Crazy Love You (33 page)

The librarian has compiled other records. Priscilla had siblings, an older brother, Caleb, and a sister, Clara.

She went to lessons in the old schoolhouse in town, a long walk from her home. Fatboy sees her name in the register and wonders if she walked all that way every day. Obviously not in winter, when the big snows came. Wasn't it an oddity for a girl from the hills to go to school? Her brother went there, too, until he was old enough to work in the mines at the age of eight.

An old newspaper article reports on the collapse of a mine shaft, and the librarian has highlighted two names on the list of the dead: her brother, Caleb Miller, twelve, and her father Thomas Miller, thirty-five. Fatboy had heard about this mining accident, learned about it in his middle school history class. Several hundred men were killed, devastating the town, and leaving widows with children they suddenly had no way to support. The church was overwhelmed with need and the town banded together, the wealthy donating money and offering jobs, families taking in other families.

The event was always hailed as a symbol of everything that was right with small-town life. There was a saying in The Hollows: There's a net here that can only be seen when tears are shed. But Fatboy knows that's not true for everyone. For someone like Martha Miller, Priss's mother, a woman living on the fringe of society, maybe too proud or too timid to ask for help, there was no net, not really. Maybe at first, but as days turned to weeks and months, the helping hands would have slowly disappeared.

He could see them huddled in the cabin, Priscilla, her mother, and infant sister, Clara. Possibly they lived on stores for a while, maybe they had a garden and a smokehouse. But how long could they have survived?

Another article told of how some women in the hills had fallen into prostitution after the mining disaster. Some pages from the nun's journal, which had been earmarked with the librarian's yellow sticky notes, detailed the young novices' trips into the hills. They brought food and supplies. They brought offers of work for laundresses and seamstresses. Some of the younger women, those without children, returned with the nuns to town to work and live at the convent. But most did not.

They greet us with such blankness and distrust, barely able to utter their thanks. What will become of them when winter falls?

There is mention of Martha Miller and her two daughters. The librarian has highlighted a copy of the journal page.
She is a known prostitute now, taking men into her home while her daughters sleep. She greets the nuns with open hostility, refuses their charity, asks where God was when the mine collapsed, taking her husband and son. I see the light of madness in her. She is sick with grief.

Fatboy stays hunched over the stack of papers, sifting, reading. All the pieces of the puzzle of Priss are laid out before him on the wood table, the lamp burning above him. But they are not coming together to form a clear picture.

What do you want, Priss?

Then the marriage certificate: Martha Miller to Nicholas Paine.

Nicholas Paine, born 1890, died 1950. Fatboy's great-grandfather, legendary for his cruelty and temper. He was a builder, like his son and grandson after him. The original company was called Paine and Son. Later, No Paine Construction.

There are no more records of Priscilla and Clara. No school records, no marriage or death certificates. The Hill People buried their own dead back then—some still did.

What happened Priss? What did they do to you?

Then Fatboy hears his mother's voice
: Why don't you just ask her?

•  •  •

“How's it going?”

I leaped up as if I'd been Tazered. Joy Martin issued an apologetic chuckle.

“Didn't mean to scare you.”

I turned to look at her. “Did you compile all of this?” I asked.

“I did,” she said. She pointed to the nameplate on her desk with one of those bright red nails. “That's my job, research librarian.”

She looked somehow out of place among the old books and papers. She was all sleek and modern, all straight lines among the fuzzy vagaries of historical records.

“I gather the data. It doesn't tell the whole story, but it's a start. If you're lucky, there is enough information to start to form a picture of what might have happened.”

I had to wonder, how much of what we believe about the past is actually true? In the retelling, so much is added and taken away, so much is just doing what I was doing, connecting the dots between separate events to weave a story. How much of it is extrapolation, or just plain fiction?

“What did Eloise Montgomery tell you?” I asked.

“That you have company on your property and you need to deal with it.”

We might have been talking about a rodent problem, as if all I needed to do was rid myself of moles or raccoons.

“What else do you know about her?”

“Priscilla Miller?” She took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes. She looked even younger without them. “What you see there, and some rumors, plus some stories that have traveled through the generations. Folklore.”

“How reliable is that?”

“Sometimes it's more reliable than the data you see in front of you. More accurate,” she said, and then paused, looking for the right words. “Energetically speaking.”

“Sometimes the data doesn't tell the whole story.”

“No,” she said. “As a writer, you would understand that.”

She took a seat. The light washed in bright through a big multipaned window. And I was reminded that it was a warm, sunny day. This was not Fatboy's hometown. It was a real place, and outside, people were living their lives. It was only my life that was on hold.

“So what's the story?” I asked.

“It's not pretty.”

I lifted my eyebrows at her. “Nothing about life is pretty at the moment.”

“Women didn't have a lot of options in those days, especially not around here. After her husband died, you probably read, Martha turned to prostitution. Then a few years later she married Nicholas Paine.”

“My great-grandfather?”

She gave me a nod of assent.

“He was a very wealthy man, at one point he owned over a thousand acres of land. The acreage on which your house is built is the last of it. With his ready supply of lumber and his skills as a carpenter, he became a successful builder. He is credited with building over half the structures in the older parts of The Hollows.”

I knew that, of course. My father bragged about it endlessly.
Our family built this town
, he used to say. That's why they could never leave. My mother wanted to go, but he couldn't. Her dreams lay fallow while he kept building and building—homes and restaurants, offices and shops, making The Hollows bigger and better. And yet my parents stayed in the same house, on the same property.
This is my home.
And he meant it in a way that people don't mean it anymore. He meant that he'd come from this place, and he was of it, and he would never leave. And he didn't. After he died, I scattered his ashes in the woods, just as he'd asked me to.

