In the fall of 1912, three men disappeared from the swamps south of Atchafalaya, Louisiana. They were experienced watermen, familiar with the channels and currents of a place called West Run. Their boats were found tied to cypress roots. Their coats were folded neatly on the seats. Their lunch pails contained bread gone black with mold, a withered apple, and a note written in careful, workingman’s script. The note read: “I heard her calling me.”
The men were Ozius Dowtfyre, a 41-year-old trapper; Delfine Foreau, 52; and Reno Sykes, a 36-year-old cypress cutter. All three vanished within three weeks of each other. No bodies were recovered. No gear was missing. The only thing they left behind was that phrase, written in their own hands.
The insurance company sent a man named Ansel Trebec to investigate. He was 44 years old, a claims adjuster from New Orleans with long, ink-stained fingers and a habit of wearing a stiff collar even in the heat. He was sent to Black Rush, a stretch of high ground about six miles south of the river town of Little Caine, Louisiana. Black Rush was home to fifteen families, mostly trappers and a few cypress mill workers. The map around them was swamp—real swamp, where trees stand in black water and the moss hangs so thick you cannot see the sky for long stretches of the day.
The sheriff was a man named Renard Bois. He was 49, broad-chested, with a thick black mustache going gray at the ends. When Trebec arrived, Bois told him plainly: “You won’t find him. And if you go where he went so as not to be found, we won’t find you either.”
Bois warned Trebec not to go past the last house on stilts in the western channel. That house belonged to Margaret Hollow.
Trebec asked the question everyone asked: “Who is Margaret Hollow?”
The sheriff took a long time to answer. He turned his coffee cup in his hands. He looked at the wall. Then he said that Margaret Hollow was an old woman who lived two miles out in West Run, in a house on stilts her father built before the war. She was in her seventies. She sold herbs and salves. She could draw the inflammation out of a wound overnight when a doctor needed a week. Five or six people in town, including the sheriff himself, would have died without her.
And she was also, the sheriff said, the reason grown men in the parish did not go past the third bend after sunset.
“Because things go still around her,” Bois said. “Because animals don’t cross her yard. Because in 1889, a preacher came from Baton Rouge to exorcise her. The swamp returned him three days later without his shoes and nearly without his mind.”
The sheriff said he had known the woman for thirty years. She had never done him any harm. But he did not go past the third bend either.
Trebec wrote all of this down in his notebook that night. He wrote the names of the missing men. He wrote the word “pattern” in the margin and underlined it. Then he wrote a second word beneath it: “Margaret.” He did not underline that one.
The next morning, Trebec hired a young man named Cyprian Roque to row him into West Run. The water was black—not brown, not tea-colored, but black, the way something is black when light does not want to touch it. There were no birds. Cyprian noticed it first. “Sir, listen,” he said. “There’s supposed to be birds.”
Around noon, they found Ozius Dowtfyre’s boat. It was tied with a tight fisherman’s knot to the root of a bald cypress. Inside was his paddle, his metal lunch pail, and his coat, folded carefully on the seat with the buttons done up. A man who plans to be gone a while does not fold his coat like that. A man who plans to be gone a while wears it.
Trebec opened the lunch pail. Inside was the bread, the apple, and the note. The paper was dry. It had been sitting in a swamp, on a rotting boat, in a pail that was not tightly sealed, for two weeks. It was dry.
Cyprian refused his second payment on the way back. He returned the four dollars and said, “Sir, I’m done. I won’t go west again.” Then he said something Trebec wrote down that night because the phrasing was strange: “You shouldn’t have opened that pail.”
Trebec asked why.
“Because she knows now that you found it,” Cyprian said.
Trebec asked who “she” was. Cyprian did not answer. He tied the boat and walked away without looking back.
That night, Trebec did not sleep much. He lay on a narrow bed stuffed with horsehair and listened to the swamp breathing against the wall of the boarding house. At one point, he heard something that was not frogs and not crickets—a slow, faint pulling sound, like breath drawn through cloth.
The next day, Trebec went to the parish courthouse and requested the records. The clerk, a thin, dry man named Percival Kane, did not want to give them to him. Trebec paid the service fee and got the records. He sat in the back of the courthouse for six hours and read.
