Chapter 1
Birdie
I want to be clear that I didn't plan it that way.
The gun was my mother's, the bag was from a Kroger in Steubenville, and the bike I actually ride was in a shop in Ohio with a cracked stator and a mechanic named Denny who had opinions about my life choices.
So: bus. Three hundred miles of a man behind me eating hard-boiled eggs with his eyes closed.
The gas station was called PUMP & PANTRY, except the P in PANTRY had gone dark, so it said PUMP & ANTRY, which sounded like a law firm that would lose.
I went in. Bell over the door, the good kind, the kind that means somebody's been meaning to fix it since 1994.
The kid behind the counter was maybe nineteen and had the specific glaze of a person four hours into a six-hour shift.
"Hi," I said. "I need to get out to the Bly place. Odile Bly. It's off the ridge road."
"Ridge road."
"That's the one."
"Which ridge road."
I set down the grocery bag. Gently. "There's more than one?"
"There's Ridge, there's Old Ridge, and there's the one everybody calls the ridge road that's actually Route 9."
"Which one has a woman on it with forty acres and a mailbox shaped like a barn?"
He thought about it with his whole body. "The mailbox shaped like a barn?"
"Yes."
"That's off Old Ridge."
"Great."
"Or Ridge."
"Okay."
"I don't drive out that way."
"You live here."
"I live here," he said, and tapped the counter, meaning the counter.
"Okay," I said. "Different question. Is there a cab?"
"A what?"
"A taxi. A car. A person with a car who accepts money."
He looked at me with real sympathy. "There's Dale."
"Great. Dale."
"Dale's in Florida."
"Until when?"
"March."
"It's October."
"Yeah," said the kid, "that's Dale."
I bought a Gatorade out of respect for the process.
"Hey," he said, as I was leaving. "You want my advice?"
"Desperately."
"Ask outside."
"Ask who outside?"
"Whoever's outside," he said, and went back to his phone in a way that suggested the interview was concluded.
Outside there was a picnic table and a payphone that had been dead so long somebody had put a plant in it, and a man sitting at the picnic table with a paper cup of coffee, watching the road.
Not watching me. Watching the road. Which I noticed, because it's a rare thing. Most men in a parking lot allocate you a look the second you come out a door.
He was — okay. He was somewhere past forty and built like a door, and he had a beard going gray in a stripe on one side like a thumb had gotten in the paint, and he was wearing a leather vest with patches on it, and I'd been in enough county bars in Ohio to know approximately what that meant and approximately nothing more.
"Excuse me," I said.
He looked over. He had a nice face. That was the first problem.
"Ma'am."
"Do you know the Bly place? Off the ridge road?"
He drank his coffee. Took his time about it.
"Sure," he said.
"Can you tell me how to get there?"
"You got a car?"
"I've got two legs and a bad attitude."
"That'll do six miles."
"It's six miles?"
"Give or take."
"Give or take what?"
"Six miles," he said.
I sat down on the bench across from him without being asked, because I'd been on a bus since seven and my dignity had gotten off at Wheeling.
"Okay," I said. "Directions. Go."
And he gave them to me. Very calm, very clear, very specific.
Out the lot, left, past the church with the sign that's been advertising a fish fry since Lent, right at the split, stay right through the second split, up the hill, past a culvert, look for a gate with a chain on it that isn't locked, and the drive's the one after.
I wrote it on my hand.
Then I said, "Which church?"
"Methodist."
"Is the fish fry sign on the Methodist church or the Baptist one?"
Beat.
"Baptist," he said.
"So it's the Baptist church."
"It's the Methodist church with the Baptist sign in front of it. Long story. Property line."
I looked at him. He looked at me. His face did absolutely nothing, which is itself a thing a face can do.
"You're lying to me," I said.
"About the sign?"
"About all of it."
"Now why would I do that."
"I don't know. That's why I'm still sitting here."
He drank his coffee. And something happened around his eyes that wasn't a smile but was in the same family — a cousin of a smile, visiting for the weekend.
"Second right takes you to a strip mine," he said. "You'd have walked till dark and come out at a hole in the ground."
"You gave me directions to a hole in the ground."
"I gave you directions. You checked. Now you've got the real ones." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table. "Most people don't check."
"Most people don't get sent to a strip mine."
"You'd be surprised how few of them come back and mention it."
"That's insane."
"That's Tuesday."
I sat back. "Is this a thing you do? Is this like a — a rural hazing situation? Do I get a certificate?"
