Page 20

Chapter Twenty

Three days passed, and when June stepped out of her basement apartment, blinking, her limousine was waiting.

The navy-blue Pierce-Arrow gleamed; exhaust trailed around its flanks; its engine rumbled productively. Water dripped from the grill; it had gotten a wash after being pulled from the garage. It was not unusual for the staff to do something for her when she finally emerged from her days of convalescence after the Avallon IV, but it wasn’t a staff member who stood against the limo, arms crossed, legs wide, stance typical: it was Tucker Rye Minnick.

She was still too spent from the Avallon IV to find her usual smile, but he didn’t seem to expect one.

Before June had become general manager, Mr. Francis was the one to go down to bathhouses when the water became fractious. When June first found out about them, near the end of her time with direct mail, she thought these visits were a secret, because they were so completely divorced from his family life. He never gave the other Gilfoyles an explanation for missing meals or disappearing for a day or two; instead, he coordinated with Sam, his staff captain. Sam met him at the Avallon IV after he was done and helped him up the hill to the hotel, where he was put into an empty guest room to recover. For a long time, June thought Mr. Francis was sparing Madeline from the reality of the Avallon, but by the time she was going to the Avallon IV herself, she had discovered Madeline demanded he not return until he was himself. It was the only time June had felt the position of general manager was a little unfair. One person shouldn’t have to carry all the ugliness, surely.

But who else was both able and willing? Both to go into the Avallon IV and to minimize the magnitude of the task?

Tucker told her, “The Bureau has agenda items that concern you.”

Three days ago, she would have felt something about him retrieving the limo, him fetching her, but her feelings would take a bit to come back, in pricks and starts, like she’d been sitting on them too long. The Avallon IV hadn’t gotten any easier.

She shielded her eyes from the light. “I’ve got to get some work done.”

Reaching into his jacket, he removed a note, which he showed her.

Hoss,

We can survive another day.

Griff Clemons

The first feeling to return warmed her then, nearly painful in its newness: gratitude.

“Get a coat,” Tucker advised. “It’s cold in the mountains.”

···

Up, up, up. The limousine roared and whined, shook and rolled. On the rutted mountain road, the tires wailed and bumped. The wooden steering wheel bucked over potholes. The gear shift knocked. The chrome gauges, large and central as an airplane’s, trembled and strained. Everything about it, in fact, put one in mind of a great airplane fuselage, soaring and striving as wind eddied and drafted beneath it. In front of the great dark bonnet of the car, the mountains loomed, great and purple and benevolent. Behind, the highway serpentined down toward Constancy like a dropped spool of thread. Only a few weeks before, the way would have been made impassable by snow and ice, but now, spring was invading, and the heavy rain had turned the growth on the shoulder a saturated green. Redbuds spattered pink here and there.

It had been a while since June had left the Avallon, and still longer since she had been a passenger, and for a space of time, she let herself enjoy it. Out the window, she saw ridges and hollers, churches of every shape and age, some sprouting like mushrooms and others collapsed like a shot man. Every so often, they’d roar round a bend and discover a sudden brave homestead. A shack, a shed, a barn, the clearing temporarily claimed from the mountain forests. Sometimes, just the mouth of a forbidden-looking trail marked by a redundant sign warning away trespassers.

She did not know their destination. She did not care to ask if they had one. She sat on the front bench seat, and every time they went around one of the steep mountain curves, her hip or his hip could not help but slide to touch the other. Her limousine, her foolish limousine. When the Gilfoyles had first given it to her, she’d driven it up and down to Constancy a few times, just for the novelty of it. A limousine with one person in it was such a beautiful, lonely creature. The dachshunds did not count. If you could not see the passenger in the rearview mirror in a limousine, you were still alone.

Currently, the limousine was headed in the direction of June’s birthplace, although it was now a ghost town. Its death had come quite suddenly, a few years after June’s family left. Local legend blamed the sweetwater, but June heard that it had something to do with the abandoned mine. How would it feel to see it again? It felt as if they were driving back in time. June’s childhood had started with dirt floors, bedbugs, no plumbing, no electricity, wagons with wooden wheels, newspapers printed once a week, teachers who died of rabies, doctors who hadn’t finished school, families who never left the county they were born in, and the farther they went into these ancient, greening mountains, the more obvious it was that much of this rural county’s landscape had not progressed far beyond that.