Margaret Hollow was born in 1843 to a mother named Overa Hollow and a father the record did not bother to name. The father built the stilt house on West Run in 1852 and drowned in 1858, at night, alone, in the water off his own dock. The mother, Overa, lived in the house with her daughter until 1869, when she walked into the swamp one Sunday morning without a coat or a hat or a word to anyone. She did not come back.
The daughter, then 26, continued living in the house alone. From 1869 to 1912, that was 43 years alone in a stilt house in a Louisiana swamp.
The record continued. In 1871, a farmer named August Mayeux sued Margaret Hollow, claiming she cursed his cows to give bitter milk. The case was dismissed. In 1879, a preacher named Isaac Venn sued her, claiming she was a witch and demanding her removal from the parish. The case was dismissed. In the margin, someone had written in pencil: “Preacher Venn returned to Baton Rouge in poor health. Never preached again.”
In 1889, a formal complaint was filed by a man named Bethuel Cargus, claiming she killed his brother by looking at him across a fence. The complaint was withdrawn eleven days later by Cargus himself, in writing. The letter of withdrawal said only: “I was mistaken. Please cancel my complaint. I am leaving the parish.”
The record got thinner after that. Pages had been torn out. There were entries referring to earlier entries on pages that no longer existed.
Trebec noticed something else. Every eight or nine years, going back as far as the record held, there was a small cluster of mysterious disappearances in West Run. Two men in 1870. Three in 1879. Two in 1888. Three in 1897. Two in 1905. And now, in 1912, three.
He counted them again. Then a third time. He was sure.
The clerk watched him the whole time. When Trebec closed the record, the clerk said, “Whatever you think you found in there, it won’t help you. Men have found it before. It never helped any of them.”
Trebec could not force himself to stand for another fifteen minutes.
The next day, he could not find another boatman. Cyprian Roque had told everyone in Little Caine not to go with the man in the gray suit. News travels fast in a town of two hundred. So Trebec rowed himself.
It took most of the morning to reach the third bend, and another hour after that to see the roofline of the stilt house through the moss. He tied his boat. He looked at the house from the water for a full minute before moving. It was smaller than he imagined. Silver cypress planks, a rusted tin roof, stilts smooth with something dark that was not quite moss. No porch. Just a door at the top of a simple stair. No smoke from the chimney. No garden. No chickens. No boat but his own.
He climbed the stairs. He knocked, because he was the kind of man who knocks. The door opened.
Margaret Hollow was smaller than he imagined—no more than five feet tall, thin the way a person becomes from a long life of eating only what is necessary. Her hair was pure white, braided loosely down her back. Her hands were brown and knotted at every joint. Her eyes were pale gray, the color of water in a tin cup.
She said, “Come in, Mr. Trebec. I’ve been expecting you for two days.”
The house was one long room. Dried herbs hung from every beam in bundles tied with sisal twine. A cast-iron stove burned slowly against the far wall. A rocking chair sat by the front window with a shawl folded over the arm. A narrow bed was made up neatly in the corner with a gray coverlet. There was a table, two chairs, and a shelf of glass jars whose contents Trebec recognized and did not want to.
Everything was clean. That surprised him.
She sat him at the table. She put a tin cup of dark tea in front of him. He did not drink it. She noticed and did not comment. She sat across from him, folded her brown, knotted hands, and waited.
Trebec was a man who conducted interviews for a living. He knew how to make silence work for him. He tried to make this silence work for him. He could not.
After a full minute, he said, “Mrs. Hollow?”
She smiled a very slight smile. “Miss.”
“Miss Hollow,” he said. “Three men have disappeared in West Run in the past month. The sheriff tells me no one dares go past the third bend because of you. I’m here from the company about Ozius Dowtfyre. I found his boat yesterday. I found a note in the pail.”
She let him finish. When he was done, she said, “And what did the note say?”
He took the paper from his coat and placed it on the table between them. She did not touch it. She read it upside down with her water-colored eyes and said, “Yes, that’s what they say.”
Trebec asked what she meant by “they.”
“The ones the swamp takes,” she said. “I heard her calling me. That’s what they all write, Mr. Trebec, when they’re lucky enough to write anything at all. Some of them don’t.”
