The Vesta

Updated 10/20/2026

CHAPTER 1

The best swears Lina knows come from Grandpa Bloom, which makes them a kind of inheritance. She cherishes them as such, and uses them more sparingly than her grandfather, who always cursed the governor and the weather and his pickup with the same indiscriminate flair that he used on the Vesta theater. To her, foul language belongs in foul circumstances, usually out of earshot of children, and only when no other words can accurately convey the emotion of the situation.

Like now, she thinks as she skids over a patch of black ice on her way into the Vesta Theater parking lot. Now is a good time to swear.

And so she fills the morning with oaths as she fights to regain control of her pickup. She is sliding right for the brick wall on the back of the Vesta, or perhaps for the Blue Ridge Haunts jeep—it could go either way, really—and bracing for impact. At the last possible second, her tires find bare pavement, bark across the dry place until she comes to a stop near the building, the very definition of cattywampus. She decides it’s close enough and steps gingerly out of her car. Takes a deep breath of the cold mountain air to steel herself for the day.

Before the sun had even tipped over the mountain, Beth Ann Nash had called to say that the power was out at the Vesta, which made it impossible for her Blue Ridge Haunts crew to finish recording for the segment they were doing on the theater. It was cold, she said, and too dark to get any meaningful B-roll footage. She had sent the rest of her crew to get breakfast at Ashby’s Diner until the problem was fixed.

“It’s probably just a breaker issue,” Lina had said. “I can talk you through it.”

“I don’t want to be fooling around with electrical in this—in a building this old. Can you come over?”

Lina stretched her thumb and forefinger across her brow, the way Grandpa Bloom used to do. Tears gathered her eyes. “Can we do this tomorrow? I still have a lot to get ready for the funeral.”

“I’m sorry,” Beth Anne had said, and sounded like she meant it. Lina thought she might follow up with all right, that’s fine, another day then. She did not. “Did I mention it’s cold?”

Lina had waited for the anger to wash through her before she reigned in her breath and allowed her heartbeat to slow.

“Hello?” Beth Anne said.

One last deep breath. “I’ll be right over. No problem.”

She breezes through the lobby by the emergency exit lights, but the stairwell to the basement is pitch black. She counts steps as she descends—eight in the first flight, two-step turn, seven more down to the concrete floor. She manages to unlock the mechanical room door by feel, despite the cold. The ghost must have blown out the pilots before she flipped the breakers. A clever touch. Lina curses her anyway.

The swearing was another of Grandpa Bloom’s tricks, albeit one they never admitted to Grandma Joyce. It was, he told her, a way to assert her confidence, to close the openings for dark spirits to prey upon her feelings—not to mention a tool for discerning who cared more about a little girl’s potty mouth than they did about real evil in their midst.

She thought he would never die. She still can’t believe that he did.

She reaches for the flashlight she keeps on an upturned five-gallon bucket by the door. She comes up empty the first time and so begins moving her hand around in circles, fingers splayed so each pass searches a wider area. All at once, the tip of her pinky finger grates across the wall, leaving bits of nail and skin on the unpainted cinder block.

That does it for Lina. And so she lets loose, her invectives flying in all directions at the wires and pipes and machinery that she knows lurk somewhere in the darkness. She curses the cell phone she left in her car, the call that had awakened her at this ungodly hour, the woman who summoned her for an errand she could have done herself. She curses Blue Ridge Haunts and the Vesta’s desperate need of the tourist bump an appearance on the channel might produce. She curses these cinderblock walls, this January darkness, this ridiculous human dependency on electricity. She curses her wasted thirties, her failed marriage, the lack of employable skills that forces her to be grateful to have even this sorry job at this crumbling tourist trap.

Most of all, she curses Grandpa Bloom and the ghost and their feud, which always seems to make others bleed.

The words hover for a moment, their echo more pronounced without the hum of the various appliances in the mechanical room. Lina winces at the word “foolfuckery.” Not her best effort, to be sure, but the cold is getting worse by the minute. She takes in a breath—in for three, out for three. Decides on a different strategy.

“Elyane?” she calls. “Elyane! He’s gone.”

The only reply is the reverberations of her voice off the hard walls. After that, a silence as definitive as the tomb. She puts her pinky to her mouth, feels the abrasion against her lips. She flexes and relaxes her aching little toe, still not quite healed from the cinderblock she kicked a month ago on this same errand. The bruising has faded, but the pain still flares up in the cold, a reminder to respect the obstacles and whatever forces slide them into her path.

The cold grips her now, and it will only get worse until she can get things turned back on. She blows on her free hand to cut the chill, then folds it into the warmth of her armpit.  Before she thinks to stop them, her fingers locate a tiny, hard mass in the soft flesh above the edge of her pectoral muscle.

No. Not now. Not this thing too, here in the black morning.

She pulls her hand away. Breathes in for three counts, out for three. One breath, then another, smooth and steady. That much she can control.

CHAPTER 2

Before everything went to hell on the express train, Grandpa Bloom would have been the one to slog through the darkness to set things right. He had joined the maintenance staff at the Vesta the day the new building opened, a part-time labor of love to go along with his new job teaching chemistry at the high school. Half a century on, he could diagnose most of the building’s issues at a glance. He liked to say he knew where all the bodies were buried, which Lina hoped was metaphorical. In point of practice, it meant he could navigate the building’s aging systems by rote, a mug of coffee in one hand and a sensibly sized flashlight in the other.

Managing the ghost was another matter. Until she took the job managing the Vesta, Lina had assumed the haunting was merely her grandfather’s metaphor for his struggles with the facilities, or perhaps a marketing device to keep the theater on the Spooky South bus tours that brought in no small percentage of their yearly income. Once Lina joined the staff, however, she could see up close the real-world damage Elyane LaSalle’s spirit could do. A sudden leak in the roof dumped enough snow melt in the balcony to require new carpet for that entire level. Power outages interrupted performances in the fall and froze pipes in winter. Grandpa Bloom dealt with the headaches and fielded the complaints and waited until he thought he was alone to grumble about the ghost.

But the gruff and grit he used to keep the Vesta together was not enough to keep his own body from decaying. Six months into her tenure, Lina noticed how much slower he moved, how forgetful he’d become. But her husband Shane had just moved out of the house, and their daughter Cassie was beginning her junior year of high school, and this tiny hard thing was growing in her chest. It wasn’t until he checked himself into Shady Pines Senior Care Center that she understood what Grandpa Bloom could somehow see: that he was fading from the earth, and no one could stop it.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her at Christmas.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Doesn’t make me less sorry.”

A week later, a stroke had taken all but his breath, which seemed all the more cruel. She could not say what liminal space her grandfather occupied, if any piece of him existed at all. She grieved his pending loss, feared a future without him in it. Feared even more that he might join Elyane in her haunting.

The scrape on her hand has stopped bleeding, but Lina doesn’t notice. Instead, she fingers the lump in her chest, trying to decide if it has grown in the first six weeks of the year. It hurts, which she knows means…something. Hopeful or ominous, she can’t say, and she has not dared search the internet her initial conversation with Bella. Maybe if it hurts, it isn’t cancer. Or maybe the opposite is true. Maybe it all depends on context. 

Stop. Focus.

When she at last reaches the breaker box, she feels for the one that governs the mechanical room, six down and one over from the top left corner. She presses her thumb against the switch but does not slide it over.

A sound has emerged—not sound, exactly. Pulses, quick and insistent, at a frequency so low that she does not so much hear as feel them in her chest. It enters her consciousness like a growl, raising goose flesh across her neck and back.

