Chapter One

According to the state highway map, Route 9 ran seven miles from the interstate to the Aldervane County line. My odometer made it nine and change. Somewhere in the last sixty years two miles of West Virginia had gone missing from the record, and the road knew it even if the paper didn't.

I believed the road.

The radio lost a preacher out of Beckley on the fourth switchback. After that it was static, the heater fan, and the creek running beside the road from the gap. The water moved over rock the color of old pennies. Iron from somebody's abandoned workings, oxidizing as soon as it met air. Water tells you what's been done to a place before anybody's mailbox does.

I didn't pull over. I had a scope of work riding shotgun, two hundred fourteen pages of it, skimmed exactly far enough to know where the per diem landed, and four days before anybody expected me at a kickoff meeting. What I told Charleston was that I wanted lead time on the benchmarks. What I told my mother was less than that.

February had stripped the trees bare, and the light went early. It was coming up on five when the valley opened and the Vane appeared all at once: two rows of Jenny Lind houses set shoulder to shoulder along the branch, wood smoke above the stovepipes, a white church steeple, the brick block of the old company store with ALDERVANE COAL & IRON still visible in faded paint above the second-story windows and a dollar-store banner below it. Trucks in the yards with toolboxes in the beds. A satellite dish on every third roof, all aimed at the same gap in the ridgeline.

A man coming the other way in a Silverado lifted two fingers off the wheel as he passed. I lifted two back without thinking. Twenty-one years, and I still remembered.

Nobody looked at my truck twice. In a town that size, an unfamiliar vehicle gets noticed, but a woman with a grocery sack, a man at the diner window, and a kid on a porch step all looked away. The kid studied everything except me. It was deliberate. I kept driving. The diner's gas pumps went by, two price wars out of date.

Above the town, the mountain went up black against a sky that still had some silver in it. The map on the seat beside me called it Sang Mountain. Nobody in the Vane had ever called it anything at all, in my hearing, in the ten years I lived under it. You'd say up the mountain or on the mountain or nothing. Nobody used its name.

Halfway up its flank, where the haul road used to run, the old tipple stood against the last of the light — a dead geometry of steel and timber, the headframe and the long slope of the conveyor gallery. Even from the valley floor, the sag was obvious.

Verna's house was the fourth one up the branch road, and I am going to call it Verna's house for as long as that keeps working.

The estate lawyer in the county seat had mailed me a key in a padded envelope with a letter that used the phrase sole surviving heir twice in one paragraph, in case I'd missed it the first time. I didn't need the key. Verna had never locked her door, and eight months empty hadn't changed that.

Inside, the house was cold. It smelled of stale woodsmoke and old coffee. It had been shut for eight months. I stood in the kitchen doorway with my duffel still on my shoulder and let my eyes go around the room once, slow, the first-order survey: what's here, what's moved, what's bearing load.

The wall by the stairs was bearing load. Framed school pictures ran up it in a straight line — me at seven, me at nine, then eleven, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen. The later ones were taken in the flat gray light of Roanoke picture days, after my mother and I had moved away. Every fall, she must have mailed Verna a new one. She'd never told me. I didn't call her about it.

The glass-front cabinet stood where it had always stood, and in it, on its edge, facing the room, the supper plate.

Blue rim, worn gold line inside the blue, a chip at seven o'clock she never let anybody file smooth. It had been in that kitchen since before my father was born. I was ten the last time I saw it. I hadn't thought of it once in twenty-one years, and I could have drawn it from memory in the dark, chip and all. Verna washed it by hand every Sunday and put it back facing out. The whole cabinet was arranged around it. She never explained why.

I didn't touch it. You don't move a benchmark you didn't set.

I got the stove going with the dry wood stacked beside it. Verna had died with the woodbox full. There was an unopened can of coffee in the freezer and an old percolator on the stove, so I made a pot. It came out black and strong, and I drank it.

I took it out onto the porch.

I'd forgotten how dark a February porch could be outside Roanoke. The valley lay below me in a scatter of yard lights and blue window-glow. I could hear the creek under the road. The ridge rose behind the house, and the cold came steadily off it.

The eyes came on at six-forty, up on the tipple.

I say came on because that's the honest sequence: dark, and then not. Two points of red, high in the dead steel where the headframe crossed the sky, set apart at a width I didn't want to assign to a skull. My first thought was aircraft beacon, and there was no tower on that flank and never had been. My second was reflectors catching headlights, and there was no road up there for headlights, and nothing on that structure had been maintained enough to shine in sixty years.

I keep a hand compass in my field coat, which was the coat I had on. Bearing 041 magnetic. Elevation above the valley floor, call it eighty feet, which put the two red points in the gallery framing, on members I would not have certified to carry a crow.

They were steady. They did not blink and they did not wander and they did not do any of the things a light does when it's only a light.

I stood there, drank the coffee, and worked the problem, but got nowhere. The coffee cooled in my hands. Down the valley the Vane sat with its lights on, still looking away. With the compass open in my hand, I understood that the town had expected me.

The thing on the tipple was looking at me straight on. It had been since before I found it.

I took a second bearing, mostly to give my hands a procedure. It came back 041, same as the first.

At the end of all this, I'd owe Charleston a report — benchmarks, closures, a mountain reduced to paper. The two red points in the tipple would never appear in it. Not because nobody would believe me. There was no field for them.

It wasn't fear that kept me out there. I'd have known what to do with fear.

I finished it cold anyway. I closed the compass. I left the porch light off.