She said it the way a doctor delivers a diagnosis he has given too many times.
Trebec felt a cold run up the back of his neck. He said, “Miss Hollow, are you telling me you called these men?”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, “No. I never called anyone. I have spent my whole life keeping something from calling. Do you understand the difference?”
He said he was not sure he did.
She said, “My father built this house on this land because there is something in the water beneath it that does not like to be alone. It has been in the water under this house since before my father built here. Since before there was a parish here to notice. My father did not know that when he chose the land. He was a young man looking for cypress to cut. He found ground solid enough for pilings, so he drove them and built the house and brought my mother here in the spring of 1854, and I was born under this roof. My father learned about the thing in the water too late. That’s why he drowned. My mother learned about the thing in the water too late. That’s why she walked toward it. I learned near the end, when my mother could no longer sleep because of its voice under the floorboards, and she told me what it was and what I had to do to keep it quiet. Then the next Sunday morning, she walked out because she could not bear to do it anymore. And ever since, I have been the door between it and this parish. When it is quiet, no one disappears. When it is not quiet, men disappear. It is not quiet now.”
She said, “Mr. Trebec, if you had any sense at all, you would put your boat in the water and go back to Little Caine, and catch the first train to New Orleans, and never speak the name of this parish again for the rest of your life.”
Trebec did not know what to say to that. He was a man who lived in ledgers. Ledgers do not have a column for things in the water.
He asked her, “If this is true, why don’t you leave?”
She smiled her small smile again. “Mr. Trebec, if I leave, there is no door. And if there is no door, it does not come as a voice. It comes as whatever it wants to be. And if that happens, this parish will not be the only one to empty out.”
He asked what he could do to help.
“Nothing,” she said.
He said there must be something.
“Mr. Trebec, you can go back to town and tell the company that Ozius Dowtfyre cannot be found, and you can pay his widow because she has done no wrong and needs her money. That is what you can do.”
Then she stood, and he stood, and she walked with him to the stair. As he put his foot on the first step, she called his first name for the first time.
“Ansel.”
He looked back.
She said, “Do not open the shutters tonight. Whatever you hear at your window, do not open the shutters.”
He sat in the boat at the base of her stair for a minute, maybe, before he took up the paddle. He looked at the water. The water did not look back at him. But he had a strong, unshakable feeling, sitting there, that something was watching him from directly beneath the boat. And that if he leaned over the side and put his face close to the surface, he would see a face looking back. Not his own face.
He did not lean over the side.
He rowed the two miles back to Little Caine with the sun low on his right side. He reached the dock at dusk. He ate a plate of red beans and rice and did not taste it. He went up to his room. He locked the door. He closed the shutters. He turned the lamp low. He sat on the edge of the bed in his coat and shoes.
At about nine o’clock, something began to knock on the shutter.
It was a light, polite knock. Two knocks. A pause. Two knocks. The way a person knocks on a door in a city where knocking on doors is considered polite. His window was on the second floor. There was nothing outside it to stand on. Nothing at all.
Trebec sat perfectly still on the edge of the bed and listened.
The knocking continued for perhaps ten minutes. Then a voice came through the shutter, in a tone he recognized because he had heard it that afternoon across a table with a tin cup of tea.
“Ansel. Ansel, open the shutter.”
It was not her voice. It was almost her voice. There was something wrong with the vowels. It was her voice the way a careful drawing of a person’s face is that person’s face. Everything in the right place. And yet not a face you would want to kiss.
Trebec did not open the shutter. He sat with his hands flat on his knees for a long time. After a while, the voice stopped. After another while, the knocking stopped. Then—and this was the part he wrote down the next morning and underlined in his notebook—something breathed. A slow, deep breath outside his window. The breath of a large animal at the end of a long day. It was so close to the shutter that he felt the cold of the wood on his face from three feet away. As if that breath had pulled the heat out of the room, and out of him, and out of the wall between them.
He did not move. He did not even breathe. He counted to sixty in his head, the way a man does when he is trying to stop himself from doing something foolish. When he reached sixty, he started counting again from one. He reached sixty a second time. He got to about forty on the third count, and then the thing left. It left by moving down the wall. He heard it scraping as it went down. It took as long as a large man takes to descend a stair, with the same rhythm of pauses, as if it were thinking about coming back up. Then the yard below the window went quiet.