The gas station that came into view after nearly an hour, though, looked like a proper resident of 1942. Previously a speakeasy, it had since embraced an identity as a country store and way station for highway travelers. Tucker got gas there, flipping his ration card and then his badge to the dubious clerk, and June got them two Coca-Colas. The clerk pried the tops off with the counter opener and asked, “Where you two headed?”

Tucker pointed. Up. He offered nothing else.

The clerk glanced at the limousine outside; the hood ornament, a boy shooting an arrow, was right at elbow level. He had a question in his eyes, but Tucker just slid his change off the counter and into his pocket.

Once they were back in the car, Tucker finally spoke. He said, “Pennybacker and I discussed Sabine Wolfe.”

“I ain’t sorry about talking to her,” she said.

“I didn’t expect you to be.” He handed her his open Coke bottle and put the limousine back on the road. “You know if he can manage the numbers, Hannelore will be here alone.”

“Far sight better than dead,” June said. “Worse fates than being an orphan. I was the same age when I came to the hotel.”

“Toad told me.”

“She must’ve taken a shine to you. Were you awful to her? Most people are afraid of her, but if you treated her badly, she’d think you were something special.”

Amusement played around his mouth. She handed him the drink; he took a swig, handed it back. He asked, “Are your parents still alive?”

“My father’s dead,” June replied. “Would you believe I never knew my mother’s real name? My father called her Toots. Took me years to realize it had to be a nickname. Toots Hudson. There was this fellow down by the—”

“I don’t need Hoss,” Tucker interrupted. “Just June.”

She was completely silenced, absorbing his meaning.

That first day, he’d stood in the Smith Library and given her the clean, cool facts of the upcoming detention, somehow correctly guessing she was someone who didn’t need life sugarcoated, even if she was always shaking sugar out for everyone else. And today, he guessed that sugarcoating cost her something, and offered her the ability to talk for free. Every interaction has a social cost , Mr. Francis had said. But what if some didn’t?

Tucker said, “You don’t have to polish the bullets for me. Just fire them.”

So she just said her piece. Hesitantly, with no story to it, in a lumpy, unpolished order. She told Tucker that she, like Hannelore, had been a remote, quiet child, fearful but tearless. She told him she remembered the period of her life after her father’s suicide as if from an owl’s view. The money running out, her mother’s hope running out shortly after, the days of begging in Malden. She told him she did not remember her tantrums, but she remembered the aftermath. Her mother apologizing to passersby. June exiled to sit on a crate behind the post office for entire days while her mother begged, so as to not ruin the gig with a sudden mood shift. Perhaps another child would have been miserable, but June was as far away from her emotions then as she was from anyone else’s. She watched the girl sitting on the crate, and she watched the people going in and out of the back of the post office, and she counted to pass the time. She told Tucker she remembered the sunburn on the top of her legs. She remembered the calico cat. She remembered the sound of the postal wagon’s axles.

He just listened. She didn’t have to tell him that she was only one of many children given up in West Virginia; he knew. She didn’t have to make him feel better about the tragedy of her childhood; he didn’t need her story to be a simple shape, designed to make him feel differently about his own.

She said, “I guess if I regret anything, it’s that no one told her I would grow up eventually; I was just taking a long time to get there. Are your parents—”

“Dead.”

“God rest ’em.” June handed him the Coke bottle. He finished it; she finished hers. Empty glass bottles clicking together in the footwell of a limousine. Somewhere, men were shooting at each other. Somewhere her mink overboots were toppled on their side beside her door. “Land sakes, it feels right indulgent to be putting rubber on this road, Tuck; we’re using up your gas ration.”

She tried it out, Tuck , not Tucker. She called her staff by nicknames all the time, but this was different, and she knew it. This was vocalizing the electricity between them.

He said nothing. He breathed out, real slow, between barely parted lips, which was louder than anything he could have said anyway.

