The bend in Crooked Creek had always been deeper than it should have been. That was the first thing Mercer Tindale noticed, standing on the shoulder of rock above the water with his leather book in one hand and a revolver in his coat pocket that he had already decided would be no use to him. The creek made its second bend there, a sharp hook that had given the town its name, and the water where it turned was a strange black-green, slow and cold. He stood at the edge of it for almost an hour and saw nothing in it.

That was important later. The water was simply dark and still, and he wrote down in his book what he had seen that morning from the rock, before he had come down to the edge himself. He had arrived in Crooked Creek on a Wednesday afternoon in the first week of November 1886. The maples were already bare.

The light was thin. He had walked the last four miles on foot because he had a feeling he ought to, leaving his cart at the end of the marked road. He was not a sheriff. He was the assistant county clerk over in Barberville, a thin, neat man of about forty-one with a habit of writing everything down in a small leather-bound book he carried in his coat pocket.

But he had been the one who had taken down the original report on Obadiah Mossbridge all those years before, in his careful clerk’s hand, and the report on Eustace Pelum’s abandoned wagon, and the report on Beecher Trowel’s horse. Now he was being asked to take down the report on Case Whitfield, and Mercer Tindale was, before anything else, a man who could count to four. Crooked Creek sat in the lower folds of the Cumberland country, eighteen miles past the last marked road and four miles past the last man willing to take you any further by wagon. If you wanted to get there, you walked.

The town was not on most maps. The county recorder over in Barberville had a notation for it, a small set of pencil marks beside an old creek that bent twice on itself before vanishing into a stand of hemlocks. About sixty souls lived there in the late autumn of that year, mostly farmers, a blacksmith named Forester, a general store run by a man called Puit and his wife, and a circuit preacher who came through every third Sunday and stayed only as long as the weather allowed. Set off from the main road by a quarter mile of pine and laurel, there was the cabin of Sephrona Crayle.

She had been the widow Crayle for almost twelve years by then, which would have been an unremarkable thing in those hills. Plenty of women had buried husbands. The mines took some, the fevers took others, and now and again a man simply walked into the trees one autumn and did not walk back out. But Sephrona Crayle was different.

She had not buried one husband. She had lost four, or more precisely, she had had four husbands disappear into the country around Crooked Creek, one after the other, across a span of about nine years. Not one body was ever found. Not one shovel of dirt was ever turned for them.

Not one stone was ever set with their name. She lived in a low cabin that had once belonged to her father, a hard man named Isben Crayle who had come down from somewhere in the upper Ohio Valley around the 1850s. He had built the cabin himself, three rooms, a sleeping loft, a stone chimney that drew so well in winter that travelers used to swear they could see the smoke from a half mile off when they could not yet see the cabin. Isben died when Sephrona was about twenty-four.

Her mother had gone earlier of something nobody in Crooked Creek wanted to name in polite company. So when the cabin came to her, Sephrona was alone in it, a circumstance most neighbors expected to be temporary. It was not. She was, by all accounts, a striking woman, tall for her time at five foot eight or nine, thin-wristed, with pale hair she kept in a single long braid down her back.

Eyes that the few people willing to discuss her later described in different ways. Forester the blacksmith said gray. Puit the storekeeper said green. The circuit preacher said neither, that they were the color of well water, which was as honest a description as anyone in Crooked Creek ever managed to give of her.

She was not unfriendly. That was the part that confused people the most. She would say good morning at the well. She would thank people for the salt and the coffee.

She sometimes brought honey, which she kept in two long hives at the back of her property, and traded it for what she did not grow. It was the kind of friendliness that did not ask anything of you and did not give you a way in either. A door, but not an open one. She married the first one in the spring of 1878.

His name was Obadiah Mossbridge, forty-three years old, a widower from over by the Tennessee line, a man with calloused hands and a habit of cleaning his pipe with a small bone-handled knife he had carried since his army days. He had no living family to speak of and a small piece of land near the creek that had gone after his first wife passed. He came through Crooked Creek on a Tuesday in March looking for work and a roof, and by the end of that summer, he and Sephrona Crayle had spoken to the circuit preacher and signed their names in the small ledger he kept. The wedding was a quiet thing.

Five people, honey cake, a handshake on the porch from Puit, and a few words from the preacher about endurance and patience and the long winter coming. Then Obadiah Mossbridge carried his small canvas bag into the cabin behind the laurel, and that was that, for a while. For about fourteen months. Long enough that people stopped looking sideways when they saw the two of them together.