He did not sleep. He sat with his hands on his knees watching the shutter until the first gray light of morning showed through the cracks.
In the morning, he opened the shutter because daylight had come. He was a man who relied on records and verification. There were no marks on the shutter. There was nothing in the yard. There was a track in the mud beneath his window that he chose not to describe in his report. It was not a boot print. It was not a hoof print. It was not the track of any animal he knew, and he had grown up on a farm in western Kentucky and knew the shape of most animal tracks. It was long, longer than a man’s forearm. And its pattern—if “pattern” was the right word—was not the pattern of something that walks upright, nor the pattern of something that walks on all fours.
Trebec stood over it for a long time in the wet morning without a single thought forming in his mind that could be put into a sentence. Then he covered it with the toe of his boot and scraped mud over it until the track was gone. He did not know why he did that. He would think about it later.
When he came downstairs, the boarding house was quiet. The proprietress, a heavyset woman named Idalia Beaumont, was sitting at the kitchen table crying silently.
Trebec asked what was wrong.
Idalia Beaumont said, without looking up, “Cyprian is gone.”
Trebec said, “Gone how?”
Idalia said, “His boat came to the dock this morning. His paddle was in it. His coat was folded on the seat. My sister sent for him last night to walk her home from the store, and he never arrived. Someone says they saw him at the dock at eleven o’clock heading west, calling out.”
She stopped because she did not want to say the rest.
Trebec said, “Calling out what, Idalia?”
She said, “Calling out that he heard her calling him.”
Trebec went up to his room and packed his bag. He wrote telegrams to Baton Rouge, to New Orleans, to the company. Then he walked to the small telegraph office and sent them. In every telegram he wrote different words, but the meaning was the same in all of them. He was going back to West Run. He was not going to leave anyone else where he had left Cyprian.
He went to the sheriff’s office. He told Renard Bois everything. The pale light, the note, Margaret Hollow at her table, the knocking on the window, the voice, the breath, the track in the mud. He added no exaggerations. He added no personal commentary. He was an insurance man. He described what he saw the way an insurance man describes damage.
When he was done, Renard Bois was silent for a long time. He sat at his desk with his big hands on his knees. He looked at the wall. Then he said, “Mr. Trebec, there is something I did not tell you the day you came here.”
Trebec said, “Tell me now.”
Bois said, “My older brother disappeared in 1897 in West Run. He was 28 years old. He was strong in the water. He disappeared the same way. His boat came to the dock. His coat was folded. There was a note in his pail that said, ‘I heard her calling me.’ I hated Margaret Hollow for fifteen years, Mr. Trebec. And I was never able to prove she did anything. So I will go with you today. And anything we find in that stilt house, you will leave me to deal with. Do you understand?”
Trebec said he understood.
They took the sheriff’s flat-bottomed boat, which had a small motor that Renard Bois did not start until they were half a mile out of Little Caine, because he said West Run did not like motors and he did not want to anger it before his time.
They went under the moss while the little motor coughed. The water was blacker than the day before. Trebec had not thought that was possible. The cypress roots seemed larger, or perhaps more numerous, or perhaps more watchful. He could not say what the difference was, only that it was there.
Halfway to the third bend, they passed a place where the water was so still it looked poured. Trebec saw, or thought he saw, or would later tell himself he imagined, a face beneath the surface. Not a body. A face, turned upward, eyes open, watching. He did not point at it. He told himself he imagined it.
A hundred yards past the still place, the sheriff cut the motor and said, “Do you hear that?”
Trebec listened. What he heard was Cyprian Roque, from somewhere far off among the trees, calling his name. The voice said, “Sir. Sir, help me. Sir, I’m here.” It was Cyprian’s voice. It was exactly Cyprian’s voice, even in the way the boy dropped his r’s at the end of a word.
Trebec almost stood up in the boat. He almost answered. The sheriff’s big hand clamped down on his shoulder and pushed him back onto the seat. Renard Bois put his finger to his lips. He shook his head very slowly. He mouthed the word “No.”