Something is out there. In the darkness.

Not out there. In here.

The muscles in her thighs and hips tense, ready to run. Let’s go, they tell her, we can make it just close your eyes and go and you won’t see it it can’t get you if you don’t see it.

But her body is wrong. She does not need the fluorescents to make out the dark silhouette of a woman on the floor, eight or so feet away, lying in a position that implies some form of injury. Her right hand extends forward, clutching something Lina can’t make out. The tiny hairs on her neck stand on end.

That is my body, she thinks.

And then, That is my daughter’s body.

The pulses quicken, the waves compressing into sound and finally speech—a woman’s voice, clear and cold as the air in these mountains.

You are frail.

You are weak.

You will die alone.

A sharp pain races up from behind her knee to her hip, a cramp brought on by holding so much tension. The time for running has passed. She wants to cry, wants to crumble, wants to give herself over to heaving sobs that would push her breath beyond her control. But she does not. Grandpa Bloom has taught her better.

Instead she lowers her hands until they are at waist-level, turns up her palms and stands as straight as her screaming hamstring will allow. She breathes slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, three counts each. At first, her body shivers involuntarily in time with her racing heartbeat. She sticks with it, reminds herself what she must say to the pulsating voice. My breath is my own, and you may not steal it.

When she opens her eyes again, the only sound is the faint ringing in her ears. The darkness has swallowed up the vision and the voice and whatever they belonged to. She reaches again for the breaker box. Counts the switches. Presses against one until it gives way. Before the pop! has faded, the overhead lights blink on. She flips another breaker with trembling fingers. Stops to breathe. In for three, out for three. In dark places, that’s how you stay alive.

She climbs the steps to the main level slowly, gripping the rail to maintain an anchor point. The visions have become more frequent since Grandpa Bloom’s stroke, and they take more of a toll. She will play it off as grief, should anyone from Blue Ridge Haunts spot her. She hopes she can get to the back door before they do.

A shrill beeping sound greets her in the lobby, however. She takes a deep breath and runs through the likely sources—a dead smoke alarm, faults as the sound system reboots, the refrigerator in back of concessions struggling to come online. She presses her forehead against the crack between the double doors that lead to the house’s main level. The alarm is moving nearer, nearer, as though descending from the rafters to the rows of floor seats. All at once the pattern changes, beeping out a droid-like tune until it falls silent at last.

“Beth Anne?” she calls.

No answer.

She cracks open the door to the theater. She knows she flipped the correct breaker, triple checked it even. Yet save for the red glow of the exit signs, the house is swallowed in darkness. She steals a tiny flashlight from the usher’s stand by the door and clicks it on as she moves further in, scanning the mezzanine and the balcony, thirty feet above her, and then back down to the floor. A second later, the beam hits the reflectors on The Bird, Beth Anne’s camera drone. It is more expensive than everything Lina owns combined, and she begins making liability calculations out of habit.

“Beth Anne?”

Another turn of her wrist, and the blue light illuminates something far worse.

The body that once housed Beth Anne Nash lies still in the center aisle, directly below the balcony. A fall then, and almost certainly mortal. In the Vesta, however, with its shadows and its ghosts, such things cannot be taken for granted. Lina moves quickly to the woman’s side, careful not to kneel in the pool of blood seeping onto the floor beneath Row FF, and presses her fingers against Beth Anne’s left wrist. Her skin is still warm, but no pulse emerges from her veins. Lina releases her grip gently, braces herself on the aisle seat as she stands.

Don’t, she tells herself. Don’t look for what you’ll wish you hadn’t seen.

Nevertheless she trains her flashlight onto the body, and it tells her what she already knows. She has endured this vision for weeks now, worried she was seeing Cassie’s death or her own. Now the very fulfillment of that horror lies at her feet, Beth Anne’s figure contorted as though drawn by a beginning art student. Her right hand extends forward, still clutching a small, dark object. Lina bends down, lifts the tiny green-black statue from the dead woman’s fingers—a stylized falcon, exquisite in its form and heavier than she expected. She weighs it in her palm, listens as a woman’s voice seems to emerge from it.

You are frail. You are weak. You will die alone.

Her hand cradles the statue, fingers curled as though it might wriggle free. Now that she holds it, she recognizes it. Recognizes the voice from thirty years ago, when she was only just awakening to the unseen world. Back then, she was a child, and all was curiosity. Now, as an adult, she feels the force of the threat, the terror of its fulfillment. And she knows, as surely as she is standing here in the cold theater over Beth Anne Nash’s body, who speaks to her through this dark talisman.

The form is a falcon.

The voice is Elyane LaSalle’s.

CHAPTER 3

On the day of her mother’s funeral, six year-old Lina Grayson heard the falcon speak for the first time. She had left the luncheon at the church with her grandfather, who said he needed to get something out of his office at home. She knew even then that he was lying to get away from all the people, that he just wanted to be alone and cry. Of course, she wanted the same thing, which is why he let her come along. They had always known each other like that. He told her he had to go make sure the squirrels hadn’t eaten all the bird food, deposited her in the office with a box of tissues and told her he’d be back in ten minutes.

She cried for five and then made herself stop. Grandpa Bloom was nothing if not true to his word. Ten minutes meant ten minutes, and she did not want him to return and see her with puffy eyes and snot running down her nose. She cleaned her face and walked around the office, taking in the faint smell of cherrywood and scanning the rows of her grandfather’s books—better than the Carnegie Library, even, because Grandpa Bloom didn’t keep anything that he hadn’t both read and determined to be worth reading. She was deciding between The Hobbit and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH when she realized to her astonishment that she had grown tall enough to reach the shelf above those books. She stood on her tiptoes and explored its surface with her tiny fingers.

The first thing she discovered was a glossy paper, laid flat on the shelf. She scooted it to the edge until she could grasp the corner, pulled it down and felt her little heart start to race. It was a black and white photograph of a building on fire—the old Vesta theater, built when Grandpa Bloom was little and destroyed a long time before Lina was born. In the center of the roof stood the wispy figure of a woman with long, dark hair. Later, when she asks Grandpa Bloom if the woman was his friend, he will say with the saddest smile she’s ever seen that he doesn’t know. She turned the photograph over and read the words on the back, handwritten in blue pen.

Elyane LaSalle

Vesta fire

February 29, 1972

Photo by Lewis G. Qualls

She wanted to look more closely at the photograph—she’s seen it before, somewhere, hasn’t she?—but her grandfather would be back any moment. She slid it back into place, stepped away to see what else she might examine with her newfound reach.

When she thought back on the moment, she would never know for sure if the little statue caught her eye or her ear first. It was pushed all the way back to the wall, a green-black bird’s head just visible from where she stood. She stretched her body as far as it would go, until her fingertips could only just brush against the stone. After three failed attempts, she finally caught enough of the ridges along its wings to turn it and slide it and let it fall into her waiting palm.

The falcon was a tiny thing, four inches tall at best, but with an inexplicable heft to it, a weight beyond the imprint it left against her tender skin. She remembered it now, recalled the way Grandma Joyce had forbidden her from touching it or even staring too long at it. But in his usual way, Grandpa Bloom understood his granddaughter’s attraction to dark things. He crept back into the room quietly, and he did not scold her for her curiosity.

“It’s kimberlite,” he explained as he sat down on the desk next to her. He gently wrapped his long fingers around her little ribs and pulled her over next to him. Then he lifted the figure from her palm, turned it so that she might inspect it from another angle. “Probably from the mine over in Elliott County. It forms deep inside the earth, and it stays there unless a crack opens up and brings it to the surface. Sometimes, kimberlite rocks carry diamonds up with them.”