Long enough for Puit’s wife to say more than once that maybe what Sephrona Crayle had needed all along was just somebody to hand her the bucket on the cold mornings. In late June of 1879, Obadiah Mossbridge went out before sundown to check a stretch of fence along the back of the property. He had a lantern with him. He had his pipe.

He had the bone-handled knife. He had a coat that his first wife had stitched for him many years before, with a small loop of leather inside the collar where he sometimes hung his pocket watch. He did not come back. Sephrona reported him missing the following morning, which is to say she walked the quarter mile down to the road and told a neighbor named Vance, who told Puit, who told Forester, who got two other men together and went out into the back of the property to look.

They found his lantern, still upright in the grass, the wick gone out, the glass cooled to the touch. They found one of his boots, just one, set neatly beside a stump, as if he had stopped to dump out a stone. They did not find his coat. They did not find his pipe.

They did not find the knife. They did not find him. The men walked the fence line for three days. They walked the creek for two more.

They took dogs out the second week. The dogs would not go past a certain place. The dogs did not run from anything. They did not bark.

They simply stopped at a certain bend in the back pasture, sat down in the grass, and would not be coaxed any further. Two of those dogs were good ones, bred for tracking bear, and they sat down in that grass like old women in church and refused to move. By the fourth week, the search was over. People said all the natural things.

He had wandered off. He had been bitten by a snake and crawled into a hollow. He had been taken by a panther or fallen into the creek and washed down past the bend. The sheriff over in Barberville came out exactly once, took down the particulars in a small notebook, and went home.

Sephrona Crayle wore a black dress for the next eleven months, and then put it away. That should have been the end of it. In another town, in another life, it might have been. But two years later, in the autumn of 1881, a peddler came through Crooked Creek and did not leave.

His name was Eustace Pelum, thirty-eight years old, a thin man with a thin mustache and a wagon full of things you did not see often in those hills. Bolts of ribbon, pewter buttons, small bottles of camphor and rose water, a set of carving knives in a black cloth case that he showed with the pride of a man showing off a child. He had come up out of the Carolinas, and he meant to keep going north as far as the weather would let him. He went up to the cabin behind the laurel because Puit told him to, told him she sometimes had honey to sell, and that Sephrona Crayle, the widow, was a fair trader.

Eustace Pelum went up the path with his sample case under one arm. He came back down four hours later without it. He came back without his hat, too. He had left both of them at the cabin, he said, because Sephrona had given him supper, and because the company had been agreeable, and he meant to go back the next morning to settle some terms.

Puit remembered the way Eustace Pelum said the word agreeable. He said it the way a man says a word he has never quite used before, trying it out. Eustace Pelum went back up that path the next morning. The morning after that, Puit’s wife noticed that the peddler’s wagon was still parked behind the store and that the horse was getting hungry.

Puit fed the horse. He waited a day. Then he walked up to the cabin himself. He found Sephrona in the front yard hanging out wash.

She looked up from the line, smiled politely, and asked him what he needed. He asked her where the peddler was. She said the peddler had gone. He asked her where.

She said she did not know. She said he had come for supper and stayed the night, and they had spoken in the morning about prices for the honey, and that he had gone off down the slope towards the creek with one of her jars under his arm, saying he would be back by noon. That was the last she had seen of him. Puit looked at her for a long time.

Then he looked past her, at the cabin, at the smoke coming from the stone chimney even though it was a warm day, and at the laurel that grew so thick behind the cabin that you could not see what was past it. He did not say anything else. He walked back down to the store, hitched the peddler’s horse to the peddler’s wagon, and drove it down to the road. He left it there for a week with a note on the seat.

After the week was up, when nobody had come to claim it, he sold the horse to a man from over by the river and put the money in a tin behind his counter, and wrote down what he had done in a small ledger with the date in case anyone ever asked. Nobody ever did. The carving knives in the black cloth case he kept. He kept them for the rest of his life, and his wife after he died told one of her granddaughters that he used to take them out and look at them on the anniversary of the day the peddler had not come back.

He never used them. Not to cut so much as a piece of bread. That was the second one. You would think by then somebody might have said something.

And in a way they did. A woman whose husband disappears once is unlucky. A woman whose husband and then a near husband both disappear is a story. The story made its way through Crooked Creek and down to the road, and from there it traveled to Barberville and to a few other places.

