r. Jennings’s office was a tall but narrow three-storyD building downtown, a contradictory combination of old and new. The examination room was painted in a pale shade of green. It matched a row of 1970s cabinets that hung above a small porcelain sink lined with glass jars of cotton balls and gauze bandages, and though the door was still fit with what looked to be its original glass knob, a brand-new ultrasound machine sat in the corner, its screen aglow.
A tray that held three vials of my blood sat beside me on the paper-covered table, my name scrawled across the stickers in blue ink. I stared at them, listening to the scratch of Dr.
Jennings’s pen on paper as he flipped through my notebook.
He was the only one who’d ever looked inside.
Gran had never been one for doctors, but Dr. Jennings had made his calls anyway, insisting that what was happening to her followed no textbooks or standards of practice that he’d ever seen. She thought that he looked at her as some kind of science experiment, but I found the doctor to be more like a man with a chessboard than anything else. He wanted to be the first to solve the riddle of the Farrow women.
He’d failed with Gran. I was his second chance.
“They’re definitely increasing in frequency. You’re right about that. How many episodes would you say this week?” He looked up, meeting my eyes expectantly.
His once-dark hair was nearly all white, his smooth black skin dotted with tiny moles across his cheekbones. His face had significantly aged in the years since I was a child, but he still had that gentle way about him, as if he feared one wrong word would send me running straight out of the room.
“June?”
“Six, I think.” I cleared my throat when the words came out sounding cracked.
“Okay.” He scribbled away, the pen looping across the page.
I could see the word hallucination.
That label had never felt right. The things I saw were different. It was a hollowed-out, floating feeling, like the meandering path a single dandelion seed takes through the air before it eventually lands. A real thing just barely out of reach.
“Have you noticed if any of these episodes have been accompanied by any…physical symptoms? Fainting? Vision changes?”
“No.”
My eyes focused on the chart that hung on the wall behind him. It was a diagram of the human heart, with detailed renderings of the muscle and tissue, and I immediately thought how fortunate I would be to have something as simple as a heart problem. There were surgeries for that. Clinically proven medications to prescribe. Transplants, even. Labels identified the organ’s components in words like chamber, ventricle, atrium, valve. It all looked so simple. Like the parts of a machine. But the human brain was like the uncharted depths of the oceans. Science was still wading around in the shallows.
“I think we should take into consideration that you’ve been under some significant stress. I know that Margaret’s death wasn’t exactly sudden, but you’re grieving, and that takes a toll on both the body and the mind. It’s possible that these episodes have been exacerbated by that stress.” He looked up from the notebook, setting it into his lap.
I wasn’t going to tell him that my stress had multiplied even more in the last twenty-four hours, when I received a letter from my dead grandmother that had a picture from 1911 of a woman who looked exactly like my missing mother. I wasn’t going to tell him about the news articles or the call to the courthouse, either. Just thinking of it made me feel off- balance.
“Have you talked to Birdie about any of this yet? Mason?”
“No,” I answered.
“Okay, well, we’ve known for years that if the time came, you’d have a strong, stable support system in place. That’s still true. And you’ll need to tell them. Soon.”
I’d spent the majority of the last twelve years as varying degrees of Gran’s caretaker while Birdie took over things at the shop and Mason took over the farm. The thing was, I was happy to do it because I loved her. She’d taken me in and been everything to me. The center of my very small world in Jasper had always been my grandmother. Now someone would have to become my caretaker. It wasn’t a job that Birdie could do for very long. That left only Mason.
The thought made me feel weak. Fragile. Those two words had never been familiar to me before, but now they felt intimate. So close that there wasn’t air to breathe around them.
“It’s important that you continue to document things as accurately as possible so that we can keep looking for patterns and triggers,” Dr. Jennings continued.
“Gran never had patterns and triggers,” I reminded him.
That had been the most frustrating part.
He frowned, flipping through the pages of the notebook again. “That’s not true. Some of these hallucinations are repetitive. The horse, the door, the voice.”
The tingle of that touch reignited on my skin where I’d felt it when I woke that morning. He was right. There were patterns. I’d seen the chestnut horse four times now. A red door twice. The man’s voice I’d heard countless times.
“The main thing to look out for is any sign of paranoia or delusions,” he continued. “You see any sign of that, you call me right away, no matter the time.”
“I will.” I slid off the table, taking my bag from the chair. I wanted this conversation to be over.
“And you’ll need to start thinking about power of attorney.”
“What?” The word came out panicked.
