“What cave?”
“The one near the stream. I often see your father there, talking to himself.”
Minerva stopped to look at her. “Show me.”
It was less a cave than a crevice between two adjoining slices of rock, set into the slope above the water’s edge where the stream ran dark and slow. According to Judith, on more than one occasion she had spied the elder Grosvenor there.
“He’ll sit and speak into it as if it was a megaphone,” said the girl, “and then listen to the echoes as they come back. But the echoes are wrong.”
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“Sometimes they say words your father didn’t originally say.”
Minerva crossed her arms, suddenly cold. “Such as?”
Judith shrugged. “I’ve never been able to hear clearly. I never wanted to get that close. They were just whispers, really, but I could tell sometimes the words came back different. Like one time your father talked about salmon swimming upstream and the echo said something about returning to the sea. It’s a good trick.”
Minerva regarded the crevice with misgiving. “Only a child smaller than you could fall in there,” said Minerva finally. “My father is fond of geology. I’m sure it’s some acoustic anomaly he’s discovered, that’s all.”
“Maybe they’re not echoes,” said Judith with slyness. “Maybe he’s talking to Mr. Hollin. Hey!” Her face brightened. “We should tell people that whenever we’re in town. We’ll start a new story about the farm—a new fiction—all by ourselves.”
But the older woman didn’t hear. Minerva stood rigid and motionless as if listening to some distant sound, yet when Judith likewise paused to listen, all she heard was graveyard silence.
“Judith,” said Minerva very quietly, “we must go back.”
“What’s wrong?”
Minerva shook her head, scanning the trees around them. “I just have a feeling.” She held out her hand for Judith’s. “Hurry.”
They began their return, walking at first, then speeding into a trot, as Minerva held onto the girl with one hand while the other hiked her own skirts above the knees to free her legs. Judith had to jog beside her, lashed to a runaway horse she couldn’t control. Every third step became a leap to keep up with the taller woman’s stride.
Then with a rumble the ground under the trail collapsed and Minerva pushed Judith away as she spilled downwards into a suddenly yawning pit, clawing wildly for purchase, pebbles and stones raining upon her. A thick root soared past. Minerva grabbed it, her whole body jerking to a halt.
For a moment she dangled as sand drizzled past. Above her, Judith peered over the rim, her face white and wide-eyed. “Minerva,” she said, “Climb. Climb.”
Gasping, Minerva planted her heels into the pit’s side and hand over hand, pulled herself up the root. Judith’s mouth opened and closed but little sound came out.
She reached the top of the root. A gap of several feet still existed. “Judith—please.”
But Judith just stared beyond her. From the bottom, if there was a bottom, emerged an awful, improbable sound.
“Suspicion is a terrible emotion.”
“Judith. Your hand.”
The girl shook her head, not so much denying Minerva as denying what she beheld beneath her.
“Please.”
Judith thrust out her arm.
Taking one hand off the root, Minerva began to fall again. She lunged for Judith.
Judith caught her. Her strength wasn’t enough to pull her up but Minerva used her arm as she had the root, stamping her boots into the loose earth and pulling her way up and over the edge.
Together they scrambled away from the pit into the leaf litter, hoarse and tearful. They looked back toward the pit. It lay silent. When she dared to peek over its edge, all Minerva saw was an empty depression with nothing but sand and rocks at the bottom.
•••
Our thoughts in the nighttime are not like those during the day. Having fallen asleep in a world that flows by logic, by cause and effect, by customs and manners and etiquette—a world defined by predictability—we awake after our first sleep in a confusion of looming shadow and creaking floorboard. With few others awake, there is no reliance on sociability for our cues; we cannot look to them to inform us. The light of reason is subsumed by whim and mercury, leaving us with our senses as lonely guides through strange forests. We stare: what is that shape at the end of the bed? Then we remember it’s only our clothing thrown over the back of an old chair. Our force of will becomes the singular hand that molds the clay back into its daylight form, and yet as soon as we turn our attention away the shape springs immediately back into lumpen mystery.
Minerva lay in her bed, the hour of the night unknown to her. The day had passed in a confused jumble. Upon their return to the Consulate, the story of the sinkhole had been met with a flurry of alarm—the roaring collapse had been heard in the fields but dismissed as the Moodus Noises. Brandy was produced and given to Minerva in brief sips; meanwhile Mrs. Alby had bundled Judith off to their cabin, saying the girl was babbling and feverish. Minerva thought Judith quite cogent. The issue lay in the inability of the others to comprehend what she said.
The brandy made Minerva sleepy and after being helped to bed by her mother, she had tumbled into dreamless depths the minute she touched the pillow; and yet from there, some indeterminable time later, she had risen to wide wakefulness, buoyed to the surface by a single image in her head. It did not, as might be expected, concern the day’s events.
It was the remembrance of Mr. Sutton’s letter.
There were many strange things about it, not least of which was Sutton’s anonymous and detached exit. So strong was his abolitionism that he had spoken at times, with at least some small degree of seriousness, of journeying south to free the slaves at gunpoint; and it was difficult to reconcile this firebrand nature with the image of a man skulking off in the