June said, “If you pull up here, you can see the town where I was born.”

On the narrow shoulder, Tucker rolled down the window for them to have a better look. There wasn’t much to see. On this side of the ravine, the trees and brush were badly overgrown. On the other, the town’s remaining buildings, previously painted bright colors, had faded mostly into the same gray-brown-orange of the rest of the landscape.

“There used to be a bridge up there,” June said, “but it washed out sometime after my family moved. Casto Springs. My pop was a doctor. He had all kinds of potions in the trunk of his car and he’d stitch up anyone who asked, whether or not they had a cut. That was a joke. He did like stitching, though.”

Tucker had an elbow up on the edge of the door, and his entire hand pressed over his mouth, as if he were holding in his words. She didn’t mind that he didn’t laugh; she knew he had been listening. He didn’t need to entertain her, either.

Finally, he lowered his hand.

“Poison Point,” he said. “That’s what we used to call it.”

“Yes, I recollect some people called it that. The miners.” He hadn’t gotten that coal tattoo in the Bureau.

“The miners,” he agreed.

They regarded each other. She catalogued his physical features, the ones she liked, the ones she didn’t. The ever-present frown was too severe. The eyes were soft and perceptive, full of soul. The forehead was too wide; he would have to hope he kept his hair as he got old. The nose, fine, the ears acceptable. The mouth was wonderful. Wide, soft lower lip, capable of so many expressions without ever altering the rest of his face. And of course, he was cataloguing her face as well, and obvious attraction can add appeal to an unusual visage, too.

“There’s a higher bridge,” he said. “Above the town. I think it would have been spared in the flood.”

She answered the unspoken question. “Yes.”

So the Pierce-Arrow roared a few more miles. The narrow bridge was still intact, although creeper roamed all over the railings and the road itself was hidden by a layer of rotten leaf muck. Tucker didn’t take his time crossing it. On the other side, the single-track road was nearly invisible. It was only because they both knew it had been there that the gap in the undergrowth seemed inviting.

Tucker let the limo slow. “The raspberries might scratch your paint—?”

June imagined Gilfoyle returning, finding the limousine muddy and etched from a day that didn’t include him. She thought of the letter still resting on her nightstand. Keep the old chin up. She said, “Let them scratch.”

The Pierce-Arrow pressed on.

A mile of trials; that was how long the limousine had to endure brambles scraping down its sides and whipping against its undercarriage. Then, quite suddenly, the trees gave way to a ruined main street where some lucky combination of pavement and environment had kept the central track clear.

June had been so young when they left Casto Springs. But she recognized it.

The town was only about fifteen buildings altogether. What used to be a general store, a feed store, the post office and doctor’s office both—where June’s father had once worked for a time—the mining office, the school she had been too young to attend. A boardinghouse, a mom-and-pop restaurant. All the buildings were clustered on one side of the road; the other side was mountain, rising precipitously to even higher climes. All of it was soft and forgotten now, porches melted into themselves, roofs sloped into the weeds, glass broken out of windows at intervals. The humble church, one of the snake-handling models that wasn’t hard to find in these mountains, was still strangely entire, although its previously pristine white siding was dingy with old pollen and faded coal dust; this was what they had glimpsed from the other side of the ravine.

Without any discussion, they got out. Tucker went a little into the woods to pee on a tree; June had a cigarette while he did so he wouldn’t feel self-conscious about making her wait. Then they walked directly down the middle of the road, looking this way and that. Comfortable memory settled into June. All the years she’d spent here had happened both when she was too young to be wise to other people’s miseries and before her own miseries had begun, so everything, even the ancient destruction of it all, had the fuzzy appeal of nostalgia.

“Were you here long?” Tucker asked, and his voice sounded small, drowned out by the ecstatic birds and the constant roar of unfelt wind caught up in the treetops.

“I was just a mite when we left. Pop got a chance to rent a house with a little field so my mother could have some cows and chickens, and he did house calls from there until the war. The Great War. You? Were you here when I was?”