Dr. Jennings’s hand splayed in the air between us in a gesture that was meant to calm me. “No rush. Just something to consider. Have you thought about who you’ll appoint?”
I couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t. “Mason.” I shrugged. “He’s already the sole beneficiary of everything, anyway.”
“Well, I’d like for you to prioritize rest over the next week.
Limit stimulation, maybe take some time off from the farm.”
“I can’t just stop living my life. Not when there might not be much of it left.”
He gave me a sympathetic look, setting a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll get these blood tests done and compare them to the baseline. You know the drill. Regular checkups mean regular data. Might give us some insight.”
“I don’t want anyone to know,” I reminded him.
“Of course. Not until you’re ready.” He nodded.
“Completely confidential.”
“From everyone?” I lifted my eyebrows, glancing at the door. Dr. Jennings’s nurse Camille was Rhett Miller’s wife. He was the owner of Edison’s Cafe, and that was the worst possible place this information could exist.
“Everyone. No one knows what we talk about between these walls unless you tell them, June. We can even switch to house calls, like we did with your grandmother, if you like.”
“Thanks.”
His hand dropped from my shoulder, and I took a step toward the door, pausing just long enough for him to give me a concerned look.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Did you ever see my mother? When she was pregnant with me, I mean?”
His head tilted a little, as if the question perplexed him.
“Well, yes. Margaret brought Susanna in a few times, and I did her prenatal care until…” The words sputtered out. “Until she was gone.”
“Do you remember anything unusual about it? Anything that you thought could have been connected to her disappearance?”
“Nothing in particular. Mentally, she was struggling, of course. But overall she was healthy. She seemed to be taking care of herself.”
“Were you surprised when she disappeared?”
“Yes and no. Her decline was unpredictable, and mental illness isn’t exactly uncommon when it comes to missing
persons. But if you’re asking whether I thought she might hurt herself or run off, the answer is no.”
“She never told you anything about who…” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.
“No. She never shared anything about who your biological father might be. To my knowledge, she didn’t share that with anyone.”
I exhaled, disappointment settling inside of me.
“Why do you ask?”
I shook my head. “No reason. I’ve just been thinking about her.”
I could see that he was drawing a straight line in his mind from what was happening to me and what happened to my mother. Maybe I was worried about the same thing.
His tone softened. “Well, it’s quite a tangled knot. But I want you to take what I said seriously, June. Get some rest.”
“I will.”
I opened the door and followed the narrow steps down to the first floor where the receptionist was bent low over the open drawer of a filing cabinet. She didn’t look up as I passed, but I could feel myself holding my breath, waiting for the moment her eyes would lift and find me. By the time I made it out onto the sidewalk, the gravity had begun to hit me.
Episodes. Data. Blood tests. Patterns. Triggers. They were words I’d used many times when talking about Gran. Now, this was my life.
I stepped into the crooked alley between Dr. Jennings’s office and the grocery, finding a place to stand beneath an old fire escape that hid me from the street. My hand shook as I pulled my phone from my bag, and as soon as I found Birdie’s name in the contact list, my throat began to close up. I dialed
the number, pressing the phone to my ear and wiping a silent tear from my cheek as it rang.
“Hello?”
“Hey!” I said, too brightly.
“June?”
I almost laughed. My name was plastered across the screen of her cellphone, but she still somehow acted surprised when it was me. “Yeah, it’s me, Birdie. Just making sure you made it.”
“Oh, I made it. Headin’ over to the warehouse now.
Anything I should add to the order?” I wiped another tear, already feeling better now that I could hear her voice.
“Not that I can think of.”
“All right. You need anything? I was thinking, if this doesn’t take too long, I could come back tonight.”
“No, I don’t want you driving the mountain roads in the dark.”
“You know I’ve been driving for longer than you’ve been alive?” I could hear the humor in her voice now and the sound made the knot in my chest loosen just a little. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll make chicken and dumplings. How’s that?”
“Sounds good.” I pulled the keys from my bag and started toward the street.
“Love you, honey.”
The tip of my finger found the sharp edge of the key, the lump coming up in my throat again. “Love you.”
I climbed inside and turned the ignition. The smell of the engine and the hot leather conjured countless memories of summer. Countless memories with Mason. Driving in our wet bathing suits as the sun went down after an afternoon of swimming at the river. Picking him up for his shifts at the farm
when Gran finally hired him. Parking under the big oak tree at Longview Falls with an open pizza box between us and our bare feet propped up on the dash.
