The Welcome Committee

The postcard was in the passenger seat.

She had put it there that morning when she was loading the car, moving it from the kitchen counter where it had lived for the past six weeks in the particular way of things she hadn’t dealt with yet: present enough to be aware of, far enough to the edge of vision to almost ignore. It had a Portland postmark, which she had checked four times, and Celeste Hargrove’s name in the return address field in handwriting she had never seen before and could not verify, and on the back a single line: Hope you’re settling in well, Nora. It’s a big world.

She had not settled in well, technically. She had settled in, which was different.

The drive from Harwick to Greer’s Hollow was four and a half hours if you went straight, which she mostly did. She had the postcard in the passenger seat and a travel mug of coffee going cold in the cupholder and a playlist that she had made in March when she thought she was going to go on a road trip with someone and had never deleted, because deleting it felt like an admission of something. She listened to the first three songs and then turned it off and drove in silence through Connecticut and into New York and down through the long green corridor of Pennsylvania and into West Virginia, where the land changed in the way it did when you were paying attention: the hills rising, the road narrowing, the trees thickening on both sides until the sky came through them in long slanted shafts rather than all at once. She had the sleeves of her old grey driving jacket pushed up to the elbows and one ink stain on the side of her right hand that she had tried to remove that morning and hadn’t quite managed, which was the sort of detail she noticed about herself only when she was about to meet someone new.

She had been to Greer’s Hollow twice as a child. Both times with her parents, visiting Mabel in the way that families visited grandmothers: with the sense of obligation discharged but not unpleasantly, of a world smaller and slower than the one you lived in, of being very well fed. She remembered the diner and the hardware store and the peculiar quality of the silence at night when there were no streetlamps to interrupt it. She remembered Mabel’s kitchen, which always smelled of coffee and something baked, and Mabel herself, small and direct and not particularly given to sentiment, with the kind of sharpness that people called being young for her age when they were being polite and being difficult when they were not.

She had not been back in eleven years.

The invitation had come every summer, and every summer Nora had not quite managed it: the job, the other job, the relationship, the end of the relationship, the moving, the recovering, and then, most recently, the events of Crestwood Drive, which had consumed the better part of three months and left her with a solved case and an unsolved postcard and the feeling of a person who had looked at something very dark for a long time and needed to look at something else.

Come for the summer, Mabel had written, in the card that came every year, in the same small handwriting she had used for decades. I’m not getting younger and the garden is better than it’s ever been and you never come. The last three words were not an accusation in Mabel’s usage. They were simply information.

Nora had packed the car.

She reached into the passenger seat at a red light and turned the postcard face-down. Then she drove the last forty miles into the valley.

Greer’s Hollow came into view around a bend in the road, announced by a sign and then by a white church steeple above the treeline, and then by the town itself: a main street of maybe two hundred yards with a diner and a pharmacy and a hardware store and a post office and several businesses she didn’t recognise, and beyond them the scatter of houses that made up the residential part of the town, climbing gently up both sides of the valley as if trying to get a better look at themselves.

She slowed. The main street was quiet in the mid-afternoon way of small towns: not empty, but inhabited with the unhurried ease of people who had nowhere to be by a particular time. Two women talking outside the pharmacy. A man loading something into a truck. A teenager on a bicycle going somewhere slowly.

There was bunting on the lamp posts. Red and white, looped between the posts in long cheerful scallops the length of the street.

She thought: that’s new. And then she thought: eleven years is long enough for bunting.

She was almost past the diner when she saw the woman in the doorway of the hardware store. Sixties, maybe. Standing very still, not doing anything with her hands, watching Nora’s car pass with an expression that was not unfriendly and was not the idle glance of a person who had noticed movement. It was attentive. It was the look of someone who had been expecting something and was checking whether this was it.

Nora drove on. She told herself: small towns watch cars. Especially ones with out-of-state plates and roof boxes. Especially in summer.

She checked her mirror. The doorway was empty.

She kept driving.

She drove through the main street and up the gentle hill on the western side of the valley to Mabel’s house, which sat at the end of a short road with three other houses, all of them similar: clapboard, modest, with deep front porches designed for the particular Appalachian art of sitting outside and watching the evening come in. Mabel’s garden was, as promised, better than ever. Roses in the beds along the front fence, gone a little wild and the better for it. Lavender by the gate.