He said this as though it were the greatest of wonders, the way he talked when he introduced her to an especially talented actor or musician that had come to play the Vesta. But tension gathered on his forehead, and his left eye twitched as it sometimes did when she asked if her father was ever coming home.

“I don’t understand,” she answered.

“Well, it takes a lot of heat and pressure to make—.”

“No!” she said. For the briefest of moments, she thought of grabbing the falcon and running, out the door and back to the old cellar in the woods where she liked to read. Somehow, the falcon itself seemed to encourage the plan. She swallowed the lump growing in her throat. “I don’t understand what it’s saying.”

“Saying?” He dropped the statue into his lap. Covered it with his hand.

“It’s—I can’t explain it.”

“Give it a try.”

She rubbed her eyes, tried to think. Grandpa Bloom may get caught up in boring geology lessons, but he always listened when she spoke. “It’s like the falcon is trying to say something, and it wants me to hear it, but I can’t make out the words.”

“All right. You hear a voice, then?”

“Sort of. It’s more like—.” She reached for words she did not yet have. When she came up empty, she lifted her hands and flexed her fingers open and closed.

“A pulse?”

“Maybe. I think so.”

Clouds of worry passed over his face and hung there. “Well then,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.” She reached out her hand to take back the statue and he let her, waiting quietly while she held it and tried to decipher this heavy thing that called out so strangely.

She was just a child then—old enough to remember the moment, but not to draw a line between it and her future. At some point she had given the statue back to her grandfather and he had taken it away. Had she heard its call again, or even seen it up on the shelf after that day? She did not know. Layers of history had settled on that memory, burying it beneath the tumult of adolescence and all-too-early motherhood and the desperate attempt to stay sane—what passed for sane in a place like Ballard County. After so many years, the falcon lay deep below what she thought of as her life, remaining in her memory only as a shadow in Grandpa Bloom’s once powerful hands.

But no memory was ever truly lost—she could see this now as an adult, three decades from that moment, when so much had resurfaced to lay claim on her. There were fissures in time through which the past might and often did break through. The artifacts of childhood waited for some eruption in the present, some quake in consciousness to carry them upward as kimberlite might a diamond, to reveal what power and pressure could do.

CHAPTER 4

The first sheriff’s deputy to arrive at the Vesta is Vega Adair, who had been buying coffee at Duality when the 911 call came through. She hands Lina a vanilla latte, a gift from AJ, the shop owner, who had heard the dispatch call over Vega’s walkie-talkie and insisted on sending a bit of liquid love to the scene of—of whatever is happening at the Vesta. The deputy examines the body and confirms that Beth Anne is dead, takes an initial statement from Lina and suggests she go home to clean up while they wait for the forensics team to arrive from Richmond.

But first Lina has to go to the diner to tell Ixian and Kelsey, the two interns from Blue Ridge Haunts who make up the rest of the production team. The young man tears up at the news, but his female counterpart receives it as a journalist, asking questions to try to piece together the facts of the story. Lina defers such questions to Vega, who is paid to think clearly when bodies show up in unexpected places, and sends the crew to the Vesta to wait. She doesn’t hear Kelsey’s shouted questions as she exits. Her whole attention is consumed with the effort not to crumple into a ball and scream.

Halfway to her house, she realizes that she’s walking home. It’s three miles from the theater—not an unrealistic distance, but no quick stroll on a gray February morning. The sidewalk ends once she crosses the bypass, and the gravel on the road presses up through the thin soles of her dress shoes. She arrives home exhausted and teetering on frostbite. In the shower, she lets warm water fall across her body while she examines the angry pink skin hanging over her trembling hands. Grandpa Bloom used to tell the story of getting caught out in blizzards twice in one winter, his survival a testament to both the miracles of the Lord and his own poor judgment. He made her promise she would never be so proud as to think she could beat nature. Another failure.

The whistle of the tea kettle greets her when she opens the bathroom door. He daughter Cassie is in the kitchen, working to fasten a white sock over the lip of a coffee mug.

“Why aren’t you in school?” Lina asks. But curiosity squeezes out parental duty, and she asks another question before her daughter answers the first. “What in the world are you doing?”

“Improvising.” She motions toward the empty space where the coffee maker used to be. Three weeks ago, a lightning strike had caused a power surge that took out both the machine and the outlet it was plugged into. A faint ashen sunburst is still visible on the faceplate and wall. They’re lucky the house didn’t burn down.

“A sock, though?”

“Don’t worry. It’s clean—washed once and never worn.”

“I’ll look on the trash and treasures website again for a new pot,” Lina says. “Maybe we can find a Christmas present castoff.”

She sits down on a stool at the bar and lifts her knees so that her heels are on the footrest. Cassie looks her over, frowns with concern. “I hear you’ve had a fun morning?”

“What?”

“The woman from Blue Ridge Haunts. Gerald told me.”

“How did—?”

“They were in Duality talking to AJ when the call came through Vega Adair’s radio. So that woman you’ve been complaining about—Beth Anne Nash. She’s dead?”

Lina nods. “That’s why you aren’t in school then.”

“Someone has to keep you alive until you can make better decisions.”

She watches Cassie scoop two tablespoons of coffee into the sock and slowly pour hot water over it. “I can’t believe you’re doing that.”

Cassie does not answer. She finishes her pour and leaves the water to drain, then opens her little sketch book on the counter space once occupied by the coffee pot. She moves her pencil in quick, confident strokes of her left hand. Her right forearm lays across the opposite page. Lina cannot tell if her intention is to secure the sketch book or hide her drawing. Best not to press the question, she decides. These teen years have turned her daughter into a skittish animal, ready to run the moment she senses scrutiny. Lina tries to watch without seeming to watch, to take in this lithe young woman who becomes more a stranger every day. She waits until Cassie looks away to the draining coffee to wipe the tears gathering in her eyes. She folds her hands into her armpits to wipe her fingers. Feels the knot beneath her touch.

“Cassie?”

“Yeah?”

She looks past her daughter to the sketch book, now closed around the pencil to mark her place. Wonders if they are already lost to one another.

“Yeah?” Cassie says again. “Mom?”

“Nothing. When do you leave for your tournament?”

“After school.”

“Will they still let you play if you don’t go to your morning classes?”

Cassie shrugs off the question, which she knows will lead to a scolding. Relief washes over Lina, now that they are back on firmer conversational footing—a argument, sure, but one in which they know their roles.

“Coach will understand,” Cassie says. “I think he will.”

“‘I think’ isn’t going to cut it with your father.”

“Nothing ever does.”

Lina knows she should not concede the point. For all his faults, Shane Chenowith never tried to undercut his soon-to-be ex-wife as a parent—not since the split, anyhow. Still, did six months of good behavior make up for the things that broke up their marriage to begin with?

“He just wants you to be your best,” she finally ventures. “He’d love you just as much if you quit basketball altogether. You know you don’t have to keep playing just for his benefit.”

“And you know that’s not true at all.”

“I can talk to him again, if—.”

“Mom!” Cassie holds up a palm to stop her. She waits until Lina relents before she folds her arms and offers an appraisal. “You look like resurrected roadkill.”

Lina closes her eyes. Wonders what her daughter will say once the chemo has fed on her body. “Cassie, listen—.”