As soon as I was through the intersection, I picked up the phone again, finding his number. I did that sometimes, impulsively calling him and then having to think of a reason. It was more for comfort than anything, a way to stave off that lonely feeling that had been with me so long. My world was a very small one, made up of only a few people and places, and it felt like it was shrinking by the second.
My thumb hovered over his name a second too long, and I dropped the phone onto the seat, my gaze going to my bag. I reached into the side pocket, hand searching until it found the photograph. I set it onto the dash in front of me, eyeing its reflection on the windshield.
What Ida said was possible. Our family had never been a large one. Each Farrow had but one daughter, and they’d all kept their maternal surname because most of the men who fathered them died young or faded from the picture.
Somewhere along the line, one of the Farrow women could have had more than one child, and the Susanna Farrow in the photograph could have been simply lost to history. It didn’t seem that unlikely, especially in a small farming town like Jasper.
My fingers tapped the steering wheel as the road grew narrower, my mind sifting through each thought. I knew what I was doing, throwing myself down one rabbit hole to keep from falling down the other. I was distracting myself from what was happening. And deep down, I knew that it didn’t matter how deep the hole went. Eventually, I was going to hit the bottom.
I bit the inside of my lip and pulled onto the shoulder of the road, cranking the wheel hand over hand until I was turning around, headed in the opposite direction of home. Downtown
passed in a blur as I drove back down the river road, turning at the light to cross the bridge. Seconds later, the steeple of the little white church appeared through the trees.
I followed the sloped, rocky drive along the waterfront, passing the cemetery. Gran’s grave in the distance was still darkened with freshly turned earth, the headstone so white that it almost glowed against the green backdrop of the woods. The flowers left there were beginning to wilt, their bright colors fading.
The brakes squealed as I came to a stop, and I pulled the keys from the ignition, setting them onto the dash. The doors to the church were propped open, like they always were during the day. Even from across the river, you could see the light spilling from the entrance and down the steps after the sun went down.
I waited a few seconds before I got out of the truck, giving myself a chance to think better of it. But there was something relentless about my need to know about the woman in the photo. It was a sinking stone inside of me, like something truly terrible was about to happen and the only way to stop it was to know who she was.
The truck door popped as I opened it, and I hooked one hand into the strap of my bag, taking the locket in the other, as if it were an anchor that would calm that stomach-turning feeling. The cicadas were buzzing in the trees, the river rushing at my back as I climbed the steps.
I froze when I felt it. A slow tingle of gooseflesh started on the back of my hand, moving up my arm to my shoulder. The moment it touched my collarbone I forced myself to turn and look at the thing taking shape at the corner of my vision. “It’s not real, June.” The words were a reflex.
There, in the middle of the cemetery, a single red door stood among the tilted headstones. It was set into a frame, like it had
been pried loose from a wall, and yet, it didn’t look at all out of place. Like one brushstroke in a painting. The old-style paneling, chipped paint, and brass knob were the same as you’d find in a dozen other places in town.
The minute my heartbeat kicked up, I forced myself to breathe.
“It’s not real.” My lips moved around the words again, but I couldn’t hear them. That was three times I’d seen it now. Once at the farm, once downtown, and now here, in the cemetery. I let myself wonder if Dr. Jennings’s theory was right. Maybe there was a pattern to unearth there.
I looked at it for another moment, waiting for it to vanish, but it didn’t. It just stood there, erected in the grass like it was waiting for me. I could still feel the weight of its presence as I turned my face back toward the church, my toes stopping at the threshold. My eyes ran over the sunlit sanctuary inside.
Oil-stained pews were set into even rows below six pendant lights suspended from the curved rafters. The fixtures were fit with faceted glass shades that made the light look speckled on the ceiling, the only thing in the room that could be considered elegant. It was just a simple country church, but one that had been painstakingly preserved, down to the single-paned lancet windows that lined the walls.
“Ms. Farrow?”
My eyes darted around the room until I spotted Thomas Falk, the minister. He stood in the doorway at the corner of the sanctuary, forehead scrunched like he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. His dark hair was freshly cut, and the pressed button- up shirt he wore didn’t have a single wrinkle.
“Hi,” I said, my voice tight.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Can’t pretend I’m not surprised to see you here.”
I looked down at my feet, acutely aware that I didn’t actually want to cross the threshold.
“Afraid you’ll burst into flames?”
My gaze flickered up, finding his expression changed. Now he looked amused.
I dragged the toe of my boot over the lip of the floor, taking me one step inside.
He walked toward me, hands tucked into his pockets. “What can I do for you?”