Mabel herself was on the porch before Nora had fully stopped the car.

She was seventy-eight and looked, Nora thought, exactly as she had always looked, which was not young but was not old in the way people expected when you said seventy-eight, either. She was small and had been small her whole life in the way of women who had decided early on that smallness was not a disadvantage. She was wearing a blue housedress and an expression of restrained satisfaction, the expression of someone who had been right about something for a long time and had learned to wait it out.

“You’re thinner,” Mabel said, when Nora got to the porch steps.

“Hello to you too.”

“I’m not criticising, I’m observing. It’s different.” She looked at Nora steadily for a moment, the way she always had, the way that had always made Nora feel both seen and slightly exposed, and then she opened her arms. Nora went into them. Mabel smelled of coffee and lavender water and something underneath both of those that was simply Mabel, which was a smell Nora realised she had been carrying as a memory without knowing it, and which was different in person, richer and more real.

“Come inside,” Mabel said. “I’ve made things.”

The kitchen was exactly as it had always been.

This was the kind of thing that shouldn’t have been as comforting as it was: a small room with yellow walls and a gas stove and a window over the sink that looked out at the back garden, everything in roughly the same place it had been eleven years ago, as if the kitchen had simply waited. Nora sat at the table while Mabel made coffee, which she did in the old stovetop percolator she had used for as long as Nora could remember, the kind of appliance that was not efficient but produced coffee that tasted like the particular authority of someone who knew exactly how they liked things.

“The garden really is better,” Nora said.

“I have more time for it now. And I stopped listening to what the books said and started listening to the garden.” Mabel set a cup in front of her. “How are you. Actually.”

“Actually fine,” Nora said.

Mabel sat down opposite her and looked at her steadily.

“More or less actually fine,” Nora said.

“I read about the business in Connecticut,” Mabel said. “In March, when it came out. You didn’t tell me about it yourself.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to start explaining.”

“You could have started with: there was a woman locked in a house across the street and I got her out.” Mabel picked up her cup. “That would have been a start.”

“There was more to it than that.”

“There usually is.” She drank her coffee. “Are you all right?”

Nora thought about the postcard in the passenger seat. She thought about the last six weeks of waking at three in the morning by habit, the body’s memory of watching, even when there was nothing to watch. She thought about Detective Okafor’s last call, two months ago, which had been to tell her that Martin Hargrove had entered a plea arrangement and Celeste was in a facility and progressing well, and the way she had sat on the phone after the call ended and felt the particular shapeless thing that she had not yet found the right word for: not resolution, not relief, not satisfaction. Something more complicated than any of those.

“I’m getting there,” she said.

Mabel nodded. She did not push. This was one of the things Nora had always loved most about her.

She was going to feel bad about what she was about to do to this summer.

The spare room was at the front of the house, small and clean and furnished with the bed and chest of drawers that had always been in it, plus a new lamp that Mabel said she’d bought because the old one had finally given out, and a hook on the back of the door that Nora didn’t remember from before. She unpacked slowly, putting things in the drawer, hanging things on the hook, setting her toiletries on the chest of drawers in the arrangement that helped her feel inhabited in a new space. She caught a glimpse of herself in the small mirror above the chest and pushed her hair back with both hands, the automatic gesture she made when she was trying to think clearly, the dark of it still carrying a faint line from where she’d had it pinned for the drive. She set her notebook on the bedside table. That was the last thing she always unpacked, and the first thing she always needed. Outside the window: the front porch, the garden, the road, and beyond it the slope of the valley and the trees.

It was, she thought, genuinely beautiful. The green here was a different green from Connecticut: darker, denser, older, with more intent to it, as if the trees knew something the New England ones didn’t.

She put the postcard in the top drawer under a folded sweater.

She went back to the kitchen and helped Mabel make dinner and they ate on the porch as the evening came in, which was exactly what you did in a place with a porch like this, and the valley went through its colours as the sun dropped behind the western ridge: gold to amber to the particular deep green that preceded the dark. Somewhere in the town, church bells marked the hour. The air was cool and smelled of grass and woodsmoke from somewhere.

“I’m glad you came,” Mabel said.

“Me too,” Nora said. And meant it.