And you would think it would have kept her from finding a third. It did not. The third was a man named Beecher Trowel, forty-six years old, a veteran of the war with a slight limp he had carried since a place in Virginia he did not like to name. He had a small claim of land about six miles east of Crooked Creek and a habit of going long stretches without seeing another living person.

He came into Puit’s store in the spring of 1883 for flour and a new whetstone. He saw Sephrona Crayle at the counter paying for two pounds of sugar. By harvest of that same year, they were married. Beecher Trowel was, by all accounts, a man who had stopped being afraid of much.

The war had taken whatever it could take out of him already, as one of his old company mates said years later. Whatever was left was the part that did not scare easy. He moved into the cabin behind the laurel. He kept his own claim six miles east and rode out to it most days to work it.

He came back every evening for about ten months. On the 23rd of June 1884, he did not come back. The mare came back instead. She came down the path at full canter just before dark, lathered, with one rein dragging on the ground.

She stopped at the porch, and Sephrona Crayle, who had been out in the yard, caught her by the broken rein and walked her into the small barn and put her up. Then she came back down to the road and told Vance, who told Puit, who told Forester, who got the men together one more time. They searched the trail to Beecher Trowel’s claim. They searched the claim itself.

They searched the woods between. They found Beecher’s hat about a mile from his cabin, hanging on the broken end of a low branch, as if a hand had reached up and set it there. They found nothing else. The dogs this time would not go anywhere at all.

It was the same two hounds that had refused to track the first time, plus one more brought over from Barberville by a man who had heard the stories and wanted to prove the dogs in those hills were soft. His dog, a thick-chested redbone he was very proud of, walked twenty steps past the broken branch where Beecher’s hat had been, then sat down in the leaves and would not move for him no matter what he did. He sold that dog within the month. He said the dog had lost its nerve.

The men who had been there told a different story. They said the dog had simply made up its mind the way an old soul will, and had decided not to take another step in that direction for the rest of its life. By then, Sephrona Crayle was thirty-six years old. She had been widowed three times.

The story had grown. People in Barberville, people in the next county over, people two counties over, knew about the widow at Crooked Creek. The thing they did not know, the thing nobody knew, was why men kept agreeing to walk up that path through the laurel. But they did.

The fourth one was the one that pulled the eye of the law down on the whole business. His name was Case Whitfield, twenty-nine years old, an iron worker from over near Pineville, the kind of man who could shoe a horse in the morning, repair a kettle by noon, and frame a smokehouse before dark. He had broad shoulders and red hair, and a laugh you could hear at the other end of a barn dance. He came to Crooked Creek in the late summer of 1886, looking for work, having heard there was a woman up the way who needed her barn re-roofed and who paid in honey and in coin.

Sephrona did need her barn re-roofed. Case Whitfield re-roofed it in nine days. On the tenth day, he stayed for supper. On the twelfth day, he moved his small bundle of belongings out of the room he had been renting from Puit’s wife and into the cabin behind the laurel.

They were married in the first week of September. The circuit preacher who married them was not the one who had been there for the first three. The first one had died of pneumonia the previous winter. The new one was younger and did not know the stories yet.

When he asked Sephrona about previous marriages, she simply said, “Three. ” She said three, and she did not say any more. Case Whitfield disappeared on the night of October the 17th, 1886. He had been up at the cabin for about six weeks.

This time there was a witness. His name was Reuben Colsworth, a farmer who lived on the far side of the creek and who had been out that evening looking for a heifer that had gone through a broken fence. He was working his way along the back of Sephrona Crayle’s property by the light of a half moon when he heard voices, a man’s and a woman’s. He did not catch the words.

He said later that he did not try to catch them because he knew whose property he was on and he knew enough not to listen too closely to private conversations in the dark. He kept walking. He found the heifer about ten minutes later in a stand of pawpaws and was leading her home when behind him he heard a sound. He described it later in three different ways at three different tellings.

A man making things up settles on one version and stays there. The first time he told it, he said it was a sound like a man calling out, but cut short. The second time he said it was a sound like cold water going down a drain very fast. The third time, the time he told it on his deathbed in the spring of 1904, he said it was a sound like the inside of his own head when as a boy he had once been struck across the ear by his father and lay in the grass for almost a minute with one side of the world gone perfectly silent.

He never went back to look. He took the heifer home. He went to bed. In the morning, when he heard that Case Whitfield had not come down for breakfast and that Sephrona Crayle was once again standing on a porch saying she did not know where her husband had gone, Reuben Colsworth said nothing about what he had heard.

