MARK HOUSEMAN RAN HIS MEDICAL PRACTICE FROM AN OFFICE ON the north end of town, just across from the hospital. His father, Bruce Houseman, had been Erin’s doctor growing up. Except for breaking her arm at the age of seven, she’d been a healthy kid, more or less. She remembered the office, though, the anxiety she felt every time her mother dragged her here for a routine physical or childhood immunizations. The sign out front hadn’t changed, she noticed: the white background with brown lettering, the paint faded and flaking now, but still holding up after all these years. HOUSEMAN FAMILY PRACTICE, it read, and it occurred to Erin that the name could be interpreted both ways, as a general family practice but also as a business run by the family, passed down from father to son. If Mark had children of his own, maybe one of them would step into the role of small-town physician someday. If so, what would their father tell them of the times that came before, of the things that still lingered in the town’s collective consciousness? People had gone missing, torn away from their families in broad daylight and in the small hours of the night. She could picture them, names and faces that rose to the surface from the dark waters of her memory. Angela Finley. Marian Montgomery. Rose Perry. Helen Reece.
No, Erin thought as she nosed the Chevy into a space in the small parking lot. There are some things that shouldn’t be passed on from generation to generation. There are some things that need to be over.
The afternoon had turned cold. Her suitcase was in the passenger footwell. She opened it and pulled out a jacket before taking Diesel for another walk and returning him to the cab of the truck. A bell jingled as she pushed open the front door of the medical office and stepped into the reception area. It was much the way she remembered—the sterile scent, a line of chairs against the wall to her right. A woman was sitting in one of them, reading a magazine. She looked up briefly when Erin entered, smiled, and went back to her article. Another woman sat behind the receptionist’s desk, her eyes on the paperwork in front of her. Dim light spilled through a window to Erin’s right, and the blinds organized it into scalloped rows of tombstones on the floor. She didn’t recognize the furniture, couldn’t recall if these were the same chairs she and her mother had sat in when she was a child. Most likely they weren’t. Two decades was a long time. Things wore out and needed to be replaced. She wondered who had cared for the place during all those years, whether Mark’s mother still mopped the floors at night the way she’d done for her husband, or whether it was Mark himself, closing up the office at the end of each day and getting down on his hands and knees to scrub at the spots that never seemed to come clean.
“May I help you?” the receptionist asked, and Erin looked up, realizing she’d been staring at the floor, at a small discoloration in the linoleum near the coatrack.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m here to see Dr. Houseman.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, I . . . I’m Erin Reece. My father, David Reece, is a patient of Dr. Houseman’s. I spoke with the doctor earlier today in the hospital.”
“And you need to speak with him again?”
“Yes, please. I had to . . . attend to some other business. He asked me to come by the office when I was finished.”
The woman nodded. “He’s seeing a patient right now,” she said. “If you want to have a seat, I’ll let him know you’re here.”
“Thank you,” Erin said. She crossed the room and sat down in one of the chairs. Someone had left a copy of National Geographic lying on the seat next to her. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands.
“You’re Erin Reece.”
She looked up. The woman to her right was studying her.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re Erin Reece, David Reece’s daughter. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes,” she replied, getting a better look at the woman’s face. She appeared vaguely familiar, but the specifics were fragmented and difficult to recall, like a dream that scatters in the morning light.
“I’m Betty Doyle,” the woman said. “From the Roosevelt County Library. Or at least I did work there around the time when you were growing up. I’m retired now, but I still volunteer for the children’s reading hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
Erin smiled. “It’s good to see you.”
“You don’t remember me, I can tell,” she said. “And that’s fair enough. Truth is, I didn’t recognize you, either, not until I heard you say your name. But Erin Reece, now that’s a name I remember. You used to come in with your mother. She was an avid reader. The books she’d check out were fiction mostly: mysteries, thrillers, romance . . . even horror.” She made a face. “At least that’s what I remember.”
“She read to me sometimes. She could get lost in a story.” Erin pictured it in her memory, the stacks of books her mother used to keep on her bedroom nightstand. Erin had asked her once how many of them she was reading, to which her mother had responded, “All of them.”
“But how can you read all of them at the same time?” she’d asked her mom.
Helen smiled. She brushed back a lock of blond hair from her daughter’s forehead. “You have more than one friend, don’t you? Just because you play with Deirdre doesn’t mean you can’t hang out with Emily the next day.”
Erin frowned. She had gotten into an argument with Deirdre McKinney the day before. “I don’t have many friends,” she said.
Her mother had laughed. “Yes you do. You have more friends than I can count on my fingers and toes.” She leaned forward and gave her daughter a tickle, her fingers scampering along the sides of Erin’s body like furry caterpillars. Erin giggled and slinked to the floor.
“You have more friends than peacocks have feathers,” her mother said, “and they’re all a little different, aren’t they. You don’t get them confused with one another?”
“No.”
“And you’re able to spend time with all of them?”
Erin looked up at her mother, her head resting on the floorboards. “When is Daddy coming home?”
Helen Reece looked away from her for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s not for us to decide.”
“Who decides?”
“A group of people at the prison. In four months they’ll meet again and decide if Daddy can come home early.”
“—father was in the hospital.”
“Hmm?” Erin blinked and looked over at the woman.
“I said I was sorry to hear that your father was in the hospital.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“Some kind of a respiratory illness, I heard. It sounds like he’s pretty sick.”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess everything’s common knowledge here in Wolf Point.”
The woman shrugged. “Small community. People talk.”
Erin nodded. “I’ve been away for a while. I’d kind of forgotten.”
“I’m neighbors with Bill and Margery Turner. They rent a room to your father’s farmhand, Travis Cooper. They heard it from Travis, and I heard it from them.” Betty Doyle looked down at the open magazine resting on her lap. “Seems to me like your father’s got some questions to answer.”
“Right now he’s on a ventilator.”
“Yes, I understand that. We’re all wishing him the best.”
Erin was silent for a moment, watching her.
Betty looked up from the pages. “Everyone knows what they found on your father’s farm,” she said. “I think we have a right to know whose body it is and how it got there.”
The room went still and quiet. Betty’s eyes were upon her, and the receptionist was watching her as well. Erin’s heart thudded in her chest. She could hear it in her ears, could feel the whump-whump-whump of it in her teeth. She tried to draw in a breath, but it was like pulling air from a vacuum.
“I would caution people not to jump to conclusions,” Erin said, and it was strange how calm her voice sounded, as if it was coming from someone else.
The woman leaned forward in her chair. “People don’t know what to think, but they have a right to ask questions.” Her fingertips turned back the pages at the corner of her magazine, lifting and releasing them like a stack of cards, the order never changing, each shuffle coming out the same. “And if it turns out to be what it looks like, I’d watch yourself, Erin. People will expect justice, and some of them might not want to stop at just that. This isn’t a safe place for you. You decided a long time ago that you don’t belong here.”
Erin shook her head. “I was eighteen years old. I had my reasons. I left and you stayed. That doesn’t make you better than me.”
“No,” Betty said, “it doesn’t make me better.” She returned the magazine to the rack, stood up, and walked to the door with a limp that favored her right hip. She placed her hand on the doorknob, then paused with her head lowered before turning once more in Erin’s direction. “This town has been through a lot since you left. Businesses shut down. People moved away. Those of us who stayed found a way to carry on. But we’re smaller now. It’s not the same place as the one you left behind.” She sighed, and the sound of it blended with the wind as it gusted against the side of the building. “We all have our own way of dealing with things,” she said. “You left and I stayed. It doesn’t make me better. It just”—she opened the door and straightened her body against the cold—“makes me a different kind of survivor.”