I had the sudden urge to look over my shoulder to be sure that no one was listening. “Actually, I was told that the church keeps records—marriages and births, things like that.”
“That’s right.”
“I was hoping you could look something up for me.”
“And what is that?”
“I’m trying to track down a birth record for someone. She would have been born sometime before 1900.”
“I see.” He lifted an eyebrow. “We do have records from that time. Why don’t you come back and we’ll see what we can find?”
I hesitated before finding my way up the center aisle, past the pews to the doorway that led to what looked like an office.
Thomas disappeared inside, his shadow flitting over the wooden floorboards.
The room was small but packed tight with a desk, a wall of built-in shelves that were filled with books, and a few chairs that looked as old as the pews out in the sanctuary. The only thing that didn’t belong was the sleek black computer on the desk.
Thomas sat down in the leather rolling chair, giving the mouse a shake. “You can have a seat, if you’d like.”
“Thanks.” I tried to sound more comfortable than I was, taking the chair against the window and pulling my bag into my lap. The view overlooked the widest part of the river, where a few boulders split the water into four sections that ran white over the rocks.
“Thankfully, most of the records have all been digitized now, which should make this pretty simple,” he said, eyeing me over the computer screen. “Who is it we’re looking for?”
My mother’s name felt like it was lodged in my throat.
There wasn’t anyone in Jasper who wouldn’t recognize it.
“It’s Susanna Farrow, actually.”
The shape of his mouth changed. He stared at me. “I thought you said it was for someone born before 1900.”
“A different Susanna Farrow. Someone further back in the family.”
“Oh.” He relaxed just enough for me to notice. “Same spelling?”
I nodded.
He typed, hitting the keys in a steady rhythm, but he frowned when his eyes ran over the screen. “I don’t see anything here. Do you know anything else about her? Parents’ names, maybe?”
“No, that’s what I was trying to find out. She was married to Nathaniel Rutherford.”
Thomas’s expression shifted, and he sat back in the chair, his elbows finding the armrests. “Really.”
I waited, unsure of what his reaction meant.
“If that’s what you’re after, you can just say it, Ms. Farrow.
You’re not the first person who’s come to this church trying to dig up information about that case.”
“I’m not trying to dig up anything,” I said, only seconds before realizing that wasn’t quite true. “A woman with the same name as my mother was married to Nathaniel, and I’m just trying to figure out who she was.”
He surveyed me, and I had the distinct feeling he was trying to decide if I was lying.
“Really. I don’t care anything about the minister.” That was the truth.
“Well, I imagine there’s not much documentation on her since she died so young.”
“What?” I sat up straighter in my chair.
“Oh, yes. Nathaniel is well known because of the murder, of course. But his story was quite tragic long before then.”
“What happened?”
“Well,” Thomas said on an exhale. “His father was the minister at this church for years, but he died of a heart attack just after Nathaniel married. Nathaniel was just a young man.”
His hand lifted, a finger pointing to the open door that led to the sanctuary. “He was preaching God’s word at that very pulpit when it happened.”
I couldn’t help but look. The simple white wooden podium stood up a few steps on a small stage that overlooked the pews.
“Nathaniel took over his father’s position. But not long after, he and his wife had a daughter and she died.”
“Daughter?” My voice bent the word.
Thomas’s bottom lip jutted out. “She was just a baby. His wife never recovered. They say she lost her mind.”
I cringed. If I’d had any doubt left that she really was a Farrow, that one detail extinguished it.
“She took her own life up at Longview Falls. Like I said— tragic.”
A deep, dull pain erupted behind my ribs.
“Nathaniel never remarried, dedicating his life to the congregation of this church. He’s buried out there. His wife and daughter, too.”
My eyes went out the window again, to the waterfront down the hill. Only a mile and a half downstream, the river dumped over Longview Falls. The idea of the woman in the photograph tumbling over its edge made my stomach drop.
I swallowed hard. “Try Rutherford,” I said.
“What?”
“See if there are any records for Susanna Rutherford. Maybe it’ll have a birth date somewhere?”
“That could work.” He turned back to the computer, typing.
The phone in my bag buzzed and I reached inside, pulling it out. A picture of Mason standing in front of the barn lit up the screen behind his name. I silenced the call and dropped the phone into the bag, rubbing at my temple in an attempt to soothe the ache growing there.
“Here we go,” Thomas murmured.
I stood, coming around the desk to see the screen over his shoulder. The website looked like some kind of database, the words Presbyterian Regional Assembly visible at the top of the page.
