them too deliberate. My headlights caught the edge of a sign as I came around the last bend:
WELCOME TO BLACK HOLLOW
Population — 2,841
FULL MOON CURFEW: 10 P.M. — SUNRISE
I drove past it slowly.
The curfew sign was not weathered. It was not peeling, not sun-faded, not the kind of sign that gets put up as a local eccentricity and forgotten. The lettering was clean. The posts were recently treated. Someone maintained this sign, regularly, as a matter of civic practice.
I noted it the way I'd learned to note things over the past eighteen months, without reaction, just filing. My therapist in Brooklyn had called this dissociation and tried to fix it. I called it methodology and considered it a skill.
The town itself came into view as I crested a small rise, Victorian houses in various states of preservation, a main street with a hardware store and a diner and a pharmacy, fog already thickening in the low places between buildings even though it was only seven in the evening. Everything looked like a place that had agreed to look like something. I'd lived in enough temporary places to know the difference between a town that simply was and a town that was performing being a town. Black Hollow was performing.
I didn't know yet what it was hiding underneath.
✦
Aunt Claire's house was on Aldermoor Street, third from the end, a narrow Victorian with a porch that sagged slightly on the left side and window boxes that had been recently replanted with something purple and deliberate.
She was on the porch when I pulled up, which meant she'd been watching for me, which meant she'd been anxious, which meant whatever she'd told me on the phone, 'it'll be fine, Sienna, it's quiet here, you'll have space to breathe', was at least partially a performance for my benefit. I recognized the posture. She held her coffee mug with both hands even though it was not cold.
'You made good time,' she said, coming down the porch steps.
'Drove straight through.'
I got out and stretched, and she hugged me in the way she'd hugged me since my mother's funeral, carefully, like she was checking I was still whole. I let her.
'Are you hungry? I made… '
'I'll eat later.' I pulled the folder off the passenger seat before I touched anything else. I saw her see me do it. Her expression did something careful and settled.
'Still carrying that around.'
'Still need to.'
She didn't argue. Aunt Claire was the only adult in my life who had stopped arguing with me about the folder after I turned eighteen, which was one of the reasons I was here instead of in some college dorm trying to pretend the past year had been something I could file away and move on from. I wasn't ready to move on. I wanted to understand first. Moving on before understanding felt like a lie you told yourself, and I'd been told enough lies.
She carried my second bag. I carried the folder. We went inside.
✦
The bedroom she'd prepared was on the second floor, front-facing, with a window seat and a view of the street. Nice. Thoughtful. I noticed it the way I was noticing everything, cataloguing, filing.
Then I noticed the deadbolt.
It was on the window. Not the door, the window, which was on the second floor, which meant it wasn't there to stop anyone from walking in off the street. It was new hardware, recently installed, I could see where the wood was still lighter around the mounting screws, not yet weathered to match the frame. The mechanism was heavy-duty. The kind you'd find on an exterior door. Someone had oiled it recently because when I reached out and tested it, it moved without sound.
I stood there for a moment with my hand on the bolt.
Eighteen months of carrying a folder full of questions had taught me that the details that didn't fit were the ones that mattered. A deadbolt on a second-floor window in a house where my aunt lived alone didn't fit. It fit somewhere else, somewhere I didn't have a name for yet.
I left it locked. I sat on the window seat and looked out at Aldermoor Street, where the fog was thickening between the streetlamps in a way that felt less like weather and more like intention, and I put the folder on my knees and took off the rubber band and started, for the forty-seventh time, at page one.
My mother's name was Mara. The newspaper notice said she died in a car accident on a mountain road in upstate New York on a Tuesday in October, no other vehicles involved, no witnesses. I had the notice in my folder. I also had a photograph of the road, which I'd driven to myself in March, and which had no meaningful drop on either side of it for the half-mile stretch where the accident supposedly occurred. I had a copy of the weather report for that Tuesday, which showed clear skies and dry roads. I had a note from someone who signed themselves only J, sent to Aunt Claire six months after the funeral, that said, She didn't suffer. I'm sorry I can't tell you more than that. I'm sorry I can't tell you anything at all.
I had never been able to find J.
I had forty-six pages and zero answers and a deadbolt on a second-floor window in a town that maintained its curfew signs with civic pride, and tomorrow I would start asking questions that Aunt Claire would answer two-thirds of, and I would note the third that she didn't.
I was good at noting things.
The fog pressed against the glass. Somewhere in the direction of the tree line, something moved, too large for a dog, too fluid for a deer, there and then not there in the space between one streetlamp's reach and the next.
I put my hand flat against the window. The glass was cold.
I noted that too.