“Some people say it was love, that Martha was the only woman Nicholas Paine had ever loved,” said Joy. “He lifted her and her girls out of poverty, bought the land on which her house sat. Then he built her another house, big and modern—running water, indoor toilets, heat and electricity.”

I thought of Priss's house, that little shack that wasn't there. That must have been where Martha lived with her girls.

“My house is the one Nicholas Paine built?”

She nodded. “He built it on that site, yes. But the original house that Nicholas Paine built burned to the ground. Another was erected in its place, the place where your grandfather, a son by a later marriage, grew up. Then, decades later, your father gutted, remodeled, and expanded the structure again.”

Burned to the ground. I remembered that night in the woods, watching Priss being engulfed by flames, her cries carrying out over the night.

Joy went on. “But other people say it wasn't
her
he loved at all. Not Martha.”

I knew what she was implying. Priss was so beautiful, even as a child, impish and luminous like a fairy. I knew how consuming it was to desire her.

“There was speculation that he married Martha so that he could have Priscilla,” Joy said. “After all, by the time he married Martha, she was used up. By all accounts she was nearly mad—addled by grief and loss, fallen, doubtless abused by the men who paid her for pleasure. He was a wealthy man, never married, who could have had anyone. Why would he choose some hill woman, a prostitute no less?”

The data is just the penciling of the truth, the sketch of what might be there when you start to fill in the colors. I was starting to see them all. And Joy was right: it wasn't pretty.

“You said the house burned to the ground?” I said.

“That's right.”

“She died there that night. Priscilla and her sister, Clara?”

I thought of the graves, the old dilapidated church. She seemed to read my mind.

“She's still there,” said Joy. “Buried in that little graveyard just on the other side of your property line. Have you seen her grave?”

“I have,” I said. “But there was no record of her death? No investigation into what caused the fire.”

“I did not find a death record. They had a home funeral and buried the girls themselves, which was not at all uncommon then, and still happens today in some parts. The fire was investigated and was deemed to have been caused by bad wiring.”

“That's what the records say.”

Out on the street, I heard a car door slam, some voices. But the sounds seemed distant, as far away as everything else in the world. Joy sat with her hands folded, looking down, as if praying.

“The story is that Martha killed them,” she said. I could see that Joy cared about the story she told. It wasn't just an impersonal history to her. “That she discovered Nicholas with Priss and blamed the girl.”

“She killed both children?”

She raised her eyebrows and gave me a sad smile.

“Clara was, by all accounts, as beautiful as her sister. It was only a matter of time.”

“What happened to Martha?”

I thought of my own mother, her crimes against my sister, against me. That dark place she said existed within her. Was it there before my father brought her to live on that land? Or was it living in that place? Was it like a poison in the water? Did we drink it in? Had it informed the events and choices of our life?

“After that, Martha went completely mad. Paine intended to institutionalize her, but she managed to get hold of his straight razor about a month after the fire and slit her wrists in the bathtub.”

I tried to imagine the misery and pain, all that energy—fear, shame, dark depression sinking into the earth. I
could
imagine it; I could
feel
it in me.

“As for the whole truth of it, what exactly happened the night of the fire. I don't think anyone knows that. It's buried on that land.”

She was wrong. Someone did know what happened. And she wanted to tell me. Oddly, I started to think about something Binky had said when we'd been talking about my relationship to Megan. He'd asked how much time we really spent talking about Megan. Hadn't it always been about me and my problems? He wanted to know.

In that moment, I started to feel something for Priss that I had never experienced before: compassion. She'd suffered for longer than anyone deserved to suffer. I still didn't know what she wanted or if I could give it to her. But thanks to my mother, at least now I knew what I had to do.

As I left Joy and started down the long hallway back toward the door, my phone rang. I saw Megan's name on the screen, and I was shot through with happiness and hope. I answered right away. I had to tell her all of this.

“Meg?” I answered. “Megan, I have so much to tell you.”

There was a pause and a kind of sigh. Then, “No.”

Then silence, a kind of choking sound on the line. My heart did an ugly little dance.

“Meg?” I said.

I'd stopped in front of those old photographs. Why do they always look so creepy? A hundred years from now, will my photographs look strange and stilted, even haunted, to my grandchildren? “What's wrong?”

“Ian, it's Julia.”

Julia, Megan's mom. All my happiness dissipated, replaced with a big dump of fear in my belly. Why would she be calling me unless something was really, deeply amiss?

“What's wrong?” I said again.

“Where is she, Ian?” Her voice was a hiss, just south of hysterical. “You tell me
right now
what you've done to her.”

“What?” I said. “Nothing. Julia, what are you talking about?”

“She's
gone
,” Julia said. But it was more like a moan, the last word pulling like taffy. She took a deep, shuddering breath. “You were the last one with her. People saw you screaming at her in the park.”

Her voice had a wobbly pitch of terror and rage. It wasn't a scream or a sob, but it was somehow both—a mother out of control of her child's well-being. Her energy crackled over the line. I found myself suddenly trembling, adrenaline pumping—flight or fight.

“Ian,” she said. “You tell me where my baby is or so help me God . . .”

“I swear, I don't know what you're talking about. What's happened? Please. Why do you have her phone?”

She started to wail then, and I heard other voices talking over her screaming.
She's missing, she's gone. My baby.
Then Binky was on the line.

“Ian,” he said. He sounded calm, soothing, but I could feel his fear, too. “I implore you. Just tell us where she is.”