“I know,” her daughter says quickly. “Not everything in my head needs to come out of my mouth. I’m sorry. And I know you’ve had a shit morning and it’s probably going to get worse and I didn’t mean to be part of that. So.”  She turns to the coffee gently removes the improvised filter from the mug and pours milk and sugar into it. She slides it across to her mother and fills the teakettle again. When she reaches to turn on the burner, she freezes, fingers hovering over the knob. “You think the ghost did it, don’t you.”

“What?”

“That lady from Blue Ridge Haunts. You think your ghost pushed her.”

“She’s not ‘my’ ghost.”

“Mom, it’s not real.”

“I know, sweetie. Probably not.”

“Superstition ain’t the way, mom. I think that’s from the Bible.”

“Stevie Wonder, actually.”

“Close enough.” She sets the burner to heating, walks around the bar and drapes her arms around Lina, grips her shoulders with her basketball-player’s hands. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. All I’m doing is withholding belief until I get some direct evidence—firsthand, I mean. I know this ghost was real to Grandpa—.”

“Don’t say it like that. Like he was crazy. Like I’m crazy.”

“I didn’t—”

Cassie lets the thought hang. Lina weighs their arguments. Comes to an unhappy conclusion. How many times has she told her daughter the story of those months of mental illness after childbirth, when visions haunted her dreams and voices her waking? Too many, and no matter what she says, Cassie’s mind is not eased. Lina swallows the knot in her throat. No child should fear her mother might become unreliable.

“It’s okay, honey,” Lina says.

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I know.”

Cassie’s weight shifts, and Lina feels her getting ready to move away. She reaches up to cover the girl’s wrists, feels thin muscles hardened by hours of dribbling and jump shooting. Not long ago—an instant, really—Lina herself had been a teenager, sitting on this same stool and staring at the same out-of-fashion countertops, looking for a way to tell the grandparents who had raised her that she was going to have a child. Now that child was almost a woman, and Grandma Joyce gone more than a decade, and Grandpa Bloom only just departed. When she reaches for it, Lina can touch sequence, first this thing and then the other. But time itself is a vapor, impossible to grasp.

The teakettle begins to whistle once more. Cassie kisses her on top of the head and moves back to the counter and loads fresh coffee into the sock. Lina takes a tentative drink from her mug. Lifts it toward her daughter.

“Told you it was good,” Cassie says.

CHAPTER 5

Cassie insists on dropping Lina off at work on her way back to school, but she can get only so close. Police have shut down every intersection within a block of the Vesta. Gawkers press in on the barriers, gossiping about the dead woman and trying to get a glimpse of the drama. Lina knows they are looking for her, and she can’t say what they’ll do once she’s spotted. Cassie suggests pushing through, honking and yelling and revving her engine until she clears a path to the theater’s back door. Lina knows she’ll do it, and she loves her for it, but the last thing she needs is more attention. Instead she waits until a stop sign a block from Main Street and, before Cassie can argue, squeezes her hand in thanks and steps out into the cold gray morning.

As soon as her daughter’s car turns back east toward the new high school, Lina’s knees buckle. She steadies herself against a yellowwood tree, adjusts her jacket. The falcon weighs heavy in her pocket, pulling and twisting the jacket so that she can’t keep it in place. She thinks of bringing it out now into the daylight, of gazing into its sharp eyes to challenge its relentless message.

You are frail. You are weak. You will die alone.

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Her hand is only at the lip of the pocket when a man’s voice calls out from above her.

“Damned shame, Mrs. Chenowith. Damned shame.”

She looks up, turns in a half circle until she finds the source. A stocky, dark-skinned man in a charcoal jacket lifts a hand in greeting from the top of the old Ballard County Express building.

“That poor, poor woman,” the man says. “Damned shame.”

“Thanks,” Lina hears herself say, and winces at the sound of the word. She shields her eyes against the drizzle that has begun to fall, searches for a name to attach to this face. “Mr….Brotherton, is it?”

“Surely so.”

Lina forces a smile, even as despair settles into her chest. T.K Brotherton is the most generous and enigmatic benefactor in Ballard County, the name on the wall of every generosity tree from the city park to the food pantry. He is rumored to be the biggest giver to six different churches, but he has never darkened the door of any of them. He even donated $50,000 to the Vesta eight years ago to remodel the lobby and restore the eternal flame memorial to Elyane LaSalle. Lina has been trying to get a meeting with him about another gift for months, despite Grandpa Bloom’s warning.

Be careful. You don’t want to be owing a man like that.

“Looks like quite the to-do,” Brotherton calls down to her. “I’m surprised to see you out here. Thought you’d be in your theater.”

“Vega sent me home to shower.”

He cocks his chin doubtfully. “Don’t think the detectives from Richmond are going to like that very much. I’d wager she got a good chewing over it. You probably will too.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You will, you will. If you ever get through.” He leans forward, elbows on the stone railing, and looks past her to the still gathering crowd. “You’re welcome to join me up here if you like. Maybe gain a bit of perspective.”

Lina shakes her head, but a glance toward Main Street chills her. Most of the onlookers have their eyes forward, hoping to catch sight of something worth repeating, a body wrapped in black rolled out on a gurney. But a few people in the back have noticed Lina. They offer pitying smiles and tentative waves. It’s only a matter of time before they call to her, move closer to offer sympathy in exchange for information.

“I should go,” she says, quietly enough that she doesn’t think Brotherton has heard her. Still, he speaks as though in answer.

“Come on up and have a talk,” he says. “The front door is unlocked.”

She glances once more at the crowd, sees two women looking at her, whispering to each other with hands covering their mouths. Before they can beckon her over, she ducks inside the old building.

The Ballard County Express is exactly how she remembers it from the last time she was inside the office, twenty years ago now. She had come with Grandpa Bloom to pay their respects to Delores Parker, the editor who had literally worked herself to death trying to keep the local paper afloat. The same old furniture rests on the same thin carpet, worn through in lines between the front counter and editor’s chair and darkroom. Heavy cathode-ray tube monitors sit atop sagging desks next to electric typewriters and files of index cards, none of it valuable enough even to steal. She lingers just long enough to take in an oversized print of the Vesta fire, the same photograph she’d first seen on Grandpa Bloom’s shelves thirty years ago. The sight of Elyane LaSalle—the real person in the real body, doomed to the flames—always makes her breath catch in her chest. If she stares too long, she will feel the heat of the fire against her skin.

Brotherton does not turn as she emerges from the access door and climbs to her feet. He waits until she is at the concrete bannister with him to lift a hand toward First Methodist Church.

“The day the original building burned, the photographer stood there, in the steeple. And Elyane LaSalle—” he sweeps his hand toward the Vesta—“was what, 80 yards away? Maybe less?”

Lina considers the distance. She has never been good at estimations, but she gets his point. Young Luigi Qualls and Elyane LaSalle could have looked in each other’s faces before he snapped the photograph. Brotherton keeps his hand extended toward the Vesta, squints his eyes against the wind-blown drizzle.

“I sometimes imagine how it must have looked to her,” he says. “These days we all share an angle of vision, the one from Mr. Qualls’ photograph. But Elyane? She was on the other side of the camera, so she must have seen him taking it. She must have felt the building shaking, getting ready to collapse. She had to be thinking, ‘This is it. I’m going to die, and this perspective will die along with me.’”

Lina folds her arms, pulls her jacket tight around her so that the falcon’s weight can’t throw it off kilter. She can imagine what Elyane saw that day through the smoke and haze, has herself stood on the edge of the roof atop the resurrected Vesta and stared over the treetops at the First Methodist steeple. Sometimes, she imagines smelling smoke or hearing the crackle of wood fire as the old parquet floor burned. A block over, the lights from emergency vehicles spin, as silent and impotent now as they must have been on that day a lifetime ago.

