I gave it a tug, and the small room came to life around me, the tinny fizz of electricity filling the space. There wasn’t much down there except for the last of the peaches and plums we’d canned last season and the clothes washer, but Mason had built metal shelves along one wall for us after the basement flooded a couple of years ago. We’d transferred everything from disintegrating cardboard boxes to clear plastic bins. I pushed the first few to the side, looking for the only one that wasn’t labeled. It had been intentional on my part because I hadn’t wanted to draw Gran’s attention to what was inside.
I was sixteen years old when I first started looking into my mother’s disappearance. I’d figured out at a young age that Gran didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, she didn’t want to talk about my mother at all. That framed photo on the table by the stairs was the only evidence in this house that Susanna had ever even existed.
It began with a newspaper clipping I’d found at Birdie’s. That single tether to the mystery had turned into an obsession. Before that, Susanna had been no more than another town rumor to me. Part of the folklore that lived in these mountains. Seeing it in print, her name inked onto paper, had somehow made her come alive in my mind. It took some convincing, but I’d enlisted Ida at the courthouse to help me meticulously compile every bit of information that could be found on my mother and what had happened to her.
I slid the bin from the shelf and lowered it to the ground, my bare feet now cold on the basement floor. The lid came off with a pop, and I peered inside at a large accordion folder. The file was thick, its edges worn. I hadn’t opened it in years, but it was heavier than I remembered. The feel of it brought back memories of the summer afternoons I’d spent in Mason’s garage. I’d sprawl out on the old, tattered sofa, notating and cross-referencing and cataloging every piece of paper while he played video games on an old box TV set.
The research had taken over my entire life for the better part of a year, something I’d had to keep hidden from Gran. There had been a feeling of urgency to it. Like it was my only chance to understand what happened. Only, it didn’t matter how much I colored in the picture or filled in the blanks. Seventeen years later, I only had more unanswered questions.
I sank back and pulled the folder into my lap, unlacing the twine and bending the flap backward so that I could read the labels. It was everything I’d collected. Stacks of articles, photographs, and copies of the police report were arranged with dates and sources.
The sheriff gave me what few answers he could. There were statements filled with stories about Susanna that turned my stomach—glimpses of what I imagined would be my own future. Then there were little things, too, like library records of the last book she’d checked out. The purchase agreement for the Bronco, which she’d paid cash for after years of saving. A bill from the cafe showed what she’d ordered the morning she disappeared: pancakes. There had been something so heartbreaking about that particular detail. In a matter of hours, Susanna would be gone forever. But that morning, she’d eaten pancakes.
There were several newspaper articles, mostly about her disappearance, from the Jasper Chronicle, the Citizen Times in Asheville, and The Charlotte Observer. But there was also one announcing that a twelve-year-old Susanna had won the sixth grade spelling bee.
I fished the stack of photographs from one of the sections and clumsily spread them out on the floor beside me, my eyes searching the many faces of Susanna Farrow. A baby in Gran’s arms; a toddler in a pair of overalls, chest bare beneath the sagging straps. A young girl blowing out birthday candles. A teenager with wide, wire-rimmed glasses in the fields at the farm. My frantic hands finally stilled when I found the one I was looking for—a Susanna who was in her early twenties, I guessed.
She stood beneath the dogwood tree in the front yard, one hand absently reaching for the low-hanging branch beside her. Her hair was long and down, face turned to the street as if the picture was snapped the moment she saw someone coming down the sidewalk. On the outside, she looked so normal. So ordinary in the kind of way I’d always longed for. No hint or shadow in her eyes of what was to come.
I slid the photo across the ground, placing it beside the one I’d found in the envelope, and shivered. The two pictures sat side by side, different sizes, one in black-and-white, and one in faded color. But the two women were like perfect symmetry. They weren’t just similar. They were exactly the same.
I pulled my hand back, finding the pound of my heart beneath my robe and pressing my hand to it. It couldn’t be her. My mother had been born decades more than fifty years later, and the resemblance wasn’t so strange when you took into account that the woman’s face was turned a little to the side. There was also the age of the photograph. It wasn’t in bad condition, but it wasn’t as sharp and clear as the one I’d taken from the folder.
It wasn’t her, I told myself. I pulled my hair out of my face, tucking it behind my ear. Of course it wasn’t her, but where did Gran get it? And why had she sent it to me?
I tried to think back to the week before she died, my mind skipping over the days. They’d been ordinary. Runs to the shop and the farm, the grocery. She could have mailed it from anywhere. But why mail it at all? Why not just give it to me? Those were the kinds of logical questions I’d stopped asking the worse her mind got.
The more the years drew on, the more time Gran spent in that other place. She’d be standing at the sink and washing dishes, kneeling in the garden, or sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, but in her mind, she’d slipped away to somewhere else. She’d talk to people who weren’t there. Hum songs I’d never heard. She’d go out to the shed looking for something that didn’t exist. Over the years, she drifted back and forth over that line. For the last six months of her life, she all but lived on the other side of it.
In those last few weeks, Gran was slowing down. Getting quieter. She was sleeping longer and not wanting to leave the house. I’d had a sense she was coming to the end, even though she didn’t say it and neither did Dr. Jennings. But there’d been something different about her.
That single thought is what finally made it click—that maybe it didn’t make sense because it didn’t actually mean anything. How Gran got her hands on a picture of Nathaniel Rutherford, I didn’t know. But she probably thought the same thing I did—that it looked like Susanna—and somewhere in the thick mist of her mind she’d decided to mail it to me.
I couldn’t see a ring on the woman’s finger, but the inscription called her Nathaniel’s wife. And then there was the way she leaned toward him, like there was a center of gravity I couldn’t see. Or maybe it was the wind giving her a gentle nudge in his direction.
“June?”
A muffled voice upstairs called my name, making me jolt.
“June!”
Birdie. I hadn’t even heard her come in. I looked down at the photos on the floor, as if just remembering where I was. The open bin. The basement. My loosely tied robe.
“Shit.” I groaned. The tub. I’d left the water running.
I pushed the folder from my lap, dumping it and the pictures into the bin. My hands clumsily got the lid back on before I slid it against the wall and climbed the wooden steps to the sitting room.