Chapter 9
NINE
Marlowe carried Kat’s bag to the car, her niece trotting beside her, the pink pom-pom on her hat bobbing with each step.
Her younger niece, Dolly, was already complaining about having to go back to school the next day.
Nate and Stephanie were driving home to Hartford, and Henry and Constance were heading to the city.
They would return next weekend, and the moment school let out for winter break, they’d all be back in the Gray House for the holidays—just like always.
Marlowe heaved the bag into the trunk. Stephanie rounded the car and adjusted the placement before quickly hugging Marlowe goodbye. Nate followed her with a longer hug and a few reassuring pats on the back.
“Don’t worry, this will be over soon,” he said.
Nate and Stephanie pulled away with the girls, while Constance was still buckling little Frankie into his car seat. Marlowe turned to Henry and gave him a brief embrace.
“Take care of Enzo,” Henry said. “I’ll be back later this week, as soon as I can get away from the office.”
Increasingly, Henry reminded Marlowe and Nate that they all needed to look out for the old man.
He had lived on his own in Queens since moving to New York in his thirties, but after being hired by the Fishers, he spent most of his time with them, until he grew too old to work.
Enzo visited the Gray House only during holidays now, and Henry worried that Queens was a harsh exile.
“Enzo will be fine,” Marlowe reassured him. “I’ll see you soon.”
And then they were gone. The Gray House was quiet except for Glory digging out the Christmas decorations and Frank puttering from room to room with a book. Enzo stayed in his room, resting.
Marlowe retreated to the basement. Instead of opening her sketchbooks, which would have been the sensible thing to do, she went online to check the local news.
A more recent article about Harmon’s death had been posted, but it offered no new information.
Still, she lingered over a line in the third paragraph: Harmon leaves behind a grieving mother, Layla Gallagher.
Of course, she knew that Harmon’s mother had identified his body, but in her initial shock, Marlowe hadn’t given much consideration to who Layla was in relation to the Gallagher brothers.
Marlowe read the line again, anticipating a ring of familiarity.
She had never heard the Gallagher brothers mention Layla, and couldn’t recall ever seeing a woman visit their property.
Without thinking, Marlowe opened a new tab and typed Layla’s name into the search bar.
Layla had lost her husband, Peter Gallagher, five years earlier.
The cause of death was referred to as an unspecified illness in the short obituary.
His friends called him Pete, and he had worked at a Tractor Supply Co.
store a few towns over—a fact that was also unfamiliar to her, though she knew of the store.
Harmon was Pete and Layla’s only child. How abandoned she must feel now.
All alone, just as Marlowe assumed the Gallagher brothers had been.
Tom, Dave, and Leroy’s house had been bare when Frank ordered it torn down.
Had Frank known that besides an empty house, the brothers had left people behind as well?
Who was Pete to them precisely? Had they shared a great-grandparent?
He wasn’t the relative who had inherited the property and sold it.
Marlowe wanted to ask her father, but she knew her questions would upset him.
He would tell her, as Nate had, not to worry about it.
To get some rest. To work on her painting.
Marlowe paused with her hands hovering over her keyboard.
Her half-hearted searches were fruitless.
Tom, Dave, and Leroy had parents, and those parents must have had siblings.
So Pete Gallagher was a possible cousin.
Or second cousin. He would have been far younger, Marlowe thought.
She pressed her fingers to her eyes as she realized she didn’t even have a guess at the Gallagher brothers’ ages.
When she was a child, they had already looked old, but not decrepit—that was as much as she remembered.
Everything else she recalled felt flimsy, as if it couldn’t be trusted.
The Gallaghers had been nothing but kind to Marlowe and her siblings, even when they had been running wild all over their land.
But they were strange. Perhaps stranger than she’d realized as a child.
The way Leroy never talked but only stared—even Tom’s friendliness was warping in her mind.
Why was he always showing them places on his land, giving them little gifts, asking about their games?
As for Dave, she and Nora, with their overactive imaginations, had made up stories about him harboring a secret broken heart based on a rumor Nora’s father had told her about a long-ago engagement that was called off without explanation.
They romanticized his past, crafting a tale of young lovers torn apart by cruel parents and interfering siblings, even searching the desk in the tiny barn office for hidden love letters that might have contained years of pining for a girl whose family didn’t approve of him.
But what if the source of the rumor hadn’t been tragic, but sordid instead?
With a huff of frustration, Marlowe stood up and reached for her coat.
She tugged on her boots and slipped out through the basement doors.
A glance up at the windows as she rounded the corner of the house told her no one was looking out.
Both her father and Enzo napped around midday, and Glory was probably taking advantage of the silence to read.
Marlowe slowed after she crossed the road.
She thought to go toward the Rise, perhaps head all the way out to the Flats once again, looking for what Harmon had hoped to find there in the darkness.
But she stopped at the barn and placed one hand on the door, the paint faded and dull beneath her fingers.
She had left too quickly to put on gloves, and the rough splintered wood dug into the bare skin of her palm.
Just above her was the dim loft where she and Nora had played.
They had watched the Gallagher brothers push open the heavy sliding doors over and over with ease.
Leroy was lean, almost scrawny, but Dave and Tom had larger, protruding bellies, markers of their age and poor diets.
Beneath their thick coats and worn flannel shirts, all three of them had been strong.
Tom would sometimes pat Marlowe or Nora on the head when they were little, and his touch was always gentle.