Even if he had been, they might have never crossed paths; the Hudsons’ Casto Springs home had been far enough outside town that they’d only come to the main street a few times a month for supplies. But she wanted to know if he might’ve been one of the nameless silhouettes of her past.

He considered his answer. “I was here until it flooded.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-five. How old are you?”

“Some women might consider that a rude question.”

His eyes glimmered with humor. “How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-five, too.”

What a marvel that they had both begun in the same place. It was a typical West Virginia story, in its way, that they grew up here and ended up only a few miles away, down the mountain at the Avallon. It was only every single other part of their story that was different.

As they walked, June found she could not remember the last time she had spent this many minutes on so little. A stroll through a place that could serve her no good in the future. Nor could she recall the last time she’d spent so much time with someone who required so little from her. Tucker’s silence didn’t demand her to fill it. His unhappiness, if he had any, was not currently her task to solve. She knew he would have made this walk on his own, just as she would have, but she also knew he preferred it with the wordless company. She was free to simply be herself; he was free to simply be himself, alongside each other. June, not Hoss. Tucker, not Agent Minnick.

What a good feeling this would be to give the water.

Eventually, they came to the miners’ houses crowded close to either side of the road. Here, it seemed like an unlucky wind had put these structures more in the way of the mine’s breath than the rest of the town. Unlike the first stretch of the street, which was just ravaged by time, these houses had sloughing water damage. What remained of their white-painted exteriors was now dull gray with coal dust and mildew.

The glance Tucker gave these structures was cursory, if anything, and he turned away at once. June took him by his upper arm—electric! What a warm thrum right through her at the excuse to touch him! Every day she laid hands on someone without a passing thought, and yet this utilitarian gesture demanded more—and squared him up to face the houses. She had no memories of them, but she knew that wasn’t true for him. Whatever this town was to her, it was something altogether different for him.

“It was a walk and a half to get here, Agent,” she said. “Don’t look away from what you came to see.”

He crossed his arms, putting his hands in his armpits, a gesture common to him, but today, it was as if this was the first time he had postured in this way, as if he were trialing the man he might become. He was not thirty-five. He was sixteen. He was looking at one of the houses, little more than a rotted porch with half a dozen chairs toppled against each other. His nostrils flared. He was taking quick, small breaths, soaking his lungs with air before the dive.

And then it was over and he turned away lightly. This, she understood, was the story that filled the years between his time here in Casto Springs and the day he had come to the Avallon. The story of learning to breathe again after drowning.

On their way back to the Pierce-Arrow, June sheered off to the charismatic church they’d passed; it felt irresistible now. As she climbed the two rickety stairs to the door, he said, “Watch yourself,” or perhaps just took in his breath sharply enough that she understood that was what he meant. She lifted a hand to show that she’d heard, but pressed through the faded red door anyway.

“I just want to take a gander,” she said.

Inside, the interior was surprisingly intact. The paint had peeled off the walls in big, ragged sections, and the velvet on the pews was moldy and misshapen, but the stained glass windows at the rear of the church that sent candy-colored light over the sturdy pews were unbroken. June searched her mind for any memory, and instead found a composite of childhood memories of churches like this. A preacher saying, Stand, stand, is the spirit upon you? A man or a woman or, sometimes, startlingly, a child, rising from their pew to babble in tongues no one else there could understand. Taken by some amorphous spirit that ruled the heavens or, to June’s mind, more likely, the mountains, the water, the cubits of rocky earth that outnumbered them.

At the altar of the old church, a fallen ceiling beam had pierced the floor. To her amazement, when she eased over to the busted floorboards, she saw movement underneath. Water. When she crouched, she could even hear it, rushing on its way toward the ravine. The sweetwater that had risen up to tear apart this town was still surging beneath it. Poison Point. Years ago—in 1922, to be precise, just as Gary Foglesong, the mayor of Constancy, had noted—this water had turned, but that had been a long time ago, and now she felt no malice or discontent. The irresistible pull she’d felt outside was stronger now.

She spidered her fingers over the gap in the boards.

“June, don’t,” Tucker said, and she heard a thread of anxiety in his voice.

“I ain’t afraid of the water,” she said.