They sat in the boat. The voice called again from a different direction, then from a third direction, then, horrifyingly, from directly beneath the boat, in a wet, small whisper against the planks, and Trebec felt the wood under his shoes go cold.
Renard Bois started the motor. He turned the boat. He drove them the rest of the way to the third bend at a speed that was probably not safe. The boat slid over the surface of the water and clipped a low root that would have stopped them dead if the sheriff had not raised the motor in time. Trebec held onto the seat with both hands.
Behind them, the voices multiplied. He heard Ozius Dowtfyre, whose voice he had never heard in life, calling his widow’s name. He heard Delfine Foreau mention a debt he still owed. He heard Reno Sykes singing something without words, which was somehow worse than any words.
They came around the third bend and up to the stair of Margaret Hollow’s house. When they tied the boat, the swamp behind them was thick with the voices of every man ever lost in West Run. They were calling in the voices of men from long before Trebec was born.
Margaret Hollow stood at the top of the stair in the same gray dress. She looked at Renard Bois. She said, “Renard.”
Bois said, “Margaret.”
She said, “You should not have brought him.”
Bois said, “I know.”
She said, “Come up.”
They went up.
Inside the long, clean room, the stove was burning harder than it had the day before. There were three lamps lit, though it was full daylight. The bundles of herbs were swaying slightly on their strings, though there was no open window and no breeze moving through the house.
She sat them at the table. She did not serve tea.
She said, “It is under the floorboards. It has been under the floorboards since yesterday afternoon. It is angry because I did not give it your name yesterday, Mr. Trebec. It is angry because I did not open the door I guard. It wants a name to answer to. If I give it a name, it will take that person and be quiet for another eight years. If I do not give it a name, it will come up through the floor tonight and take every soul in Little Caine by morning.”
She said, “That is the choice.”
She said it in the tone of a woman reciting the weather.
Renard Bois said, “Margaret.”
She said, “Renard.”
He said, “My brother. In ’97?”
She said, “Yes.”
He said, “Was it you?”
She looked at him for a long time. Then she said, “No. But I chose not to speak the name that would have saved him. I chose silence that year, because the man I was supposed to name was a man I loved forty years ago, when I was young enough to think someone in this parish would marry a Hollow girl, and I was not strong enough, Renard, so your brother went instead. And I have paid for that choice for fifteen years, and I will keep paying for it until the day I close my eyes for the last time.”
Renard Bois put his face in his hands. He did not cry. He sat like that for a long minute. Then he stood and went to the window and looked out at the water.
Margaret Hollow looked at Ansel Trebec. She said, “Mr. Trebec, there is a way out tonight. It is not a kind way, but it is a way.”
And Ansel Trebec, a man of records who had come south to identify a widow’s claim, said the four words that would haunt him for the rest of his life: “What do you need?”
She said, “I need you to sit in that rocking chair. I need you to stay in that chair until sunrise, no matter what you hear. I need you to keep your eyes on this.”
She took a small clay bowl from the shelf and set it on the table. In the bowl was an ordinary river stone, dark, about the size of a hen’s egg.
She said, “This is the door. This is what my father made when he built this house. This is what I have kept for forty-three years. It must be guarded by someone who has never lied to it. That is the only rule. I cannot guard it because I have lied to it once. Renard cannot guard it because he has hated me for fifteen years, and he would break it in the first hour if he had the chance. You have not been here long enough to lie to it, Mr. Trebec. So you will guard it. And Renard and I will go down to the water tonight, because that is where the contest is, and someone must contest it, and we will come back before sunrise or we may not come back at all.”
He asked her what would happen if he looked away from it.
She said, “It will speak in a voice you know. It will call you by the name your mother gave you. It will ask you a question you have wanted the answer to for thirty years. It will show you the face of someone you have wanted to see for that long. And if you look up from the stone, Mr. Trebec, even once, it will come through the stone and there will be no escape after that. Do you understand?”
He said he understood.
She said, “Good. Eat something, then. It is a long night.”
Trebec did not remember eating anything. He remembered sitting in the rocking chair. He remembered the door closing behind Margaret Hollow and Renard Bois, and the slow wet sound of their steps going down the stair, and the distant push of a boat leaving the pilings and heading out into West Run.