She shook Dave’s work-worn hand once and was startled by his almost effeminate grip.
Leroy had never touched her. Whether he was ill at ease around children or people in general, he steered clear of them.
And yet Marlowe had seen him, countless times, tenderly patting the soft necks of his cows as he led them in from the fields.
She put her back to the barn and crossed the road again, but at a diagonal toward the path that led upward along the side of the North Field and eventually into the woods above.
The trek up the hill was steep but short, and the view from the top was Marlowe’s favorite.
She headed up there almost every day when she was at the Gray House, to think about a project or to daydream.
When friends or fellow artists she knew from grad school visited her, she always took them up to admire the vista of rolling hills, the farms in the distance, and the blue outline of the Catskill Mountains.
At the top, she took in the stunning view of the house and fields below her, but her mind was too busy to appreciate it. Instead, she wondered what the Gallagher girl had been running away from all those years ago.
Marlowe kept walking to the edge of the field, following the path into the woods.
She used to brag to visitors at this point on a tour, pointing out the moss-covered stone walls that cut straight lines through the trees.
One of them stretched a few yards away from the path Marlowe trod, the rocks scattered in places, the top of the wall dipping in height, but the gray stone enduring.
“This is old land,” she would say. “Land with a history.”
Once upon a time, those stone walls had a purpose. They were built to separate properties or to keep the cows to certain tracts of land. There was something beautiful and ancient about them.
During her time studying abroad in college and while traveling the world, she had witnessed firsthand the age of many European structures; some were centuries older than anything in America.
Yet when she stood before Stonehenge and, later, the terra-cotta soldiers of China, her thoughts had inevitably drifted back to the stone walls.
She enjoyed taking archeology in college.
In one class, the professor showed a series of slides depicting little statues carved by people who had roamed the earth long before recorded history.
He stopped on a stone effigy of a woman, bare-chested and with hands outstretched.
There was a wolf beside her, snout tipped up, as if it was about to suckle on her breast. Her features had been worn away by time, until her face had become a smooth oval.
“Any guesses who this is?” The professor’s eyes twinkled in a way that signaled it might be a trick question.
Students raised their hands and chirped out their theories. Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Maybe Hera. Perhaps a representation of the mother wolf that raised Romulus and Remus before they founded Rome.
The professor acknowledged that Artemis was a good guess, but then he revealed that the statue dated back a good three centuries before Greek mythology took root, when the oral stories were ever shifting, when people whispered tales that were lost or altered before they could be recorded.
The little stone goddess—she was something else, something later goddesses were molded after.
“The Mother Goddess,” the professor said. “An ancient figure that appears across early civilizations in various forms.”
He took off his glasses as he continued.
“Think of the Christian origin of man—where Adam was shaped in God’s image, and then Eve was made in man’s image, out of Adam’s rib.
The people who carved this statue did not believe that.
Women were not made in man’s image or God’s image.
They were made in her image. The Mother Goddess, the origin of all life. ”
And in that classroom, so far away from the woods by the Gray House, Marlowe blinked up at the picture projected on the screen and wondered why it looked so familiar. Wondered why she felt she had unearthed something similar, running about as a child.
Marlowe stepped off the path and placed one boot atop a rock.
Not a pagan carving, just a stone, moved into place by a humble farmer.
It felt like more. As children, they had always searched for deeper meaning to add intrigue to their adventures.
She shivered as she recalled the stories her brothers and Nora made up to scare each other, about a villainous stranger lurking in the woods.
The wall Marlowe stood by stretched westward as far as she could see.
The barren branches seemed to point the way.
Marlowe hadn’t followed their directions since she was a girl, but she knew if she kept walking, she would reach the old abandoned car.
They had found it as teenagers. It had likely been left by a previous tenant, but charred logs nearby had been enough for them to conjure a character camping out in the woods.
They called him Mr. Babel. Nora had come up with the name, inspired by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which had stuck with her since Sunday school. She’d claimed Mr. Babel spoke to snakes and came out of the woods at night to peer into the windows of the Gray House.
Marlowe had added her own details: Mr. Babel had no fear of getting caught; he had lethal aim with his shotgun and knew the land, with all its hiding spots, like the back of his hand.
Even now, Nate and Henry told stories about him to their children, but their tales were tamer.
Mr. Babel had transformed into a genial hermit hiding treasure in the woods.
That wasn’t how he had started out, though.
In fact, there was a time when Marlowe truly feared Mr. Babel.
She’d even thought she had spotted him once or twice, weaving among the trees, a grizzled beard covering his face, dead squirrels tossed over his shoulder.
All at once, a smile tugged at the corners of Marlowe’s mouth, and tears threatened to well in her eyes. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at the memory of Nora’s dramatics.
Marlowe moved back to the path. The abandoned car was still a long ways off, and she doubted there would still be any sign of a fire.
Mr. Babel was a myth; by the time Nora disappeared, Marlowe was certain of that.
The woods weren’t even that vast—a few miles in any direction and a walker could hit a road or someone’s backyard.
It wasn’t a true wilderness, and there were no monsters hiding behind the thick tree trunks.
But there had been Gallaghers. Marlowe confronted that fact as she emerged into the field, the ground brown and dull. Another Gallagher, camping out, just as Harmon had done mere nights ago.
Only this other Gallagher was far more secretive. He had picked a hidden spot up in the woods. He had not reached out to them. Had he been watching them? And, if so, for how long?