The coffee had been burning since nine.
Tessa Reyes knew it the way she knew the hum of the ice machine and the tick of the wall clock over the key rack — by the back of her mind, not the front. She could have poured it out. The pot sat six feet behind her on the little brown counter, and it would have taken ten seconds. But if she poured it out she’d have to make more, and if she made more she’d have to drink it, and if she drank it she’d be awake at seven in the morning with her heart going like a bird in a shoebox.
So she let it burn. The smell had gotten into the carpet years ago anyway. It had gotten into the wood paneling and the fake-leather chairs in the lobby and the ugly framed print of an elk that had hung by the door since before she was born. The Pinecrest Motor Lodge smelled like burnt coffee the way other places smelled like pine cleaner. It was just what it was.
She pulled the cash drawer and started the count.
Twenties first. She flattened them one at a time against the desk, faces up, faces the same way, the way her mother had taught her when she was eleven and standing on a milk crate to reach the register. Money likes to be neat, mija. It won’t stay if you treat it sloppy. Six twenties. Then the tens. Then the fives, then the ones, then the roll of quarters she’d broken for the trucker in room 3 who needed change for the vending machine and had stood there talking about his grandkids for twenty minutes while the quarters got warm in her hand.
She added it twice on the desk calculator and once in her head.
Three dollars and forty cents short.
“Of course,” she said to the empty lobby.
It was always something. Some nights it was over by two dollars, some nights short by five. Once in the spring it had come out exact to the penny and she’d sat there staring at the drawer like it had spoken to her. Her mother used to laugh about it. This register has a hole in it somewhere, Tessa. Someday we’ll find it and we’ll be rich.
They had never found it. Now there wasn’t a they.
Tessa wrote -3.40 in the ledger in small neat pencil, closed the drawer, and did not look at the envelope.
The envelope was on the left side of the desk, under the stapler, where she had put it four days ago so it would stop looking at her from the top of the mail pile. Cream paper, heavy. A return address in raised blue letters: Hollow Valley Mortuary & Cremation Services, Anaconda, Montana. Her name typed on the front. Not her mother’s name — that was the thing that had made her set it down and slide the stapler over it. For thirty-one years every serious piece of mail that came to the Pinecrest had said Marisol Aramburu on it. This one said Tessa Reyes like it had been waiting.
She knew what the number inside was, more or less. She’d signed the paperwork. She’d sat in the little office with the box of tissues that nobody had used and nodded at the man in the gray suit while he said tasteful and simple and arrangements and she had signed where he pointed. The number had been on one of those pages. She’d looked at it once and let it go right out of her head, because that day it had not been real.
It was real now. It was under the stapler.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
Behind her, on the mat under the coffee counter, the dog sighed.
“Don’t start with me, Dutch.”
Dutch was a blue heeler and something else, maybe shepherd, maybe just fence. He was twelve years old and gray around the muzzle and he had exactly two speeds: asleep, and watching. Right now he was asleep, or pretending to be. Her mother had brought him home in a cardboard box from the feed store in Wisdom when he was six weeks old, and he had spent every night of his life since on that mat in that lobby, and Tessa was fairly sure he still didn’t understand why one of them had stopped coming down the stairs.
She wasn’t sure she understood it either.
The phone rang. She picked it up on the second ring, because that was the rule. “Pinecrest Motor Lodge.”
“Are you eating?”
“Mateo.”
“That’s not an answer.”
She looked across the lobby, out the big front window, across the two lanes of Highway 43 and into the yellow glow of Ochoa’s. She could see him through the diner’s window, phone cord stretched behind the counter, wiping the same spot on the pie case he’d been wiping for ten minutes. He raised a hand without looking.
“I ate,” she said.
“What did you eat.”
“Food.”
“Tessa.”
“Crackers. I had crackers. They’re a food group.”
She heard him breathe out through his nose the way he did. Mateo Ochoa was sixty-four years old and had known her since she was in diapers, and he had appointed himself something between an uncle and a warden the day after the funeral. He was not subtle about it. He was not subtle about anything. “I’ve got a whole pie over here nobody’s going to eat. Peach. It’ll go bad.”
“Peach doesn’t go bad in a night.”
“It does if I say it does. I’m closing up. I’ll bring it over.”
She glanced at the clock. Ten-forty. “You’re closing early.”
There was a short pause on the line, and she heard him stop wiping. “It’s the fifteenth.”
“I know what day it is.”
“Then you know why I’m closing.”
“I know you do it. I’ve never known why. My mother never knew why either. Twenty years I’ve been watching you flip that sign and I still—”
“Ten minutes,” Mateo said, and hung up.
Tessa put the receiver down and looked at it. Then she looked across the road again, and watched him come around the counter with something under a towel and stop at the door. He reached up. The sign in the window turned over. She couldn’t read it from here, but she didn’t need to. She’d read it every month of her life.
CLOSED FOR THE MOON. Hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard in black marker, replaced whenever it got too faded, always the same words in the same square capitals.
The porch light at Ochoa’s went dark. Then the sign lit up — he had a little clip lamp he pointed at it, so people could read it from the road. Just the sign, glowing in a dark window like a joke nobody had explained to her.
She reached up and touched the locket.
It was a habit, like the coffee. Her fingers went to her collarbone and found the little oval of silver on its chain and turned it over, once, twice. It was warm from her skin. It was always warm. It was the only thing she’d taken off her mother’s body in the hospital before they’d wheeled her away, and she’d had to unclasp it herself because the nurse’s hands had been shaking worse than hers.
