Chapter 1
Wren
The third missed Sunday, I was in a truck stop outside Youngstown with a cold sandwich and a phone that had rung eleven times, and I remember thinking: okay.
Not oh no. Not something's wrong. Just okay, the way you say it when a job you've been dreading finally gets assigned to you.
Then I paid for a sandwich I didn't eat, got in the truck, and drove to Pennsylvania.
Hollow Ash is what happens when a town is built around one thing and then the one thing leaves.
You come in on Route 9 past a Dairy Freez that's been closed so long the sign has faded from red to a sort of apologetic pink, and then a church, and then a longer stretch of nothing than a town that size has any right to, and then the mill.
The mill is not a mill anymore. It's a foundry, technically, and it hasn't foundried anything since the nineties, and now it belongs to a motorcycle club.
I want to be clear that I was not impressed.
I'd heard about it for two years. Kai talked about that building like it was Notre Dame.
You've gotta see the beams, Wren. They kept the crane rail.
There's a whole cupola. And here's what it is: it's a big brick box with new windows in the old holes, sitting in four acres of gravel, with about thirty motorcycles parked out front in a line so straight it made me want to nudge one.
I parked my truck at the end of the line.
My truck is a 2016 Peterbilt medium-duty wrecker in a color the factory called Sable and I call brown, with a thirty-ton boom, a name, and a fuel economy that would make a coal plant blush. Next to thirty motorcycles, she looked like a mother collecting her children from a party.
Her name is Delores. We don't need to talk about it.
A kid came out before I'd gotten the door open. Nineteen, maybe. Skinny in the way that makes a leather vest look like it's wearing the person.
"Ma'am, this is private—"
"Yep."
"—property, so I'm gonna need you to—"
"Yep." I got down out of the cab. It's a long way down and I do it in one, and I've noticed over the years it ends more conversations than it starts. "Is church still going?"
He blinked. "Is—"
"Church. Your meeting. The thing you do on Sundays where everybody sits in a room and pretends the vote wasn't decided in the parking lot."
"How do you know about church?"
"Because I have a brother," I said, "who tells me everything, including things he shouldn't, which is why he'll never make officer. Where's Kai Adeyemi?"
The kid's whole face did something. It was fast and it was not good and he put it away almost immediately, which — bless him — is a skill that takes about fifteen more years than he's had.
"You should wait out here."
"I've been driving for six hours."
"There's a bench."
I looked at the bench. It was an actual bench, welded out of scrap plate, sitting under an actual sign that said VISITORS, which is the single funniest thing I have ever seen an outlaw motorcycle club do.
"You have a visitors bench."
"Roman had it put in."
"Does anybody sit on it?"
"No, ma'am."
"Great," I said, and walked past him into the building.
Here's what I'll give them. The doors were nice.
Big rolling steel doors on a track, oiled, no squeal, and inside it was warm and it smelled like coffee and machine oil and about a hundred years of iron.
The ceiling went up forever. The crane rail was still there.
The light came in sideways off the west windows and lay down in long yellow bars across a concrete floor somebody had actually taken care of.
It was, fine, it was beautiful.
I kept walking.
The church room was through the back, glass block wall, closed door, and there were about six guys standing around outside it doing the specific loitering that men do when they're not allowed in a room. They all looked up at once.
"Whoa," said one.
"Yep," I said, and opened the door.
I'd like to describe what a room full of grown men looks like the exact moment a stranger opens the door on their meeting, and the honest answer is: like a photograph.
Nobody moved. Twelve, thirteen guys around a table that used to be something else — a pattern bench, I found out later — and a president at the head of it with a beard and forearms and an expression that went from irritation to interest so fast I decided immediately I'd have to keep an eye on him.
"That door," he said, "is closed."
"I noticed. It opened anyway. Bad hinge."
Somebody at the far end made a noise into his fist.
"Ma'am—"
"Wren Adeyemi," I said. "My brother's Kai.
He's your prospect. He hasn't called me in three weeks and he's called me every Sunday for six years including the Sunday he had appendicitis, so I'd like somebody to tell me where he is, and then I'll leave, and you can get back to voting on whatever you already voted on in the parking lot. "
The room did a thing. It's hard to describe. It's the thing a body of water does when something big moves under it.
The president leaned back. "You know how this looks."
