The Previous Owner

The tag said $6.99 and GENUINE VINTAGE and, in pen, in someone's cramped handwriting, "do not sell."

Marguerite bought it anyway, because the Halloween party was in four hours and because the Goodwill on Delmar had nothing else in a women's twelve that wasn't a sexy Minion.

It was a scarecrow costume. Not a cute one. Burlap tunic, patches sewn on by hand with thread the color of old teeth, straw actually stitched into the cuffs so it poked out at the wrists like something trying to escape. The mask was the real find: burlap again, with button eyes and a mouth embroidered in a long, uneven grin that looked less sewn than healed over.

"That's from the Hollis estate," said the woman at the register, who had a name tag reading DEB and the affect of someone eleven minutes from her break. "Came in with about nine boxes."

"It's amazing."

"It's something," Deb agreed, and did not meet her eyes, which Marguerite would think about later, at length, in a parked car outside a town that did not appear on any map her phone would admit to.

She put it on at 7:40 in the bathroom of her apartment with a hard seltzer open on the sink.

The first memory arrived while she was adjusting the mask.

It was not a thought. It was not imagination. It was the specific, boring, undeniable texture of recollection, the kind where you don't remember remembering, you just know: the smell of a kitchen. Linoleum, scorched coffee, the particular dusty sweetness of a propane heater. A window over the sink looking out at a field of corn gone brown and whispering. A rooster-shaped clock with one eye painted crooked.

Marguerite said, out loud, "Huh."

Then she said, "Mom always hated that clock," and her entire body went cold, because Marguerite's mother was a dental hygienist in Chicago who had never in her life owned a rooster clock, or a propane heater, or a field.

She took the mask off. The kitchen stayed, hovering, filed. She could have drawn it. She knew which drawer the good scissors were in. Third one down, under the twine.

She put the mask back on.

At the party she was a tremendous hit. Everyone said the costume was so creepy, and she said thanks, it's vintage, and someone said where's it from? and Marguerite heard herself say:

"Pellham Hollow."

"Where's that?"

"Ohio," she said. "Little bit north of ..." and she stopped, because she had been about to say north of where the Ryerson boy drowned, which was a direction, apparently, in this place she had never been.

She drank four more seltzers. She did not take off the mask, because every time she did, the memories came back thinner, grayer, and she found she did not like that. It was like watching someone you love leave a room.

By midnight she knew her name was Hollis. No. Her name had been Dorene Hollis, and she had been fifty-one, and she had a bad left knee from a fall off a hay elevator in 1974, and a daughter named Pauline who called on Sundays and resented it, and a husband named Carl.

Carl.

The thing about Carl was that Marguerite could not picture his face. Every other detail in Pellham Hollow arrived in high resolution: the chipped green bathtub, the brand of cigarettes (Pall Mall, soft pack), the way the church bell was off-key on the third ring. But Carl was a blur with a shape. A tall absence in a doorway. The feeling of a hand on the back of the neck that could have been affection.

And underneath all of it, steady as a refrigerator hum, was one more piece of knowledge that was not a memory at all but a condition, the way you know you're thirsty:

He's still looking.

She did not take the costume off for six days.

This became a problem at work. Marguerite was a claims adjuster, and while her office had a relaxed culture, there is a ceiling on how relaxed a culture can be about a woman arriving in burlap on November 3.

"It's a bit," she told her manager, Trent, through the embroidered grin. "I'm doing a bit."

"The bit was Friday."

"The bit is ongoing."

Trent, who had a laminated card about workplace mental health in his desk and had never once found it, said, "Love the commitment," and sent an email to HR that he would later be very relieved was never read in court.

Marguerite remembered, that same afternoon, while denying a water damage claim, exactly where Dorene Hollis kept the key to the cellar (in the mouth of the ceramic frog, in the flowerbed, under the downspout) and that Dorene had not wanted anyone to find it.

She began making a list on a legal pad. Things I Know About Pellham Hollow, OH.

The list got to ninety-one items. Item 62 was the Dalton place burned 1988 insurance paid out too fast. Item 77 was Pauline's father is not Carl. Item 88 was the grain tower by the tracks is where he waits. Item 91 was in handwriting that was not Marguerite's, cramped and leaning, and it said:

do not sell

Marguerite looked at that for a long moment.

Then she called in sick and got in the car.

The drive took eleven hours and the last forty minutes did not exist on GPS.

Pellham Hollow announced itself with a sign reading POP. 1,104, which had been amended by hand to POP. 900-SOMETHING, which Marguerite found she admired as a civic philosophy.

She drove in at dusk with the mask on because she had tried taking it off at a Shell station outside Columbus and had immediately, violently, forgotten the name of the town she was driving to, and had sat in a parking space for twenty minutes crying in a burlap tunic while a man filled a twelve-gallon jerry can and declined to engage.

Pellham Hollow was exactly where she'd left it.

That was the only way to describe the feeling. Not recognition. Recognition implies surprise. This was the feeling of coming home after a long shift. The Marathon station with the dead middle pump. The Lutheran church with the off-key bell. The water tower someone had painted a smiley face on in 1996 and nobody had painted over because what was the point.

She drove past the Dalton lot, still empty.

She drove past the elementary school.

She drove, without deciding to, out County Road 9, and pulled into a gravel drive beside a mailbox that said HOLLIS in reflective stick-on letters, two of which had fallen off, so that it said H LL S, which Marguerite thought was about right.

The house was dark. The field behind it was brown and whispering.

In the flowerbed, under the downspout, there was a ceramic frog.