He remembered the small clay bowl on the table under the yellow lamp light, and the ordinary dark stone inside it, and how it did not look like anything at all.
He remembered the swamp beginning to call again, but closer this time. He remembered hearing his mother’s voice at the window. His mother had been dead for nineteen years. He remembered hearing his own name in the voice of a woman he had loved and lost in the summer of 1893, a woman whose name he had not spoken aloud since the day of her funeral.
He remembered the shutters creaking. He remembered a slow, wet sound climbing the stair outside, the same sound the sheriff’s boots had made going down, but heavier and heavier. He remembered how pale his hands looked as he gripped the arms of the rocking chair.
He remembered the cabin door, which was barred, beginning to rattle gently, as if someone on the other side were leaning against it with a palm. He remembered a woman’s voice saying, softly, “Here at the crack of the door, Ansel. It’s not a big ask. Just look at me. Look at my face. It’s been so long.”
And Ansel Trebec, who had loved a woman named Charity Fairlane when he was twenty-four and buried her when he was twenty-five, before he had even paid off the cost of their wedding, felt every muscle in his neck tighten against the urge to look up.
He kept his eyes fixed on the stone.
The stone did nothing. Nothing at all. It sat in the small clay bowl like any river stone you might pick up on a walk.
He remembered the door rattling harder. He remembered a second voice joining it, a faint man’s voice he did not recognize, and a third voice that was his father’s voice, who had died in the winter of 1889.
He remembered that he did not look away.
He remembered the stone in the bowl beginning to hum, very faintly, at about two in the morning. A low note, like a finger running around the rim of a wet glass.
He remembered that he did not look away.
He remembered the hum growing louder. Louder the way a tuning fork grows louder when a string touches it. Louder until the tin cup on the table was vibrating against the wood. Louder until the bundled herbs on their strings above him were swinging in slow arcs, as if a hand had touched each one and set it moving.
Then everything stopped. Everything. The hum. The voices. The rattling at the door. The scraping at the stair. The shutters stopped moving. There was a very long time in which nothing happened at all. Which was, in some way, worse than what had come before. Because in that nothing, he had to listen to his own breathing, and his breathing was the only sound in the world.
He remembered that nothing came in.
And sometime near dawn, he must have fallen asleep in the rocking chair, his eyes still fixed on the stone. Because he woke to gray light and the sound of a door.
Renard Bois came in first. He was soaked to the collarbone. His hair was plastered to his skull. His face was pale. He was holding his hat in his hand, which was strange, because he had worn it low the whole way.
He looked at Ansel Trebec. He looked at the stone in the bowl, which was quiet again, and looked again like just an ordinary stone.
He said, “She’s not coming back.”
Trebec said, “What happened?”
Renard Bois said, “She went into the water and gave it a name.”
Trebec said, “Whose name?”
Renard Bois sat down in the other chair and said, “Her own. She told it her name. She said, ‘I am Margaret Hollow and I am the door. Take me and be quiet for another hundred years.’ She said it three times, and the water went still and took her, and she did not come back up. That is what happened.”
Trebec said nothing. He looked at the stone. The stone looked like a stone.
Renard Bois stood after a while and walked to the shelf and took the bowl. He carried it to the stove. He opened the stove door. He placed the bowl inside on the coals. He closed the door and stood there for a full minute with his big flat hand on the stove door.
Neither of them spoke.
Outside the window, the sky was turning the color of old copper, and the water under the pilings was beginning to move again. Small, ordinary ripples. Small, ordinary sounds. The swamp settling back into being a swamp. A bird called from the far side of the channel, then another.
Renard Bois took his hand off the stove door and turned. He said, “We need to go.”
They went back to Little Caine in the sheriff’s boat with the motor off, because there was no need for it. The swamp on the way back was quiet. There were birds. Trebec heard a red-winged blackbird at the second bend and almost cried, which was not something he did.
When they reached the dock, the townspeople were coming out to meet them, because news travels the way it does in a town of two hundred that had stayed up all night listening.
Idalia Beaumont was at the front of the crowd. Trebec did not know what he was going to say to her.