“Do you see her?” Brotherton asks in something near a whisper.

Lina’s pulse rushes into her ears. The ghost has indeed appeared across the way on top of the Vesta, feet offset and arms dangling at her sides, fingers twitching as though she is ready to sprint away. As though she might jump. Lina wants to cry out, wants to confirm that another human sees this apparition, wants to steady herself on whatever is near. It would be so easy to reach out her hands, one to grasp the falcon and one to cling to Brotherton’s coat.

Instead she opens her mouth and forces her breathing to steady. In for three, out for three.

“I see her sometimes in the theater,” she says. “I can’t say if it’s really her or just my imagination.”

“But you don’t ever catch her outside the building?” the older man says. “Not on the roof?”

“Well. I don’t go looking for her.”

“Probably for the best. Ghost hunting didn’t turn out so well for Mrs. Nash.”

Lina doesn’t answer. Her breath jumps with her heartbeats.

“I’ve heard rumors,” Brotherton says. He turns away from the Vesta now, toward Lina. She has to force herself to match his pose. Tries to keep her face neutral. “Not about Mrs. Nash personally, you understand. Only I mean that she and I share—well, she once shared—an interest in preserving some of Elyane LaSalle’s artwork.”

“I see.”

“No, Mrs. Chenowith, I’m sure you do not.” He produces a small black statue, some roughly carved animal with stiff legs. As he moves to place it in her palm, however, he adjusts its position and transforms her understanding of it. Not an animal. A piano, unpolished yet beautiful. When it touches her skin, she can hear music playing—a hymn, Grandma Bloom’s favorite. “And Are We Yet Alive?” She wills herself not to flinch. Hears Grandpa Bloom’s voice in her head. Be careful.

“It’s lovely,” she says. A moment later, she takes his meaning. “Is this the artwork you’re talking about? Did Elyane LaSalle carve this?”

“She did, surely,” Brotherton says, a satisfied smile just crossing his lips. “Someone found it in the ashes after the fire—your grandfather, as I recall. Did he never show you something like this? One of her kimberlite carvings?”

“I—I can’t say,” she stammers. “I mean, he must have at some point. I assume he did. I don’t know.”

“Oh. Well, I would have thought the Vesta might have a few of her statues, down in the archives. I always wondered why they were not on display somewhere.” He lifts the piano from her palm and returns it to a pocket. “I know they aren’t worth much, but I’ve taken a great interest in these little trinkets of late. I would very much like to obtain more of them.”

Lina blinks hard, tries to clear the music from her head. It’s a simple hymn played by an intermediate musician, a single melody pressed down over heavy chords, and something else beneath it all. A pulse, low and insistent.

“I should go,” she says.

Brotherton lifts his palms. “Oh, Mrs. Chenowith, no. I am so sorry! I did not mean to offend you with a collector’s ambition. Surely you are concerned with the preservation of artifacts, which I can understand. It is a difficult job on what I imagine is a very small budget.” He pauses to let the implication settle. If you give me what I want, I can offer you the world.

The pulses grow in her ears, vibrate quick and hard through her cells. She can feel this thing concealed in her jacket, Elyane LaSalle’s carving, singing back at the piano. If she stays much longer, she fears it might leap out and join its sister stone. “Thank you, Mr. Brotherton, really,” she says. “But I have to get back to the—to everything.”

“Surely, surely. If you can get there. May I offer you a ride?”

He motions toward the streets, still thick with people. Most of them will know her well enough to speak as she passes, and many of those will expect more from her than a simple greeting. She regrets now not letting Cassie take her all the way in her car. She stretches her hand over her forehead, rubs her temples the way Grandpa Bloom used to.

“It’s all right,” she says, and smiles despite the throbbing pain that has moved into her skull. “I can walk.”

“It’s no trouble at all.”

She shakes her head gently, tries to smile. Backs away from the edge. The music fades as she approaches the access door. Her grandfather’s voice is waiting for her when it clears.

You don’t want to be owing a man like him.

CHAPTER 6 - TAUNTING

Lina watches the day bleed out from the edge of the stage, pink light fading to purple across the theater floors. Earlier this afternoon, the forensics team opened the blackout shades to the stained-glass windows in the balcony, illuminating the main room with a sad reverence. She realizes now why Grandpa Bloom always wanted them drawn. It feels too much like church.

The ghost stands along the wall, arms at her side, looking back and forth from the balcony to the floor where Beth Anne Nash had died. Her eyes take in the scene. They offer nothing back to it—no empathy nor remorse nor exaltation. If she is capable of feeling, she does not let it show.

“Do you wonder what it’s like for her?” Lina asked her grandfather when she was maybe 15. “Being dead. Being a ghost.”

He paused to think, and that was enough to make her heart soar. For all the adults that left or dismissed her as a child—for all those who would quietly call her crazy in the months after Cassie was born—she could count on Grandpa Bloom to treat her with respect.

“I try not to,” he said at last.

“Because it scares you?”

“Does it scare you?”

“Don’t avoid the question.”

Grandpa Bloom had smiled at her then, and she knew he would tell her the truth. “I think the living have enough to worry about without getting all worked up over the dead.”

She can almost hear him saying it now. Perhaps it’s the grief or the stress, or both working together to make her imagine him so near. Or perhaps his spirit is wandering like Elyane LaSalle, too stubborn to depart. She can almost feel him sitting beside her, big hands gripping the lip of the Vesta stage, heels thudding against the apron.

Before she can blink away the thought, a new figure emerges from the shadows. Sharp bile rises in the back of her throat, but the form is too tall and broad-shouldered to be her grandfather. He steps into the center aisle and comes to a stop six feet from where Beth Anne Nash met her end.

“Hey!” Lina calls. But her voice fails her, and she has to clear her throat. Before she can speak again the man has turned to consider her. He lifts his hand in greeting. She takes in a slow breath, releases it. When she hops down from the stage, the impact of her soles on hard ground steadies her. She walks forward to the yellow caution tape, stretched across the front row of seats, and puts on her mom voice. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

The man gives a little shrug of his massive shoulders, nods as though conceding her point. But he keeps his feet planted and looks up toward the balcony, thirty feet above them. Lina can’t help but to follow his eyes, to imagine the arc of Beth Anne’s descent. She wonders if her body’s impact made any sound at all.

“The police won’t be back here,” the man says. “They’ve collected their evidence. They just have to keep the scene taped off for 48 hours. State law.”

She doesn’t know how to respond to that, and so she slips under the yellow ribbon and marches to within a few feet of him.

“Grant Nash,” he says once she has reached him. He moves to extend his hand but stops when he sees her flinch.

Lina lets the name sink in, feels waves of sadness rippling out from it. “Beth Ann was your…?”

“Wife,” he says, but lifts a hand to correct himself. “Ex-wife.” The words hang for only a second, then die among the curtains and plush cushions of the floor seating. He winces. “Late wife.”

“That sounds complicated,” Lina ventures.

“What about any of this is simple?”

She breathes quietly, releasing tension from her jaw and her shoulders as she watches him. Grant Nash looks to be about her age, with the muscular build of a former athlete. Still, he does not stoop or limp like so many men who have traded their cartilage for contact sports. His deep voice and intense eyes would make him a perfect Othello, she thinks, although who can say if he has the capacity for pretense required of an actor.

“The police will want to know you were here,” she says.

“They know. But you can tell them again if you must.”