“There’s a baptism record linked to her married name.” He clicked on the file, and a black-and-white scan of an old log opened, filling the browser’s window. Row after row of names and dates were recorded in the same ornate handwriting.
Thomas leaned in closer, eyes roaming over the entries, but he looked to the door when the sound of footsteps echoed out in the sanctuary. He pushed away from the desk, getting to his feet. “Hello?”
“It’s me, Tom,” a woman’s voice called back.
“Excuse me.” He stepped around the desk, leaving me alone in the office, and I took his chair, eyes still glued to the screen.
The old style of calligraphy made the words almost impossible to read, and it was made more difficult by the glare coming through the window. I dragged a finger down the rows
slowly until I found it.
Susanna Rutherford.
It was listed under the field MOTHER. The record wasn’t for Susanna’s baptism. It was for her child’s.
The name stared back at me, but it didn’t look familiar anymore. There was something that felt twisted about it.
Distorted, almost.
I reached for the mouse and zoomed in on the page, reading the entire entry carefully. It was dated 1912.
Baptized by Nathaniel Rutherford on the 4th day of April, with her mother, Susanna Rutherford, as witness.
My eyes stopped on the name of the child, my throat closing
up. I read it again. And again.
June Rutherford.
June.
I pushed away from the desk, sending the chair rolling backward a few inches. As if that space between me and the computer would somehow change what was written there. But the more I stared at it, the blacker the ink appeared. It almost seemed to be moving on the screen. Rippling like water.
Voices echoed on the other side of the open office door, followed by more footsteps. I pulled the phone from my bag, taking a picture of the document before I closed out of the window Thomas had opened and I deleted Susanna’s name from the search field. My hands were trembling as my fingers left the mouse.
“Find anything?” Thomas came back through the door.
“Not really.” I smiled shakily. “But thanks anyway.” I stood, pulling the bag back over my shoulder before making my way past him.
“You know,” Thomas said, waiting for me to look at him.
“You’re always welcome here. If you ever need anything.
Even just to talk.”
I pressed my lips together, unable to muster any kind of answer. What would he think if I told him about the photograph and baptism record? What would he say if I divulged the creeping thought that was unspooling in my fractured mind?
His smile faded in the eerie silence that fell over the room.
I turned on my heel, following the aisle back to the open doors. My feet flew over the steps, and I didn’t draw in a full breath until I was outside with the sunlight touching my skin.
There was a tightening in my chest again. A pinch at its center that made the ache in my throat expand.
I’d been telling myself it was just a photograph. Just a name. But that wasn’t true, was it? Something bigger was happening here.
My head turned to the white picket fence that encircled the graveyard, my eyes searching the stones. The red door was gone, but on the hill beside the tree line, I spotted it: RUTHERFORD. The name was engraved on a red marble stone. I
took a step, and another, my open hand hitting the fence posts until the splintered wood was scraping my palms.
NATHANIEL RUTHERFORD
The closer I got, the clearer the name on the stone beside it became.
SUSANNA RUTHERFORD
But it was the smaller one beside them that I was looking for.
The grave was marked with a worn, wind-washed granite, and the writing was shallower, obscuring the inscription.
I sank down, jaw clenching when I came face-to-face with it, and my hand lifted, tracing the moss-covered letters with
the tip of my finger.
JUNE RUTHERFORD
BELOVED DAUGHTER MARCH 14TH, 1912—OCTOBER 2ND, 1912
October 2. All at once, the weight left my body. I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me anymore. June Rutherford died on October 2, the exact same day of the year that Clarence Taylor discovered me in that alley.
“Five, six, seven,” I counted.
There were seven months between the date of birth and date of death on the headstone. I was about seven months old when I was found.
Reluctantly, my gaze drifted to the date of birth on Susanna’s headstone. September 19. The same as my mother’s.
My thoughts began to poke at the edges of something I couldn’t quite bring into focus. I couldn’t explain this away even if I tried. What was it that Gran had told me? That she was in two places at once? That the Farrow women were
different. Her words swirled inside my head, making me feel like everything was upside down.
I’d chosen the wrong rabbit hole, I thought.
The roaring was so loud in my ears now that it was painful, a widening rift in my mind. Was it possible that my mother wasn’t missing? That maybe she’d only gone someplace else, a place no one could find her?
Slowly, I turned to where the door had stood in the middle of the cemetery, my eyes lifting from the grass as I strung the idea together. Where, exactly, did it lead? The fact that I was even considering it was only a confirmation that every thought, every inclination I had couldn’t be trusted. I couldn’t make this fit together. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