Then, from the far side of the dock, out of the reeds where the water meets the planks, Cyprian Roque came walking. His clothes were soaked through. His face was blank. He remembered nothing from the moment he tied his boat at eleven o’clock the night before to the moment he woke up in the mud at the edge of the channel at dawn. He was very cold and very hungry. There was a small cut on the palm of his right hand that he did not know how he got. But he was alive.
Idalia Beaumont fell to her knees on the dock planks.
Cyprian said, “Mr. Trebec.”
Trebec went to him and put his coat on him, because Cyprian’s coat was folded on the seat of his boat, and neither of them mentioned it.
Ozius Dowtfyre’s widow was compensated. Delfine Foreau’s widow was compensated under a policy Trebec was not obligated to open, but he did anyway. Reno Sykes had no widow, but he had a sister in New Orleans, and Trebec made sure the small amount due to the estate reached her without any trouble. He delivered the checks in person, holding his hat in his hand, answering all their questions, and he did not say the name “Margaret Hollow” in front of any of them. Not once.
The company accepted Trebec’s report, which described the case as accidental deaths in the Louisiana swamps, with recovery of bodies impossible due to the nature of the terrain, and did not mention Margaret Hollow at all.
His supervisor, a man named Avid Prather, read the report and looked at Trebec across a desk in New Orleans and asked him one question only: “Is there anything in that parish that might come back to haunt us?”
Trebec said, “No, Mr. Prather. Nothing in that parish will haunt anyone anymore.”
Avid Prather signed the report and filed it, and it stayed there for thirty years until the cabinet was emptied and the file was sent to archives, never read by human eyes again.
Renard Bois remained sheriff of Little Caine until 1928, when a stroke put him in a chair by a window for the last two years of his life. He never married. He never took a boat past the third bend of West Run again. He sat at that window watching the water and drinking chicory coffee. Once, near the end, a young deputy who had come to check on him asked what he was watching out there all this time, every day. The old sheriff said only, “I’m watching to see if she comes back.”
The deputy asked, “Who comes back?”
Renard Bois did not answer. And the deputy did not ask again, because there was something in the way the old sheriff looked at the water that made the deputy not want to be part of it.
The stilt house stood empty. In 1921, a hurricane took the roof, and the walls after that, and finally the pilings in 1936. By the time the war came, the pilings had returned to the water without a trace.
But the men of Little Caine noticed something, and they passed it quietly from father to son without writing it in any record. Every eight years starting in 1912, the pattern that should have started again did not happen. No men disappeared in West Run. Not in ’20, not in ’28, not in ’36, not in ’44, not in ’52. It was quiet for a very long time. It was exactly as quiet as she said it would be.
Ansel Trebec returned to New Orleans. He worked for the company for another eleven years. He never took another case in a parish with standing water. He wrote a private account of what happened in the fall of 1912. He sealed it, and it went to his son upon his death in 1941. In the 1960s, his son donated it to a small university library that kept boxes like it. That is how the story came to be told.
On the last page of the account, in his precise, ink-stained hand, Ansel Trebec wrote something:
“I do not know what Margaret Hollow was. I have thought about it every day of my life since. I thought she was a witch. I thought she was a saint. I thought she was a woman doing a job no one asked her to do, no one thanked her for, and no one released her from. And I have thought that this is probably the truest thing I can say about her. But sometimes, on a quiet night with the window open, I think about the stone in the fire. And I think she said it would take exactly a hundred years. I wonder what happens in the year after the hundred. And I wonder about that too, because if its clock started in 1912, the hundred years are long past.”
The maps in the parish office no longer show Black Rush. West Run has silted in so badly you cannot get a small boat past the first bend. No one has looked under those pilings for a very long time. Little Caine is barely a place now. A dozen houses. A gas station that closes at six. A post office that opens three days a week, according to the last check.
The parish courthouse still stands, but the record Trebec sat with for six hours in 1912 was lost in a fire in 1948, and no copy was ever made. There is no record left to count from. No one is watching the eight-year clock.
Perhaps she bought more time than she said. Perhaps she bought eternity. One hopes she did. But a hundred years is a long time for a person, and a very short time for anything that was under those floorboards. And the pattern may be due somewhere in what was once called West Run, in water no boat visits and no map records.