He said nothing for years. He was a careful man, and he had a family, and the country around Crooked Creek was a country in which a careful man with a family did not say things he could not unsay. Case Whitfield was the one that brought the law in. His brother, a man named Linton Whitfield, came up from Pineville two weeks after the disappearance and made a serious noise.

He wanted his brother found. He wanted somebody held to account. He went to Barberville, and he went to Frankfort, and briefly he went all the way up to Louisville to see if anyone there would listen. Most people did not, but one man did.

That man was Mercer Tindale, the assistant county clerk over in Barberville. He stopped first at Puit’s, and over a tin cup of coffee he asked the questions a careful clerk asks. How long had she lived there? What had her father been like?

What was the layout of the property? Who had been at each of the weddings? Who had searched the woods and where? What did the dogs do?

When Puit got to that part, he stopped, and looked into his coffee for a long moment, and told him. Mercer Tindale wrote it down. He did not look surprised. He had, by his own admission later, expected something like that.

Mercer Tindale was not a religious man, but he had grown up in a household where his grandmother was, and his grandmother had taught him a few things she said were not to be repeated outside the family. One of them was that dogs see what people pretend not to see. He walked up to the cabin behind the laurel. Sephrona Crayle was on the porch when he arrived, shelling beans into a tin pan.

She looked up at him as he came around the last bend of the path and she did not stop shelling. She said, “You must be the man from Barberville. ”

He said, “Ma’am, I am. ”

She said, “You can come up.

”

He came up. She offered him a seat on the porch. He took it. She offered him coffee.

He declined. She offered him a piece of bread with honey. He took it because his grandmother had also taught him that you do not refuse honey when it is offered to you in a house you do not understand. The honey was good.

He ate it slowly. He watched her hands while he ate. Her hands were long, the fingers a little reddened from the work of the season, with no rings on them. She had taken to wearing no rings, she told him a few minutes later when he asked.

She said she had buried the rings of the first three. He asked her if he could see the spot. She said yes. It was at the back of the property near the laurel, in a patch of ground where she said her father had once tried to grow rhubarb.

There were three small flat stones laid into the dirt in a rough triangle with no names on them, just the stones, no different from the stones you might use to mark the edge of a flower bed. She said, “The first one is Mossbridge. The middle one is Pelum. The third one is Trowel.

”

He asked her why she had buried them in a triangle. She said, “That was the shape that came to me. ”

He asked her where Case Whitfield’s ring was. She said, “I haven’t put it down yet.

” She said it the way another woman might have said, “I haven’t put away the summer dishes yet. ” It was the smallest thing, a note in her voice, a turn at the corner of a word. He wrote it down in his book. Then he asked her if he could walk the rest of the property.

She said yes, and added that the dogs in town would not go past the back pasture, and she supposed he had heard about that. He said he had. She said, “You can go past it if you like. I won’t stop you.

”

He went past it. The back pasture sloped down toward the creek, and at the bottom of the slope the creek made its second bend. The bend was sharp, almost a hook. The water where it turned was a strange black-green color, and the channel was deeper there than anywhere else along the creek’s run.

Mercer Tindale stood at the edge of that water for almost an hour. He did not see anything in it. That was important later. The water was simply dark and slow and cold, and a pair of red-winged blackbirds went over his head while he stood there.

He took out his book and wrote down the date, the time, the temperature so far as he could guess it, the color of the water, and the sound of a cow up the slope that was making a noise that was not quite a low and not quite a moan. He wrote, “The dogs are right. ” Then he closed the book and walked back up the slope. She was still on the porch, still shelling beans.

He said, “Ma’am, I’d like to come back tomorrow. ”

She said, “Suit yourself. I’ll have bread. ”

He did not sleep well that night.

He slept at Puit’s on a cot in the back room with the small revolver on the chair beside him, and he kept the lantern on low until almost dawn. He thought about the triangle of stones in her garden. He thought about her saying, “That was the shape that came to me. ” He thought about a line in his grandmother’s old book of household things, about how some women in the hills had what she called a long quiet about them, and how those women, when they were left alone too long, sometimes began to listen to things that were better not listened to.

His grandmother had said one other thing. She had said, “If you ever meet such a woman, do not eat her honey. ” Mercer Tindale lay on the cot and remembered the taste of the honey on the bread that afternoon, and how he had eaten it slowly, and how it had been the best thing he had put in his mouth since his wife had passed two summers before. He went back up to the cabin the next morning, earlier than the day before, with the sun just over the ridge and frost still on the grass.

