The water is wide, I cannot get o’er,
and neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that can carry two,
and both shall row, my love and I.

— Traditional folk song

Part One

The House That Knew Her Name

CHAPTER ONEThe Second Cattle Grid

The road stopped being a road somewhere after the second cattle grid.

Evelyn’s phone still insisted, in its patient voice, that she was on Ashvale Road and would remain on Ashvale Road for another 2.4 miles. The asphalt had given out around the time she crossed the first grid. The gravel had held on a little longer, and now there were only two pale ruts running through wet grass, with a stripe of goldenrod between them that brushed the underside of the car with a sound like a broom.

She kept going. She had driven four hours from Somerville and had promised herself, somewhere around White River Junction, that she would not turn back over a bad road. People hired her to follow paper trails into places other people had tried hard to close off. A rough driveway was practically a professional courtesy.

The trees started a quarter mile past the grid.

They were birches mostly, with a few beeches among them, and they came right up to the edges of the ruts as if the track had been cut through them that morning. That was not what made her slow down. It was the color. Every trunk was furred with a lichen she did not recognize, pale and silvery and unmistakably blue, the blue of a gas flame turned down low. It ran up the bark in patches and streamers. It hung from the lower branches in soft beards. The rain had darkened it, and where the light came through the canopy it seemed to give some of the light back.

She had grown up in Massachusetts and gone to graduate school in Rhode Island and had never once seen a tree like that.

She eased the car along at fifteen miles an hour and watched the odometer, because she didn’t trust the phone and had never trusted it. Half a mile. A mile. The ruts bent left in a long, slow curve. The blue went on along both sides, deep enough that she couldn’t see where it ended. At two miles and some tenths the track straightened, and the trees thinned, and she came out onto open ground.

Fields. October brown, stubbled, a stone wall running along the right side with a few gaps in it like missing teeth. Half a mile ahead, a house sat against a sky the color of dishwater.

Evelyn glanced in the rearview mirror to see the woods from the outside.

There were no woods.

There was the track, two ruts in the grass, running back the way she had come between the same brown fields. There was the stone wall. There was, far off, a low line of hills. There was not a single tree within a mile of the car.

She braked.

The engine idled. The wipers went back and forth. She turned around in her seat and looked through the rear window, because mirrors were mirrors and could be wrong, and saw exactly what the mirror had shown her. Fields. Wall. Hills. Rain.

There were explanations. There was a dip in the land she hadn’t noticed, and the trees were down in it. There was fog. There was the light, which in late afternoon in the mountains did strange things to distance. She did not believe any of these explanations, but she lined them up anyway, the way she lined up exemplars before she looked at a questioned document, so that she would know what she was comparing against.

Then she took the small notebook out of the door pocket, uncapped her pen, and wrote: Thurs 10 Oct. Approx. 4:40 pm. Ashvale Rd. Drove through ~2.3 mi of woods (birch, beech, blue lichen). On exiting, woods not visible behind me. Visibility otherwise good.

She read it back. It looked reasonable written down. Most things did.

She put the notebook away and drove on toward the house.

*  *  *

The letter from the attorney had come on the first of October, on a Tuesday, in a long envelope from a firm in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. She had opened it standing at the kitchen counter with her coat still on.

Dear Ms. Vale, it began. I write on behalf of the estate of the late Edmund Ashvale, of Ashvale House, Hollin’s Ford, Vermont, who passed away on the night of September 20th. You are named as the principal beneficiary of Mr. Ashvale’s last will and testament, executed September 10th of this year.

She had read it three times. She had never heard of Edmund Ashvale. She had never been to Hollin’s Ford, a town of nine hundred people in what Vermonters called the Northeast Kingdom, and when she searched for it she found a general store, a bookshop, a white church, and a historical marker about a covered bridge that had burned in 1911.

She had called the attorney, a polite man named Martin Prewitt, who confirmed that there was no mistake. The bequest included the house, roughly two hundred acres of land, and “the contents of the house, with particular reference to the library and papers.” Mr. Ashvale had left a letter of wishes. Mr. Prewitt would prefer to go through it with her in person. There was, he added carefully, a family member who intended to contest.

“Do you know why he left it to me?” she had asked.

There had been a pause on the line.

“Mr. Ashvale was very clear about his intentions,” Prewitt said, “and not very forthcoming about his reasons. I had hoped you might be able to tell me.”

She couldn’t. That was what she had told him, and it was true.

What she had not told him was the date.

The night of September 20th. She had looked at those words on the page for a long time that Tuesday. On the morning of September 21st, a little before eight, she had woken in the driver’s seat of her own car at a rest area off Interstate 91, more than a hundred miles north of home, with the engine off and the windows fogged and no memory at all of how she had gotten there. The last thing she could recall was leaving the office at noon on the Friday. Twenty hours were simply gone.

A neurologist at Mass General had run her through an MRI, an EEG, and a long afternoon of questions, and had told her, with what seemed like real sympathy, that she had probably experienced an episode of transient global amnesia. It was uncommon, it was frightening, and it was almost always harmless. It rarely happened twice. The lost hours would most likely never come back.

She had accepted that because it fit the evidence, and because the alternative was not having an explanation at all. She had told no one except the neurologist and, in a heavily edited version, her colleague Marcus, who had noticed that she’d come in on Monday looking like she hadn’t slept.

And then, ten days later, a dead stranger in northern Vermont had left her his house.

She did not believe in coincidences. She didn’t disbelieve in them either. In her experience they were simply facts whose connection hadn’t been found yet.

*  *  *

The house was bigger up close than it had looked across the field, and older. It was built of dark fieldstone, almost black in the rain, three stories high under a steep slate roof with four chimneys. The windows were tall and narrow and set deep in the walls. A gravel turnaround curved in front of it, and across the turnaround stood a long low outbuilding with carriage doors and a single lit window. Behind the house, beyond a lawn that sloped down toward a line of rough pasture, the land rose again, and on that rising ground, a quarter mile off, she saw trees.