Here is the part Marguerite had not let herself think about on the drive, in the way you don't let yourself think about the dentist:

If she remembered being Dorene Hollis, then something had happened to Dorene Hollis. People do not shed their entire lives into a burlap sack and donate it to a Goodwill in St. Louis as a going concern. Memories do not evacuate a living skull.

And if Dorene had sewn herself into a costume, it had been on purpose, and if it had been on purpose, it had been to get out.

And Marguerite had just driven her back.

She stood in the yard holding the key from the frog's mouth, and she said, out loud, in the voice that was increasingly not entirely hers:

"Oh, you stupid woman."

Behind her, the screen door of the house opened.

It did not open the way a door opens in a horror movie. There was no slow creak. It banged, the way a screen door bangs when someone who lives somewhere comes out of it, and a tall shape in a doorway said:

"Dorie?"

And Marguerite remembered Carl's face.

All at once. Full resolution. And the reason she hadn't been able to picture it was not mystery, it was mercy. It was the one thing Dorene had managed to leave behind, the one box she'd refused to pack, and Marguerite understood with total clarity that Dorene Hollis had spent thirty-one years in this house learning to not-see that face, to look at the rooster clock instead, to count the chips in the bathtub, to live in the periphery of her own kitchen.

"Carl," she said.

"You come back."

"Seems like."

He came down off the step. He was seventy-one now and moved like it, and the horror of him was not that he was monstrous. He had a face like a mailbox. He had reading glasses pushed up on his head. He was ordinary, with the specific ordinariness of a man who has never once in his life been told no by anyone he could reach.

"I knew you'd come back," he said. "Pauline said you was dead. I said she don't know you."

"Where'd you think I went, Carl?"

He shrugged. "Thought you went and got confused. You got confused at the end there. Puttin' things in the wrong places. Talkin' to the sewing machine." He looked at the costume, and his face did something complicated and brief. "You made that."

"I did."

"You wore it around the house. Wouldn't say why."

"No," Marguerite agreed. "I bet I wouldn't."

And she knew, then, the last item on the list, the one Dorene had not written down because some things you don't write down even in a stolen life:

Item 92. The grain tower by the tracks is where he waits. And it's where I'm buried.

Not metaphorically.

Not symbolically.

There was a specific memory, thin and gray and the only one in the whole collection that arrived in third person, because nobody remembers their own, you only remember up to the edge of it: the smell of wet concrete and the sound of a man breathing hard and an argument about a key in a frog's mouth, about a cellar, about what she'd found in the cellar, about the Dalton place and 1988 and the insurance that paid out too fast.

Dorene Hollis had not sewn her memories into a costume to escape a bad marriage.

She'd sewn them into a costume because she was being murdered, and it was the only filing cabinet she had left.

"Carl," said Marguerite, who was now about sixty percent Dorene and holding, "I need to tell you something and I need you to understand I'm saying it kindly."

"What."

"You're going to want to take this mask off me."

"I don't want nothin' off you."

"You do, though," she said. "Because I'm the only person left who knows about the cellar, and the only reason you haven't dug me up and moved me is you were never a hundred percent sure I didn't tell somebody. And I did, Carl. I told me. I told me so hard it took."

Carl stood in the yard in the last of the light and thought about it, slowly, visibly, like a man doing long division.

Then he said, "Who are you?"

And Marguerite, who had a credit score and a sublet and a manager named Trent, and who had taken four days of PTO she had not formally logged, reached up and took off the mask.

The thing about dark is that it's quick.

Everything went. Pellham Hollow, the frog, the rooster clock, Pauline's father, the elevator fall in '74. Thirty-one years in a kitchen. Ninety-two items. All of it drained out through the top of her head like water from a cracked pot, and she stood in a yard in Ohio in a burlap tunic holding a mask, a woman with no idea where she was, which was the point, which had always been the point ...

... and she pressed the mask into Carl Hollis's hands and said, in her own voice, bright and empty and perfectly innocent, "Sorry, I'm so lost. Is there a gas station?"

And Carl Hollis, who had never once in his life been told no by anyone he could reach, looked down at the burlap his wife had sewn by hand over four years of sleepless Novembers, and did what men like Carl always do with a thing that belonged to them.

He put it on.

The sheriff's report filed November 9 is mostly unremarkable. Elderly male, Carl R. Hollis, 71, discovered at approximately 6:15 a.m. at the base of the old grain tower on CR-9, digging. Deceased spouse Dorene M. Hollis, missing since 2019, recovered from the concrete pad eleven hours later.

The unremarkable part is that he had been digging with his hands.

The remarkable part, the part Deputy Ruiz left out, because there is no box on the form for it, is that when they got to him he was still at it, bleeding to the wrist, wearing a homemade scarecrow mask and weeping, and he kept saying the same thing over and over in a voice that two separate deputies described, independently, as a woman's:

"I'm down here. I'm down here. I'm down here."

Marguerite got back to St. Louis on the 7th with no memory of the trip, 1,400 miles on the odometer, a burlap tunic in the back seat, and a sense of profound, unaccountable well-being, like a sneeze that finally came.

She dropped the tunic at the Goodwill on Delmar.

Deb took it without comment, wrote $6.99 on a tag, and then, because she had worked donations for nine years and had developed certain instincts, turned it over, looking for the mask.

"No mask?"

"Was there a mask?" said Marguerite.

"There's usually a mask," said Deb.

And Marguerite, who had a party to get to and a life that was entirely her own and absolutely no idea why she suddenly wanted to call her mother and ask whether they'd ever owned a clock shaped like a rooster, said:

"Not my problem."

Which was, for the first time in a very long while, true.