He went up not by the front path but by a deer trail he had found the afternoon before that ran along the edge of the property parallel to the laurel and came out near the back of the cabin, behind the small barn where Sephrona kept the mare and the few chickens she had. He did this not because he meant to be sneaking, but because, as he wrote later in his book, he wanted to see the back of the house before he saw the front of it. He stood at the edge of the laurel for a while. The chimney smoked.

The wash hung on the line. The mare moved in the small paddock. Nothing was out of place. He almost turned and went back around to the front.

And then he saw her. She came out of the back door of the cabin carrying a basin. She walked down the slope, past the small barn, past the pawpaws, and down toward the creek, all the way down to the bend. He followed, keeping to the laurel, then to a stand of hemlocks, then to a long shoulder of rock that ran above the bend.

From the rock he could see down into the water. She stood at the edge of the deep part, set the basin down beside her, knelt at the edge of the water, and put her hands into it up to the wrists. She did not move for a long time. Mercer Tindale watched her from the rock.

He said later, on three different occasions, that what he saw next was the thing he wished he had not seen. He said the water around her hands changed. Not the color of it. The behavior of it.

The water at the bend, which had been moving slowly the way creek water moves in late autumn, began to move in toward her wrists. Not over her wrists. In toward them, as if the creek had a small mouth at her wrists and was drinking. He said she stayed like that for almost ten minutes.

He counted on his watch. Then she took her hands out of the water, picked up the basin, dipped it once into the creek, and stood up, the basin full. She walked back up the slope with it, past the pawpaws, past the small barn, and in through the back door of the cabin. The door closed.

Mercer Tindale did not move from the rock for a long time. Then he sat down, took out his book, and did not write in it. He just held it on his knee and watched the water at the bend, which after she was gone moved the way creek water moves in late autumn. Slowly.

Honestly. After a while, he went down to the bend himself, because he was a clerk, and because the clerk in him needed to put his own hand into the water at that bend just to confirm that the water was water, that the cold was cold, that the bottom was a bottom and not something else. He put his hand in up to the wrist. The water was cold.

The bottom was stone. Nothing in the water moved toward him. Nothing in the water moved at all. He took his hand out.

There was a fine dust on the skin of his wrist that had not been there before, the color of pine ash. It rubbed off easily on the leg of his trousers, and he could not have said, if asked, where it had come from. He walked back up to the cabin. She was on the porch again, with a small pile of something in her lap that he could not identify from the path.

When he got closer, he saw that it was a pile of small bones. For a long, terrible moment he thought they were the bones of a hand. They were not. They were the bones of a chicken.

She was cleaning chicken bones for a soup. She looked up at him as he came up onto the porch and said, “You came around the back this morning? ” He did not answer right away. She said, “That’s all right.

I’d have come around the back, too. ”

He sat down across from her. He set his leather book on his knee. He said, “Ma’am, did you do something to those four men?

”

She looked at him. She put one of the small bones down on the porch board beside her. She said, “Mr. Tindale, I have to be careful how I answer that.

”

He said, “Why is that? ”

She said, “Because I’m not entirely sure I know. ”

He said, “What do you mean? ”

She said, “There is a thing I do at the creek.

I have done it since I was a girl. My father taught it to me before he taught me anything else. And his mother taught it to him before he could read. It is not a thing I asked to learn.

It is not a thing I would teach to anyone. But it is a thing that is in me. And once a thing like that is in you, Mr. Tindale, you don’t get to leave it alone.

It would be a kindness sometimes if a person could leave a thing like that alone. But you can’t. You take it down to the water. You let it have what it wants.

And then you come back up and you eat your supper and you shell your beans and you keep on living because the alternative is to walk into the water yourself. And there are people in this town who I owe a basket of honey to. And a person can’t be giving in to every dark thing, every dark afternoon. ”

She said all of that without raising her voice.

She said it the way another woman would have said, “I scorched the bread this morning. ” Mercer Tindale wrote nothing down. He sat across from her and he listened, and when she stopped, he asked one more question. He asked her if the men had known.

She thought about that for a long time. Then she said, “Mr. Tindale, every one of those four men knew. In the way men know when they are not really being looked at by the woman they think they are marrying.

They knew and they came anyway because they were lonesome and because the cabin was warm and because the honey was good. I do not say that to be cruel. I say it because you came up here to find out and now you have found out and I want you to write down what is true and not what is easy. ”

He left her on the porch.