"Like a woman walked into your church. Yeah. I've upset the furniture." I put my hands in my jacket pockets. "I drove six hours. I'll leave when somebody says a sentence with information in it."
"Everybody out," the president said.
Chairs went back. Thirteen men filed past me and every single one of them looked at the floor, and by the fourth one I'd stopped being angry and started being scared, because men only do that when they know something.
One of them didn't leave.
He was sitting three seats down on the left with his boots crossed at the ankle and a paperback face-down on the table in front of him — an actual paperback, cracked spine, in a room like that — and he hadn't looked at the floor.
He'd been looking at me since the door opened, steady, like I was a piece of information he was reading.
"Ash," the president said.
"I'll take it."
"That's not—"
"Roman." He said it without heat. "I'll take it."
And that was the whole argument. The president looked at him for maybe three seconds, and then got up, and on his way past me he said, "The bench outside is for visitors," and I said, "I'll tell them," and he made a sound that was almost a laugh and left.
Then it was me and the paperback.
He didn't get up. He kicked the chair opposite him out from under the table with one boot, which is a gesture I've had aimed at me maybe four hundred times in truck stops and diners, and I've sat down for it exactly zero times.
I stayed standing.
"Suit yourself," he said.
"I will."
"Coffee?"
"No."
"It's good coffee. It's the one thing here that is."
"I don't want coffee, I want a sentence."
He nodded slowly. Vice President patch. Thirty-five-ish. Gray coming in early at the temple on one side only, which is a thing I'd never seen before and found personally annoying. Long hands. The kind of face that's been handsome long enough to be bored of it.
"Sit down, Wren."
"How do you know my name?"
"You said it forty seconds ago, in a loud voice, in a room with a concrete floor."
"...Fine."
"Also Kai talks about you constantly. Constantly. There's a photo of you in his bunk and it's not of your face, it's of your truck."
"That's the good photo."
"He also says you've never once been late to anything in your life."
"That's true."
"He says it like it's a warning."
"It is a warning," I said. "I've ended two relationships over airports."
"Two."
"One was correct and one I've had to think about."
"He says her name's Delores."
"Yep."
"He would not tell me why."
"He doesn't know why," I said. "Nobody knows why. It's the last mystery."
And he smiled. Short, one side, gone again. And I thought, with the tired clarity of a woman who's driven six hours on a cold sandwich: oh, you're going to be a problem.
I sat down.
"He's not here," Ash said.
"I got that."
"He's not in a hospital, he's not in a cell, he's not in a ditch, and nobody in this club has hurt him."
"Okay."
"I'm telling you those four because that's what people's heads go to, and I'd rather you not spend the next ten minutes there while I explain the rest."
"That's — actually, that's considerate."
"I have moments."
"Where is he?"
He turned the paperback over and squared it up with the edge of the table, and I understood that he was buying about two seconds, and that he knew I knew, and that he was doing it anyway because he needed them.
"There's a facility in northern Michigan," he said. "Up past Gaylord, on a lake. It's a residential treatment program. Kai's been there nineteen days."
I heard it. I want to be honest: I heard it, and for a second nothing happened, because it was so much better than the four things he'd listed that my body didn't know what to do with it.
"Rehab," I said.
"They don't like that word."
"I don't care what they like."
"Neither do I, particularly."
"Nineteen days." I was doing math, which is a thing I do badly and out loud. "Nineteen days is — that's before the first missed Sunday. That's a week before."
"Yes."
"Who signed him in."
And here's what he did. He looked at me. Not down, not away, not at the paperback. Straight at me, and he took a breath first, which is how I knew the next thing was going to cost him something.
"He did," Ash said. "He signed himself in."
The room had a clock in it. Old industrial thing, big black hands. I looked at it because I needed to look at something that wasn't a man's face.
"No," I said.
"Wren—"
"He wouldn't."
"He did. I drove him."
"You—"
"I drove him," Ash said. "Eleven hours. He slept for six of them. He signed a voluntary admission form at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday and he was completely sober when he did it, which is the only reason I let it happen, and then I drove eleven hours back."
"He would have called me."
"He knew you'd come."
"Yes," I said. "Yes. That's the — that's the entire — "
I stopped. My voice had gone somewhere I don't let it go in front of strangers.