Movement from the shadows flashes at the edge of Lina’s vision. She keeps her head steady, the practiced deception of one who does not want to seem paranoid or inattentive. But she tunes her focus to the space just beyond Grant Nash’s ear. Elyane has left her place along the wall. Now she moves between rows toward them, eyes locked on Grant Simms, ghostly feet silent against the polished concrete. She pauses at the blood stains on the carpet, steps around them until she is mere inches from the stranger, close enough to touch him. Lina pulls air into her lungs. Elyane turns to look at her, daring her to speak a warning.

“Everything okay?” Grant says.

Lina nods, but she feels the hesitation in the gesture. He won’t see Elyane unless she wants to be seen, but who can know the intentions of a ghost? Lina gropes in her brain for a way to keep Grant’s eyes forward.

“How long were you married?” she blurts. She presses her fingers against her lips. Shakes her head.

“Seven years. We were on our way to divorce, though. It was all over but the shouting.”

The ghost folds her hands over her still heart, thrusts out her lip in mock pity. Grant tilts his head toward her, almost turns in her direction but thinks better of it. He looks down at his bare left hand. Covers it with his right. “What about you? Are you married?”

“Separated.”

“Well then. I guess you know.”

“Know what?”

“The way things sometimes go.”

Elyane steps toward him again. Nash flinches, but this time he does not counter her movements. She moves closer, almost to his ear, and forces her mouth open as though to scream or to bite. He works his jaw back and forth, uncomfortable for reasons he cannot see. Elyane smiles toward Lina. Raises her eyebrows. Shall we let him in on our little secret? she seems to ask. Shall I invite him to play?

“No!” Lina hisses.

“No, what?” Nash answers. He narrows his eyes at her.

“Nothing.”

Strands of barbed wire squeeze around her heart. Half a lifetime ago, before she learned to filter what she said about the things she perceived, Lina ended up in the behavioral hospital in Hazard, separated from her infant daughter and terrorized by more than one kind of monster. Not even her grandfather could reach her then, and she has never been able to make him understand. All these years later, she is still never more than one stray word from some sideways glance, some whispered concern. Now, with Grandpa Bloom dead, who will intervene on behalf of her sanity?

Not Elyane LaSalle. She has moved again, this time to the place where the body had lain. She lowers herself onto the carpet, contorts her limbs until she fills the white outline, stretches her right hand forward as though holding out the falcon to Lina. Or waiting to receive it back from her.

“Mrs. Chenowith?” Nash says.

Lina slips her hand into her pocket, feels a jolt as her fingertips brush the surface of the falcon. It pulsates against her skin, sings out its dark hymn. Lina waits for the familiar words to form in her ears—you are frail, you are weak, you will die alone—but they do not. The song the falcon sings is not for her.

It is for the ghost.

“Lina?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” She tears her eyes from Elyane, looks half-panicked into the face of the widower. “I’m sorry.”

He keeps his eyes on her, studies her face without apology until he is satisfied she hears him. “What do you think happened to Beth Anne?”

Heat and pressure rise in her face. She is glad now for the waning day, dark enough to hide her lie. “I guess she jumped.”

“You guess?”

“The police think she did.”

He stares down at the carpet. The white police outline of the body gives back what light is left. The ghost and the crimson stains beneath her have been swallowed in darkness. “I wish you would say it,” he says.

“Say what?”

“That you think your ghost pushed her.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. But you should.”

“Why?”

Grant Nash looks into her face, eyes glistening with all the sadness in the world. “So that I can agree with you,” he says.

CHAPTER 7 – PROPHESY TO THE BONES

            A thin band of yellow shines into the backstage hallway from beneath the closed door to the artist’s studio, piercing the sickly purple glow of the work lights. Lina stands before it, listening for any sign of what might be behind the door. She hears only the blood pulsing through her ears, the sharp voice of the falcon statue singing in her pocket.

            She breathes, in for three, out for three. It’s a ruse, she knows. The breathing is a way to feign control over threats that don’t give a damn how she feels about herself. But it is a tool within her reach, and so she reaches for it, even when—like tonight—it doesn’t work.

            She breathes in. Holds it. Releases.

            She looks one way down the hall, then the other, reviews her memory of the place. Had the studio light been on when she’d ushered Grant Nash out the back door and into the drizzly night? She cannot say. She folds her arms and tries to remember, even as she tries to forget the lump inside her chest. But her internal argument is one thing, what her body does another. Her fingers knead the knot before her mind even forms a rebuttal. Tendrils of pain wrap around her ribs. She jerks her hand free from her armpit, turns the handle and pushes herself into the studio.

            The yellow light comes from a drafting lamp set on the center table, bare save for a cardboard box that once housed copy paper. A chill snakes over Lina’s shoulders. These are Beth Anne’s things, collected from around the theater and deemed unworthy of cataloguing by investigators. She might have time to catch Nash before he drives away, to give him the box and be done with it. But the etiquette surrounding divorce is still a mystery to her. Before she can sort through the decision, something else catches her eye—a thin black bar, charcoal, laid across the lid. Beneath it, in handwriting that looks for all the world like her own, someone has written a single cryptic phrase.

            Prophesy to the bones.

            The dark figurine stirs in Lina’s pocket, the falcon testing its cage. She leaves it there, afraid to even bring it into the dim light in this dingy room lest it sing to the ghost. Lest it summon something worse still.

            Lina reads the words aloud, feels their familiarity but cannot locate them in a memory. She wastes a long moment on the effort before she gives up, curses into the dim room. Elyane likes to leave scraps lying around, especially in the artist’s studio—sketches of old buildings, portraits of people Lina doesn’t recognize, fragments of poems, all questions and no answers. Whatever message the ghost is sending, Lina is in no mood to receive it. Instead she curls her fingers under the lid of the box, lifts it and peers inside. Cables and connectors snake through each other, coiling themselves around adapters and hand-held devices whose purpose she cannot begin to guess. However useful the electronic mess might be to the Blue Ridge Haunts crew, it is for Lina a puzzle with no solution.

            Prophesy to the bones.

Frustration seizes her, as though these scribbled words lash her to some impossible weight. She grinds the heel of her hand across the message, ready to turn the letters into a gray smear. But Elyane has used some fixative, whether ghostly or terrestrial, and the lines do not blur. Lina swipes at the lid, sending it skating across the floor until it stops at the feet of someone she had not known was with her.

“It’s okay,” the young man blurts. He holds up a palm, trembling as though she has a gun trained on him. “I didn’t want to scare you, but then you didn’t hear me when I came in, and I thought it would be worse if you heard me back out but didn’t see anyone there. Shit. I’m sorry!”

She barely hears his apology, so loud is the blood rushing in her head. But his posture calms her just enough that she can take in who he is—the skinny young man on Beth Anne’s staff. The video engineer. Ixian.

“Please?” he says.

He motions to Lina’s hand, and awareness of her own body creeps over her. Her right fist is pulled back behind her shoulder, ready to strike. Her fingers curl around something cold and hard, a weapon she doesn’t remember grabbing. It isn’t until she looks at her own hand that she realizes it’s clutching the falcon statue. She lowers it. Places it on the table behind the box of wires.

“Okay,” he says. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—.”

“What can I do for you, Ixian?”

“I was at Capital Diner. Ashby’s, people call it. I just—I haven’t been able to go back home yet. All this stuff with Beth Anne. Did she—do you think she jumped?”

“Why do you ask?” Lina snaps. She doesn’t like the tone of her voice, but it feels good to release some of the tension, to direct it even at an innocent. “Why does everyone want to know what I think? I wasn’t with her, Ixian. I don’t have a clue if she jumped or fell or was pushed. Her ex-husband was just in here. Ask him.”