He walked back down the path, and he walked the four miles back to where his cart was, and he drove the cart back to Barberville. That night, in the small room he kept above the clerk’s office, he wrote in his leather book until past midnight. He wrote down everything she had said. He wrote down the dust on his wrist.

He wrote down the bend in the creek. He wrote down what Reuben Colsworth had heard, though it would be years before Colsworth said any of it out loud. He did not file the report. He kept the book in a small drawer under his cot.

He went back to work the next morning. When Linton Whitfield asked him what he had found, Mercer Tindale said, “I am sorry. I did not find what you were hoping I would find. I could not place your brother’s body anywhere I would be able to swear to.

” Linton Whitfield went home. He died of a fever the following spring. The case of Case Whitfield was never solved. The case of Beecher Trowel was never solved.

The case of Eustace Pelum was never solved. The case of Obadiah Mossbridge was never solved. Sephrona Crayle did not marry again. She lived in the cabin behind the laurel for another twenty-three years.

She kept her bees. She traded her honey. She walked to the creek on certain afternoons with a basin and walked back up. She was, by all accounts, polite to everyone she met, and she was helpful in her quiet way to two of the women in Crooked Creek when their husbands fell sick during the bad winter of 1898, and she sat with one of them all night when the man passed, and would not take any payment for it.

People in Crooked Creek did not love her. They did not run from her either. They walked around her, the way you walk around a deep hole that you have known about your entire life and that has not killed you yet and that you have learned to live with because you have to live somewhere. She passed away in the autumn of 1909.

She was sixty-one years old. She was found in her bed by Puit’s widow, who had taken to checking on her every Tuesday morning since the previous summer. She was buried in the small plot behind the cabin near the triangle of three stones, by a man Puit’s widow paid to dig the hole. A fourth flat stone was set into the dirt.

No name on it. Just the stone. After Sephrona Crayle was buried, the cabin behind the laurel sat empty for two years. Then in 1911, a man came through Crooked Creek looking for cheap property, and Puit’s widow, who had been left as the executrix of Sephrona’s small estate, sold him the cabin and the land for almost nothing.

The man’s name does not matter. He stayed in the cabin for three months. At the end of three months, he came down off the slope one morning, walked into the store, set the deed on the counter, and said, “Mistress, I am giving it back to you. ” He did not say why.

He did not stay another night. He walked out of Crooked Creek that same afternoon with one bag on his shoulder, and he never came back. The cabin sat empty until it fell down, slowly, the way cabins do in those hills, the roof going first, then the loft, then the front wall, and finally the chimney, which stayed standing the longest because Isben Crayle had built it. By the time of the first war in Europe there was nothing left but the chimney and a square of foundation stones.

By the time of the second war, the chimney was down too, and there was only the foundation and the laurel, which had grown over almost all of it. The creek still bends. The water at the bend is still deeper than it has any right to be. And on certain afternoons in late October, when the air is cold and the maples have given up most of their color, people in Crooked Creek say the water at that bend does not move the way water should move.

Nobody goes down to look closely. Whatever Mercer Tindale saw from the shoulder of rock above the bend, he kept to himself for the rest of his life. He died in 1926, an old man in a small room above the clerk’s office in Barberville. He had no children.

He had no living wife. He had the leather book. The book passed to a nephew, who passed it to a daughter, who passed it to a granddaughter, who eventually gave it to a small county museum in the early 1960s, where it sat in a glass case for some years without anyone reading it. A woman who read it finally in the late 1960s said she could not finish it.

She said the writing was perfectly clear. It was not the writing. It was the feeling of holding the book that she could not bear. It was the feeling that the book was a little warmer than it had any right to be.

It was the feeling that on certain pages the ink seemed to be a little wet even though the pages were over eighty years old. She put it back into the case. The museum closed in 1974. Where the book is now, nobody knows.

The thing about the lady of Crooked Creek is not what she did or did not do to those four men. It is the part where she sat on the porch and told the truth to Mercer Tindale, and Mercer Tindale wrote it down, and Mercer Tindale went home, and Mercer Tindale put the book in a drawer, and let her keep her bees. The men who walked up that path through the laurel were lonesome, and the cabin was warm, and the honey was good. That on most evenings in this country is enough.

And out there, in a fold of the Cumberland hills that has no road into it anymore, there is a bend in a creek where the water is darker than it should be, and a square of foundation stones, and a patch of ground where rhubarb once grew, and four small flat stones set into the dirt in a rough triangle, plus a fourth at one corner, with no names on any of them.