“I am.”

Flatly.

“What do you think I do at the Avallon?” June asked him.

He closed his eyes and turned his face away; too proud to leave, not proud enough to watch.

Some people saw fear and mirrored it without question, but June wasn’t put off by Tucker’s. Whatever he was afraid of belonged only to him.

She lowered her fingers into the water in the way she always did. Pinky, ring, middle, pointer, thumb, palm. A gesture repeated so often the staff used it as an offhand shorthand to refer to her. Where is [hand gesture] ? Don’t let [hand gesture] catch you at that! Hoss. The hand gesture meant Hoss, the person who held the Avallon steady, unchanging, the same as it had been for decades.

The water beneath the church was quite cold. Not as cold as one would expect—it should have been just short of freezing—but not as warm as the waters around the Avallon.

Oh, hello , June thought. Hello, hello.

This water was different from her water. How sweet and wild and innocent it was. It rampaged around her fingers, not out of unkindness, because it did not know how breakable she was, and it was in a hurry. It curiously splashed up her wrist right up to her elbow, right onto her face, hungry, disbelieving. It must have been a very long time since any human had set foot in it. It must have been a very long time, June thought, since this sweetwater was asked to do anything but be sweetwater. She let it play around her skin, listening to how she felt, to that wholeness she’d just felt on the walk here. In return, she listened to it—it was so eager to be heard. She let it fill her with its youthful mayhem, its sweet healing, its fretful certainty it had somewhere else to be. She wondered if there was a time when the water beneath the Avallon had ever felt like this, if they had taken something away from it by making it useful.

June, not Hoss.

I’d like to put you into the purchasing department, June , Mr. Francis had said. You and I both know you’re headed for staff captain, but I can’t transfer you right from direct mail. In purchasing, you’ll see how everything moves in this place from top to bottom. You’ll meet everyone. You’ll touch everything. I’m putting a lot of responsibility on you, though. It’d be hard to replace you. Do you intend to stay—

I’ll be at the Avallon forever, Mr. Francis.

“You should come over here,” she told Tucker. “I’m learning about last year’s snow.”

He did not come over there.

She said, “Look, I’m fine, more than fine. You don’t trust me?”

“You’re different.”

“What do you think will happen?”

Tucker said, “I think it’ll remember me.”

She weighed this sentence, decided it was not worth pressing him, and stood up, shaking her nearly numb hand out. By the time she was wiping it on her slacks, she saw that his fear had given over to something else: rueful admiration.

“So that’s why they’ll walk through fire for you,” he said.

“Through water, but point taken. Reckon so.”

It didn’t seem wise to navigate the overgrown road and bridge past dusk, so they returned to the limousine. Without a word, Tucker pulled open the passenger-side door and sat; June drove them back down the mountain. They went the same way they had started, in silence. A full, growing silence, one that filled every inch of the car.

By the time they arrived back in Constancy, the day had already given up and it was pitch-black, except, of course, for the Avallon, whose floodlights blazed through the trees at the top of the hill. June drove past the hotel to the dark train station a mile down the road. She pulled the Pierce-Arrow up to the benches and turned it off. She still felt like she was moving. It had gotten cold.

In the dark of the car, she heard a rustle. She knew what he was up to before he finished it, and she finished it for him, closing the distance between them. There was his mouth, wonderful as she’d expected, gentle and accommodating against hers. They had both done this before, with other people, so the only awkwardness was that they had never done it with each other. But that dissipated quickly; a good kiss erases doubt. He had a lovely, mannish smell to him this close, the sort of earthy-coffee-metal workingman scent that colognes were always trying to capture and amplify, and she liked tasting him as much as looking at him. She touched his hair, his neck. His hands were awed on her neck, her breastbone, curious beneath the edge of her bra. They were as close as the front seat would allow; anything further would require more planning, more logical thought, more commitment. June considered it as he put her earlobe in his mouth. The youthful water was still running through her from earlier today, urging speed, exploration, wonder. She slid her hand in his jacket, testing herself for desire, finding it in spades. It felt so long since she had wanted something in such a delicious, thorough, uncomplicated way.