Ixian is shaking his head before she finishes the thought. “Coach Nash would never hurt her.”

“How do you know what any other human would or would not do?” She pulls in breath, fresh oxygen for the tirade burning in her chest. But a word she did not expect has poured water on that flame. “Coach?”

“Her husband. Coach Nash. Sorry, I thought you knew about him. I mean, everybody knows.”

“No,” Lina says wearily. She spreads her thumb and index finger across her forehead to rub her temples. The adrenaline has receded, and she can feel her body crashing. “If he doesn’t coach Ballard County girls’ basketball, I have no clue who he is.”

“One of his players at Sheltowee State died in a game three years ago. Heat stroke, I think. He got fired over it. It was a big deal, like national news. You really don’t know that story?”

“What do you want, Ixian?”

The young man shifts his weight from one spindly leg to the other. “I thought maybe you’d have the Bird.”

She takes a step back. Glances at the dark statue, now still and silent beside her on the table. “Bird?”

“The drone camera. We used it the first day to get B-roll of the town, remember? Beth Anne had it out the morning she—that morning. Did you see it?”

The memory takes shape in Lina’s mind. Beth Anne’s body, contorted against the hard floor. The drone, softly beeping out an error message on the carpet beside her. The falcon, clutched in the dead woman’s hand until Lina pulled it away.

She nods, but her mouth feels too full of sand for words.

“I’m not trying to cause any trouble. It’s an expensive piece of equipment, that’s all. And if Kelsey and I are going to finish the episode, well. I think we owe it to her to try. So do you have the Bird?”

She forces her lips apart with her tongue, pushes air through her voice box until it catches. “No,” she says. “The police were looking at it. All I have is this.”

She steps aside, motions to the box of electronics. Ixian picks the lid up off the floor and brings it with him to the table. He studies the contents of the box. Raises his eyebrows. “Well, we will need all this eventually. So thank you.”

“Sure.”

He sets the lid down on the table and rummages through the box for a moment. Lina counts breaths as she waits for him to notice the falcon. If he asks for it back, she could tell him it belongs with the Vesta, along with the rest of Elyane’s artwork. Or she could throw it into the box, be rid of this thing and its strange hold on her and focus on giving Grandpa Bloom a proper send-off. The young man does not even look in its direction. Instead he returns his hands to his side. Goes very still.

“This episode, at the Vesta,” he says. “I think Beth Anne might have thought the ghost here was real, you know? Like in other places, she was skeptical but we had a show to produce, and the people could believe whatever they want. Here, though? I think she was into it. I mean, her dad took that picture, after all.”

“Picture?” Lina asks.

“That one.” He points to the photograph on the wall, a cheap frame holding a small version of the one displayed in the lobby. Elyane LaSalle, standing on the roof of the doomed Vesta, tongues of fire framing her on either side as though she were some terrible cherub.

            “Her father is Luigi Qualls?”

            “Was, yeah. He’s dead now. Well, I guess they both are. Prophesy to the bones.”

            She levels a hard stare at him. “What did you say?”

            Ixian holds up the box lid in answer, underlines the words with his index finger. “It’s from the Bible. God told this guy to prophesy to a valley filled with dry bones.”

            Lina waves her hand as though she understands, even though she is slow to remember this story. Grandpa Bloom has taught her the plenty the Bible, which so far as she knew he still believed, more or less. But he gave up on church long before his granddaughter’s birth, and Lina has never picked up the habit as an adult. At last the name comes to her.

            “Ezekiel,” she says. “He spoke, and the bones became an army.”

            “That sounds right.” He places the lid back on the box. Wraps his fingers around it and lifts. “I think Beth Anne had her on video. The ghost. She tell you that?”

            “No.”

            “I thought she might. But she wasn’t really herself these last few days.” He steps backward toward the door. Nods at the falcon statue. “That was Beth Anne’s. She found it in her father’s things after he died.”

            Lina picks up the falcon, tries to play it off as though she’d forgotten all about it. But she knows better than to think she’s believable. The voice within it stirs again, worms its way into her body with its awful threat. She looks up at Ixian to see if he hears it too. The look on his face isn’t fear, though. It’s worry.

            “There’s a guy in town who’ll buy it,” he says. “Stocky dude, maybe 60, white hair. He’d probably pay good money too. You might want to take him up on that.”

            “Why?”

            “Because I saw that same look on Beth Anne’s face when she held it. And this other guy, Brotherton. He acted pretty determined.”

            “Determined?”

            “Like if Beth Anne wouldn’t sell it to him, he might just take it.” He looks away, purses his lips in thought. “You have a daughter, right?”

            “She’s got nothing to do with this.”

            “Maybe not yet.”

            He says something else, but she doesn’t hear him. Every bit of her awareness is consumed with the falcon’s message, with Elyane LaSalle’s voice.

            You are frail.

            You are weak.

            You will die alone.

            “It’s not for sale,” she blurts. Her voice is a whisper to her ears, but Ixian startles. She closes her eyes, focuses on her breath. “My daughter is my business. Your drone and grief and whatever else you carry is yours. Go on now, but leave the falcon. It belongs at the Vesta.”

            Ixian nods slowly, his shoulders slouched as though the box of electronics had tripled in weight. “Okay then. Suit yourself. But be careful, Miss Chenowith. Whatever that bird is, it’s not your friend.”

 CHAPTER 8 – SAD, AND

Lina remembers her grandfather’s office as a room of wonders, books and games and puzzles of all kinds, arranged on shelves lining every wall. She spent hours on the oval run laid out in front of his desk, reading or sketching or building multi-colored block towers while he worked through whatever unfathomable adult problem life had set before him. In the summer, she would let her bare feet hang off the edge of the rug and press against the hardwood floor. In winter, she snuggled among her stuffed animals into the wicker daybed Grandma Joyce had helped him build for her. He smoked a pipe back then. The blankets she wrapped herself in held the scent.

For a few seconds after she awakens, she is back in that room. What this room used to be.

She swings her feet over the edge of the full-sized bed, lets her toes brush the carpet. When Lina told her grandparents a child was on the way, Grandma Joyce had set to remodeling, relegating her husband to 30 square feet to make space for a new bed and crib and rocker, banishing him altogether from the time Cassie was born until Lina and Shane could afford their own place.

Lina has been a child and a mother and a wife, all within these walls. With her marriage over and her daughter nearly grown, she is not sure what to call herself now.

“Mom?”

Cassie’s voice comes from the kitchen, which means she’s spent the night at her dad’s house and come by before school to check on Lina. Finding her mother fully dressed on the guest bed won’t do anything to make Cassie feel better.

Lina rubs her eyes, brushes wrinkles out of her clothes, tries to look less than the hot mess she has become.

“In here, sweetie.”

Cassie strides into the room, sits in the rocking chair and drapes on leg over the armrest. “This is a fun look for you,” she says. “Party hard last night?”

“Something like that.” She sits straighter, tries to look like a competent parent. “Did you win your game?”

“Nope. Coach is being a dick about it. Wouldn’t let us talk on the bus ride home.”

“Oh. Well, don’t be late for practice this morning.”

“What’s he going to do, make me run more ladders?” She waves away the prospect. “For real. What’s going on.”

“Just stress, part of life. I’ve got to go to the funeral home this morning to finish the paperwork for Grandpa Bloom’s service.”

“Want me to go with you?”

“I’m fine, sweetie.”

“Clearly.” She nods once, and her point is made. She turns her attention to the room, the old wooden desk and leftover shelves and dark gray walls. “Does this place depress you?”

