Chapter 33: The Old Mill

We went to the mill at first light with the snow still coming down, and we went in through the trees from the north so that nobody on the mill road would see us.

Elias had the lantern and the hatchet. I had Owen's knife, which June had stolen back out of Dale's coat pocket while Dale was talking to Maeve on the porch and which she had pressed into my hand without a word. It sat in my jacket against my ribs and it was cold.

The mill was the same as it had been. The door hung open and the floor was swept by the wind and the grain chute ran up the wall like a scar.

"The false wall," I said. "You said there was a false wall behind the grain chute."

"There is." Elias went to the chute and put his hand on the boards at the bottom of it. "I found it in June. I was sleeping in the loft and I heard a noise in the night and I came down and there was a draft coming through the boards. I pulled at them and they came away and there was a space behind them." He looked back at me. "I did not go in. I was not in my right mind in June and I did not want to find out what was behind a false wall in a mill where a woman was held prisoner in 1891."

I came and stood beside him. The boards were old and gray and the nails in them were square and hand cut, and when I put my fingers in the gap at the side and pulled, the whole panel came away with a sound like a cough.

Behind it there was a space. It was not a room. It was a gap between the inner wall and the outer wall, maybe three feet wide, and it ran down to the floor and up to the roof, and there was a ladder in it. A wooden ladder, old and dry, going up into the dark.

"Give me the lantern," I said.

Elias gave me the lantern and I went first. The ladder held. I went up through the gap between the walls with the lantern hooked on my arm and the cold coming down on me from above, and at the top there was a hatch and the hatch was not fastened and it came open when I pushed it.

I came up into a room under the roof.

It was small. It had a floor of rough boards and a window that had been boarded over and a chimney that went up through the middle of it. There was a chair and a table and a bed with a straw tick on it, and there was a shelf along the wall with a candle stub and a tin cup and a book with no cover.

There were also walls. The walls had been papered once and the paper was brown and peeling, and on the paper somebody had drawn with a pencil. Trees and a stone and a circle, and three small figures standing in the circle with their hands joined.

"Wren," Elias said from the hatch. "What is up there?"

"A room," I said. "Somebody has been living in it."

I put the lantern on the table and went around the room slow. The bed was made. The straw tick was covered with a blanket that had been folded at the foot. The candle in the holder had been burned down to the wick and then replaced with another one that had not been lit. The book had no cover but the spine said it was a Bible and the pages were soft with use.

And on the wall by the bed there was a row of marks cut into the wood. Tallies. I counted them the way I count things. There were ninety-four of them.

"NINETY-FOUR," I said.

"What?"

"Somebody has been counting something up here." I looked at the room again. "It is not a hiding place. It is a prison."

Elias came up through the hatch and stood in the middle of the room and turned around slow.

"The window is boarded from the inside," he said. "Look at the nails. They are driven in from this side. Whoever was in here boarded up the window themselves."

"Or whoever put them here did."

"No." He pointed. "The heads of the nails are on this side. If a man nails a board over a window to keep somebody in, the heads are on the outside. If a man boards up a window from the inside, it is because he is trying to keep something out."

I stood in the middle of the room with the lantern in my hand and looked at the drawings on the wall and the tally marks and the boarded window and I did not know what to make of any of it.

Then I saw the box under the bed.

It was small and flat and made of tin and it had a latch, and I pulled it out and put it on the table and opened it. Inside there were three things. A photograph of a woman with dark hair and a long coat. A piece of paper folded small. And a ring.

The ring was silver and it had a stone in it that was not a stone. It was a piece of the boundary stone, cut small and set into a silver band, and the stone in it was warm when I touched it.

"That is the Luna's ring," I said. "That has to be the Luna's ring."

Elias picked up the piece of paper and unfolded it. He read it and his face did not change and then he handed it to me.

It was a list. Names and dates, written in a small neat hand.

The woman in the cellar. Mary brought her water. Margaret brought her bread. The wagon came on the third night.

The child was born in Walla Walla. A girl. The woman called her Ruth.

Ruth came home. She brought the stones. She put them back in the wall.

The boy died on the Walla Walla road. The curse went to the next one.

Ruth gave the box to her daughter. Her daughter gave it to me.

Owen. The curse went to Owen.

And under that, in a hand that was not the same, in pencil and pressed hard into the paper:

It went to me.

I looked at Elias.

"It is Clara Renn's hand," he said. "The list. It is hers. She has been keeping it since her mother died."

"Then the room is hers," I said. "The room is hers and she has been coming up here for years and she has been sitting in this chair and looking at these drawings and counting the tally marks."

"The tally marks are the years," Elias said. "Ninety-four years since 1891. She has been counting the years since the founders took the Luna."

I put the list down on the table.

"I do not understand," I said. "Why would Clara Renn keep a room in a mill like this? Why would she sit up here and count the years? She has a house at the end of the road and a stove and a chair and a garden, and she comes up here to a cold room with a boarded window and a straw tick and a box of her mother's papers."

Elias picked up the photograph of the woman in the long coat. He looked at it for a long time.

"Because this is where it happened," he said. "This room. This is where they kept her. The Luna was not in the cellar. She was up here. The founders held her in this room under the roof and Mary brought her water and Margaret brought her bread and on the third night a man came with a wagon and took her away." He put the photograph down. "Clara Renn has been coming up here for sixty years because this is the only place in this territory where her mother's story is real."

I sat down in the chair. It creaked under me and the cold from the window came through my jacket.

"There is something else," I said.

"What?"

"The tally marks. There are ninety-four of them and the last one is fresh. It was cut this year." I looked at him. "Somebody has been up here this year. Somebody has been in this room since 1891 and since Clara Renn's mother and since Clara Renn herself, and they have been adding to the count."

Elias looked at the marks.

"Who?"

"I do not know. But the room has been used and the box has been used and the ladder in the wall has been used, and a thing that is used has an owner." I stood up and put the box back under the bed and looked around the room one last time. "We need to talk to Clara Renn. We need to talk to her tonight and we need to ask her who else knows about this room."

We went down the ladder and through the gap and out through the mill, and the snow had stopped and the sky had gone flat and white and the light was the kind of light that comes off snow and makes the whole world look like a photograph.

There was a truck on the mill road.

It was parked at the end of the road with its nose toward the mill and it was not Dale's truck and it was not the pack truck and it was not Harold's.

There was a mark on the door.

A circle with a line through it.