"You get the right directions."
"After."
"After," he agreed.
"Great. Excellent system. Very efficient." I flipped my hand over and showed him the pen. "Okay. Real ones."
"You're not mad."
"I'm extremely mad."
"You don't sound it."
"I'm conserving it," I said. "I've got six miles."
That got something out of him. Not a laugh — a short breath through the nose, which on a man built like that is basically a standing ovation.
"Where'd you come in from?"
"Ohio."
"Whereabouts."
"Little town outside Steubenville. You've never heard of it."
"Try me."
"Wintersville."
"Huh," he said.
"See, that's not I've heard of it, that's huh—"
"I've heard of it."
"Everybody says that."
"There's a diner on 22 with a rooster on the sign."
I sat back. "Okay. That's — yeah. That's the Hen House. That's a real answer."
"Ate there in 2003."
"How was it?"
"Bad," he said. "But it was four in the morning and I was twenty-something, so it was the best food I ever had."
"That's not a review, that's a condition."
He gave me the real ones. And I could tell they were the real ones, because they were worse — they had things like the second cattle guard and if you hit the creek you went too far and there's a dog at the yellow house, he's a coward but he's loud.
I wrote them on the other hand.
"Six miles," I said.
"Six miles."
"On foot."
"On foot," he said, "unless somebody's going that way."
I waited. He drank his coffee.
"Are you going that way?" I said.
"No."
"Wow."
"I'm going that way later."
"How much later?"
"Depends how long you sit here talking to me."
And I laughed — actually laughed, out loud, in a gas station parking lot in a town I'd been in for eleven minutes — and I want it noted for the record that I have thought about that laugh a great deal since, and what it cost, and whether I'd take it back.
I wouldn't. But I've thought about it.
"Scarlett," I said, and put my hand out.
He looked at it for half a second longer than a person looks at a hand. Then he took it. His grip was careful in the way that big hands sometimes are, like a person who's broken things.
"Roman," he said.
"Roman."
"That's right."
"Just Roman."
"Just Roman," he said.
Here's a thing about me. I'm a vet tech. Nine years, mostly large animal, mostly farms, which means my entire professional life is walking into a barn where something is wrong and everybody in the barn already knows what it is and nobody is going to tell me.
You learn to read the room instead of the people.
And what I read, sitting at that picnic table, was that a man with a wolf's skull on his back had been sitting alone at a gas station facing the road, in no hurry, on a Tuesday afternoon, and that in the eleven minutes I'd been talking to him three separate vehicles had slowed going past, and every single one had sped up again after.
I've been in a lot of barns.
"Hey," I said. "Can I ask you something?"
"You've been asking me things."
"Do you know my grandmother?"
The road got very interesting to him again.
"Bly," he said.
"Odile."
"I know who she is."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," he said. "It isn't."
And that was all I got, and I sat with it, and something started to go cold along the back of my arms.
Because here's why I was there.
Every Sunday for six years my grandmother has called me at seven p.m. She has called me from a landline mounted on a kitchen wall, and she has talked for between eleven and fourteen minutes, and she has never once in six years failed to complain about the weather in a way that was actually a complaint about somebody in town.
Three Sundays ago: nothing.
Two Sundays ago: nothing.
Last Sunday I called her and it rang eleven times and then it stopped ringing, which is not the same as being answered. Somebody picked it up and put it back down.
I called the county. The county said there'd been no calls out to that address.
I said, "That's what I'm telling you."
The county said, "Ma'am, no news is good news."
I also called the church. Both churches. The Methodist one said she hadn't been since August, which they said in the tone of a woman marking something down. The Baptist one said she'd never been, which they said in the tone of a woman marking something up.
I called the feed store and got a man named Duane who said she'd been in Thursday and bought sweet feed and two salt blocks and hadn't said much, and when I asked what she usually says he said, "Everything," and then went quiet on the line for a second, and that's the call that actually got me on the bus.
So I cracked my stator and sold my jacket for the fare, which is the actual reason I was standing in Pennsylvania in a red hoodie in October like a woman who's never met weather.
The jacket was good, too. Cowhide, armored, eleven years old and finally broken in the way they get where it stops being a jacket and starts being a shape of you.
A guy at the shop gave me four hundred for it and told me I'd regret it, and I said I regretted it already, and he said that's how you know it's the right price.
I told Roman roughly none of this.
What I said was, "She's stopped answering the phone."