Tucker said, “Wait.”

He did not mean wait . He meant stop .

They stopped. They sat back in their seats. June put her hand on her throat and felt her heart racing beneath her palm. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and she saw Tucker’s chest rising and falling. Wild to think she had ever thought it had gotten cold. Heat suffused every part of her.

After a space, he said, “My SAC handed me a resignation letter right before I came to the hotel. My name at the bottom. I didn’t write it.”

June rummaged in her mind for a response and found she didn’t have one at the ready. His confession described a world she had heard and read about but never experienced. A masculine circumstance. A military circumstance. Are you listening to me, soldier? circumstance. Head games and handshakes, obedience and obsequence. It was as far away from the Avallon as she could imagine, the opposite of luxury.

“Why?” she asked.

A faint, repetitive noise. He was running his middle finger across the dash over and over, left to right, left to right, left to right, left to right, trying to dispel the energy that they’d generated between them. He said, “We had new background checks after Pearl Harbor and they didn’t like what they found. If I prove myself invaluable here, they look the other way, because I’ve been there ten years. Longer than most. This is a way to make it right. What I did.”

June wasn’t sure if that was how right and wrong worked—it felt more like how blackmail worked—but she understood what he was really saying. He was telling her why this assignment was important to him. He was telling her that he used to be someone else. He was telling her that he would do anything to remain in the Bureau. He was telling her this was why he would not take her in the back seat and do something they might both regret later.

He was giving her a way to wait . To stop . And he was right. Of course he was right. The Avallon was just up the hill. What did she think they were going to do? At the top of that hill, she would turn back into the general manager of the Avallon and he would turn back into Special Agent Tucker Rye Minnick. She wasn’t going to go. He wasn’t going to stay. What had they even been doing?

“Ten years is a long time,” June said, cautiously, evenly, because she felt sweetwater rushing beneath her heart, and after this, she had to go back to the Avallon, which was always listening carefully to her. “Your whole life.”

He was absurdly grateful. “Yes. Exactly.”

“Can’t feel good to be accused of wrongdoing,” she said. “Not when you’ve been trying to do it for the right reasons all this time.”

“Exactly.”

“And you’ve invested so many years in this, it’s who you are.”

“Exactly.”

What she would do, she thought, was get the Lily House in order. She would finally move her belongings in there. She would stop waiting to be asked into the Gilfoyle family apartment instead. She’d set up new rules for the hotel now that Mr. Francis was gone, rules she could live with. It was time to stop fooling around and be grateful for what she had. She’d told Mr. Francis he should think about what the hotel needed, not what he wanted. She needed to think about where she’d invested ten years of her life.

“Is this the Bureau business you wanted to discuss?” she asked.

Tucker hesitated, mouth working.

“Sebastian Hepp was the one who gave the journalists the maids’ uniforms,” he said. Before she could consider how she felt about this information or why he might be telling her, he added, “I could arrest him. For assisting Nazis.”

Warmth became fiery heat. “What the devil !”

“I haven’t yet.”

“Yet! Sebastian? Do you know what that would do to the Grotto? Do you know what that would do to him? For the crime of what? For the crime of kindness . For the crime of gentleness in this world, when he could’ve been any kind of man and he chose to be one with pity. For the—”

“June,” he interrupted, and despite everything he had just said, she felt her own name in his voice send voltage through her. June, not Hoss, but it didn’t matter, because he belonged to the Bureau and she belonged to the Avallon. “June, stop. That’s what this is about. That’s why I asked to meet with you. I wanted to hear what you had to say.”

Now she was cold. Thoroughly cold, right to her spine, her fingers squeezed into her lap to warm them. Tucker opened his door. The smell of woodsmoke and wet earth came in.

“What are you doing?”

“I heard what you had to say,” he said. “Now I’m walking back. Good night, Miss Hudson.”

···

That night, quite late, when she got ready for bed, she got ready to draw a glass of sweetwater from her kitchen sink as the dachshunds watched her anxiously. Then, for the first time, she backed away from the tap without touching it.

She didn’t want this feeling anywhere near the Avallon.