Chapter 2

The handle stopped halfway.

For three heartbeats, nothing happened. Then it turned the rest of the way, and the door opened inward, revealing darkness and a smell that hit me like a fist-antiseptic, old sweat, and the sour sweetness of spoiled food.

A woman stepped into the light.

She was gaunt, her collarbones sharp as coat hangers beneath a filthy white nightgown. Her dark blonde hair hung in tangles past her waist. Her lips were cracked, her eyes feverish and huge in a face that had once been beautiful. She was thirty-seven years old, but she looked fifty, and she looked like a ghost, and she looked exactly like the woman I had married ten years ago.

"Hello, Miles," Cora said.

Her voice was a rasp, as if she hadn't used it in a long time, but it was still her voice. Still the voice that had read to me from river histories while we lay in bed, still the voice that had laughed when Bea took her first steps, still the voice I had heard in my dreams for six years.

I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. Bea let go of my leg and took a step toward her.

"Bea, don't," Priscilla said sharply, and Bea froze.

Cora's gaze drifted to Bea, and something crossed her face-a tenderness so raw and hungry that it made my chest ache. Then her eyes moved to Priscilla, and the tenderness curdled into something else. Hatred, pure and cold, that she didn't bother to hide.

"You," Cora said. "You kept me in there."

Priscilla crossed her arms over her chest. Her hands were trembling, but her voice was steady. "You know why."

"I was your prisoner." Cora's voice cracked. She took a wobbling step forward, and I saw how thin she was, how her nightgown hung off her shoulders like a shroud. "For eight months. You locked me in a room and fed me through a wall like an animal."

Eight months. The words landed in my stomach like stones. I looked at Priscilla, and for the first time in our four years together, I couldn't read her face at all.

"Priscilla," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "What is she talking about?"

Priscilla didn't answer. She was staring at Cora with an expression that might have been fear, or hatred, or both.

Cora reached out and gripped my arm. Her fingers were skeletal, her nails cracked. But her grip was strong.

"She kidnapped me, Miles. She found me and locked me in that room. I've been calling for you for months. I've been singing to Bea through the speaking tube because it was the only way I could reach her."

I looked down at her hand on my arm, at the wedding band still on her finger-a thin gold band that matched the one I wore on a chain around my neck. I had put that band on her finger ten years ago. I had buried it with an empty coffin six years ago.

"You drowned," I said. "They found your kayak."

Cora's eyes filled with tears. "I hit my head. I don't remember much. I woke up in a fishing camp downriver. I had amnesia for months, Miles. By the time I remembered who I was, you had already buried me. You had already married her."

She said the word "her" like it was poison.

I pulled my arm free and took a step back. Bea had pressed herself against my side now, her face buried in my shirt. I could feel her heart pounding.

"Priscilla," I said again. "Tell me."

Priscilla finally looked at me. Her dark circles were deeper than I had ever seen them, and her calm nurse's smile was nowhere on her face. She looked exhausted down to the marrow of her bones.

"I found her eight months ago," she said quietly. "She was in the hidden room. She had come back through the river tunnel, the one that used to connect to the prohibition smuggling route. She had been living down there for months, sneaking up at night to hum to Bea through the speaking tube."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because she threatened to kill Bea if I did."

The words hit me like a physical blow. I looked at Cora, who was shaking her head, tears streaming down her gaunt cheeks.

"She's lying," Cora said. "She's lying, Miles. I would never hurt Bea. I love Bea. I've been trying to get back to my daughter for six years."

"She tried to drown her," Priscilla said. Her voice was still quiet, but there was steel underneath it now. "Six years ago, before she disappeared. She took Bea to the river and she tried to drown her. I was working as your mother's nurse then, and I saw her. I pulled Bea out of the water. That's why she ran. That's why she faked her death."

The room tilted. I remembered that day-Cora's wet clothes, Bea's soaked blanket, a story about Bea falling into the river while Cora fished her out. I had believed it. I had believed everything.

"You're lying," Cora said. "She's lying, Miles. She poisoned your mother. She killed your mother and then she locked me in that room."

My mother. She had died of a stroke five years ago, a year after Cora disappeared. Priscilla had been her nurse.

"This is-" I stopped. I didn't know what this was. I didn't know anything anymore.

Bea pulled away from me and walked to Cora.

"Bea, no," Priscilla said, reaching for her, but Bea stepped out of reach and wrapped her small arms around Cora's waist.

Cora sank to her knees on the dusty floor and pulled Bea into her arms, weeping. She buried her face in Bea's hair and held her so tight I thought she might break her.

"My baby," Cora sobbed. "My sweet baby girl."

Bea was crying too, but she was also smiling-a smile I hadn't seen on her face in months. "I knew you were real," she whispered. "I knew you were real."

Priscilla stood frozen, her hands at her sides. And for the first time, I saw something in her face that I had never seen before. Not guilt. Not fear. Defeat.

"I'm calling the sheriff," I said.

I expected Priscilla to argue. I expected her to fight. But she just nodded, slow and tired, and said, "Do what you have to do."

So I did.

The sheriff came. Priscilla was arrested. The hospital came for Cora, who was dehydrated and malnourished and hadn't seen sunlight in eight months. Bea screamed when they took Cora away, and screamed again when they led Priscilla out in handcuffs, and I stood in the dining room of my inn with plaster dust still on the floor and a crowbar still in my hand and no idea what I had just done.

But I believed Cora. I believed the dead wife who had come back to me. I believed her because I had spent six years grieving her, six years believing I had failed her, six years carrying her wedding band on a chain around my neck like a penance.

I should have known better.