“No,” Lina answers. Her chuckle cannot quite deflect the lie, but she doubles down on it. “Why would Grandpa Bloom’s house bother me?”

“Because this is where you had your breakdown, when I was a baby.”

Lina rubs her temples. “That was a long time ago, and it had nothing to do with you. I’ve told you.”

“No you haven’t. You’ve never talked about it.”

She says it as a matter of fact, with no more emotion than if she were recalling a bad meal or a head cold. But the words split Lina in two, half of her the worried mother, the other half the frightened child. Cassie stands up and considers the shelves behind Grandpa Bloom’s old desk. Lina cannot tell if the move is to spare her feelings or amplify them, and so she waits as her daughter trails a finger along the edge of the shelves, absently marking the photographs and crochet needles and books, all now mere tributes to the dead. On the second shelf from the top, her hand slows. Lina’s heart skips.

The falcon.

It rests in the same place Lina had found it as a girl, a third of the way over from the left edge, pushed back as far as it could go. She doesn’t remember putting it there before she went to bed. For that matter, she doesn’t remember much at all about the night after talking to Ixian. She cannot hear the falcon calling now, not to her. She breathes in and holds it, offers a prayer to whoever might be listening that Cassie cannot hear it and will never hear it and will never feel the things Lina and Grandpa Bloom could never escape.

At last Cassie’s finger moves past the statue. A tiny dose of relief hits Lina’s bloodstream, but does not relax, even when Cassie turns to leave.

“Love you, Mom,” she says as she passes through the door.

Lina half expects her daughter to show up at the funeral home despite their morning conversation. She would never accuse Cassie of being an obedient child, but almost all of her defiance was an effort to defend or comfort someone else. It would be like her to sweet-talk even her jerk of a coach into letting her out of practice and then coming alongside Lina as she answered questions and paid the remainder of the bill.

She is not surprised, then, to see a woman leaning against her car when she emerges from the funeral home. But she is mortified when she recognizes the form.

“Don’t even say it,” Bella Berry snaps as Lina approaches. “I do not want your bullshit apology.”

Lina shields her face with her hand, hoping a show of embarrassment will soften what seems to be very real irritation.

“It’s Wednesday, isn’t it?” Lina says.

“You know damn well it is.”

“I do now.”

For more than a decade, Lina has had a standing breakfast date with Bella, one of only three doctors in Ballard County and the only female among them. She is shorter than Lina, older by a decade and wider by half, and happily married to the local pharmacist. But they are both mothers, each with a single child born two weeks apart, and their histories intertwine more than most friends or even siblings. They understand one another, which is how Lina knows her grandfather’s death is, in Bella’s eyes, an insufficient excuse for missing breakfast.

Before she can say anything, though, her friend’s arms are around her, pulling her into a tight embrace that lasts until Lina exhales for what feels like the first time in a week.

“Come on,” Bella says. “AJ is saving our table for us.”

In the context of Ballard County, Duality Coffee Emporium might as well be the moon, with its stylish seating and hanging plants and little pride flags in a mug by the cash register. When members from Firesteel Church, where Lina’s ex works as youth pastor, come in for a latte, they duck their heads as if they’d been caught by their pastor in the liquor store.

“Spill it,” Bella says as they settle into their seats beside the window. Outside, a fine gray mist floats over the bare concrete of the winterized patio.

“What do you want to know?” Lina asks.

Bella huffs as though she’s never heard a dumber question. She lifts up one hand, uses the other to tick off items with her fingers. “You’re finalizing a divorce. You’re raising a teenage daughter. The closest thing you’ve ever had to a parent just died, and your family business is always hanging by a thread. Should I go on?”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Well then, you better start talking.”

And so Lina starts pulling at the strands of her life, tearing out and weaving back together as if it were one of Grandma Joyce’s crocheting projects. She talks the most about Cassie, this terrible wonder of a child.

“How’s she handling Bloom’s death?” Bella asks. “And the death of that woman from Blue Ridge Haunts—suicide, was it? Damn, Lina. They say death comes in bunches, but you’ve got it falling from the sky around you.”

Lina winces, but Bella is unmoved, as always. When your job involves giving prostate exams to old farmers, subtlety is more impediment than asset.

“She’s okay, I think,” Lina says. “Sad, maybe.”

“Sad and.”

Lina gives her friend a beat. Sometimes Bella can seem to stroke out mid-sentence, her sharp mind carrying her off in twenty directions before she finds her way back to the conversation at hand. This time, however, Bella simply shakes her head.

“She’s sad, and she’s other things—so many other things, Lina. You are too. Grief is never just ‘sad.’ It’s sad, and it’s infuriating, and it makes you want to claw your own eyeballs out so you don’t have to cry anymore because the crying comes from a thousand feelings you can’t even explain. It’s sad and exhausting, sad and exhilarating, sad and crazy and funny and stupid, all lumped together. And speaking of lumps.”

Now it’s Lina’s turn for her brain to fritz out. The thousand feelings in her chest compress into a single, hard knot embedded in her breast. Does Bella know? Are her eyes so sharp or the lump so evident that she can see it through Lina’s clothes? She cannot deal with this, not now, not with everything. She cannot. But Bella is not staring through her the way she does when she already knows the answer to her question. She’s reaching toward the floor and into her backpack. A second later, she emerges with a hardback sketchbook covered in scratches and chew marks.

“Tillman let Cassie name his new puppy. She called him Lump, I guess after Picasso’s dog? Anyhow, the little bastard said thanks by chewing up the sketchbook she left at my house. The dog, not Tillman.”

“Oh. Well. It’s okay. I guess that’s what puppies do.”

Bella nods, lifts her wrist to read a message on her watch. She hoists her backpack over one shoulder as she stands. “Possible heart attack coming in to the ER. Talk to Cassie, okay? She’s a good kid. I love you.” She leans over and kisses the top of Lina’s head and strides out the side door into the mist.

Lina reaches into her jacket, presses her fingers against her chest. Relief washes over her, but also disappointment. So many things cannot be brought to light. They tumble inside her like ice cubes in the cocktail of a thousand feelings. Sad and.

She dips a napkin in Bella’s water and rubs dried dog slobber off the tattered sketchbook. Once she’s satisfied, she opens it to see what her daughter has been drawing of late. Mostly Lump the dog, as it turns out, cuddled up asleep and chewing on a ball and watching a squirrel out the window of Bella and Tillman’s fine home. Another worry floats through Lina’s mind. Has her daughter been staying with Bella instead of with either of her parents? Maybe, she decides, although she can’t judge the thing as good or bad. Kids do what kids do, Bella always says. Families try to keep them alive until they figure out how to stay that way themselves.

She leans forward as she closes the book, letting the pages fan together as the chewed back cover lands atop them. But a glimpse of another set of drawings knocks her back down in her seat. In the very last pages of the sketchbook, Cassie engages a new subject. The first drawings are rough-outs, recognizable but not detailed, the kind made by courtroom artists. When Lina flips the pages back toward the front of the book, however, the sketches become portraits of a young Black man whose kind face can’t quite mask the seriousness in his eyes.

For just a moment, Lina marvels at Cassie’s talent for capturing the soul—far beyond anything she’s learned from her mother. In an instant, that feeling is joined by anger at being left out of her daughter’s secret, sorrow that she thought the secret necessary. Clear eyes have always been Cassie’s superpower. These portraits of Ixian are filtered through something else though, and Lina can see at once how right Bella had been about the complexity of the young woman’s feelings. Cassie is far more than sad.

She is sad, and in love.