It wouldn’t open.
She’d tried. God, she’d tried. The first night she’d sat on the edge of the bed upstairs with a butter knife and worked at the seam until she scratched the back and then she’d cried so hard she made herself sick. It looked like a locket. It had a hinge on one side and a tiny raised lip on the other where a thumbnail should catch. But the two halves fit together like they’d been made that way, one piece, no line between them she could get anything into. Her mother had worn it every day of Tessa’s life. It had been in every photograph. And Tessa had never once, not one time, seen it open.
Where did you get it, Mamá?
It was a gift.
From who?
From someone who owed me.
What’s in it?
And her mother would smile, that closed-off sideways smile that meant the conversation was over, and touch it exactly the way Tessa was touching it now.
There was a mark on the back. She turned the locket over now, in the yellow lobby light, and ran her thumb across it. A crescent, deep-stamped in the silver, with a jagged line running through the bowl of it, like a mountain ridge cutting across a moon. Worn almost smooth in the middle from a lifetime of thumbs. She’d always figured it was a maker’s mark. Some jeweler in Butte, some little shop that didn’t exist anymore.
The lobby door jangled. Dutch lifted his head, saw who it was, and put it down again.
“He didn’t even get up,” Mateo said. “Some watchdog.”
“He knows you.” Tessa came around the desk. “You’re not a threat. You’re a pie.”
Mateo Ochoa was a short, wide man with a face like a walnut and a thick gray mustache he’d worn since the seventies. He was wearing his apron still, and there was flour on one forearm. He set the pie on the counter next to the burnt coffee and lifted the towel off it like he was showing her a magic trick.
“Peach,” he said.
“You said.”
“Sit. Eat.”
“I’m working.”
“You’ve got one truck in the lot and the guy’s asleep. Sit.”
She sat on the arm of the lobby chair, because the chair itself would have meant she was staying. He’d brought forks. Of course he’d brought forks. He cut her a piece the size of a doorstop and put it on a paper plate and held it out until she took it.
It was good. It was so good she felt her eyes sting, which was stupid, and she looked down at the plate until it passed.
“Your mother,” Mateo said, “would have eaten half this pie by now.”
“My mother would have taken the whole pie and made you go get another one.”
“That’s true.” He laughed, once. Then he looked at the desk. She saw his eyes find the envelope under the stapler and move off it fast. He wasn’t a stupid man. “Have you opened that?”
“Eat your pie, Mateo.”
“I’m just asking.”
“You’re not just asking. You’re never just asking. You’re asking so you can tell me the diner’s doing fine and you’ve got some money set aside and it’s no trouble.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Well, it is trouble,” she said. “It’s my trouble. She was my mother.”
“She was my friend for thirty-five years.”
“That’s not the same as—” Tessa stopped. She put the fork down. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not nothing. I know that. I just — I can do this. I’ve been running this place since I was sixteen. She did the books and I did everything else and now I do the books too. It’s not that different.”
“It’s different,” Mateo said quietly.
“Yeah.” She picked the fork back up so she’d have something to do with her hands. “Yeah, it’s different.”
They ate. Outside, a car went by on 43 doing seventy, and its headlights swept the lobby and the elk print and the key rack and went on toward Wisdom. After it passed, the dark came back down twice as thick. There was nothing out there. Silver Hollow was eleven buildings and a gas station on a two-lane highway between one place and another, and on a full-moon night in September at eleven o’clock it might as well have been the bottom of the ocean.
“Your car’s still making that sound,” Mateo said.
“What sound.”
“The sound like it’s dying.”
“It’s the alternator.”
“So fix the alternator.”
“With what, my charm?” She shook her head. “It’s four hundred dollars at the shop in Dillon. I can jump it. I’ve got the cables in the trunk. It runs once it’s going. I just can’t turn it off anywhere I can’t get a jump.”
“That’s a hell of a way to live.”
“It’s a hell of a car.”
He snorted. He’d sold her mother that Corolla in 1998, so he could hardly argue. It had two hundred and sixty thousand miles on it and a bumper held on with a bungee cord and a battery light that had been flickering since June like a nervous eye. Every morning she went out and put her hands on the hood and said come on, come on, come on under her breath before she turned the key. Most mornings it listened.
“Why do you close?” she said.
Mateo had his fork halfway to his mouth. He put it down.
“Tessa.”
“No, I’m serious. I’m not being cute. You’ve closed that diner on every full moon since I can remember. Not the night before, not the night after. The night. You lose a whole Friday sometimes. You’ve lost a Saturday. Who closes a diner on a Saturday in a town with one diner?”
“My grandfather closed on the moon.”
“So it’s a tradition.”
“It’s a — yes. Call it that.”
“Was he religious? Was it a Basque thing? Because I asked Mamá and she said it wasn’t a Basque thing, she said her grandmother was Basque and she never heard of it.”
“It’s a family thing.”
“Mateo.”
He wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and looked at the front window. Not at the road. Above it. She’d seen him do that before too, on these nights, and she’d never thought about it until right now — the way his eyes went up, over the highway and over the diner roof and the cottonwoods, up to where Blackridge sat against the sky like a black tooth.
You couldn’t see it now. There was too much dark. But you could feel it. Everybody in Silver Hollow could feel that mountain the way you felt someone standing behind you.
“The Marricks own that mountain,” he said.
“I know who owns the mountain. Everybody knows who owns the mountain.”
“Then that’s all you need to know.” He picked his fork back up. “Eat your pie.”
“That’s not an answer—”
“It’s the one you’re getting.” He said it gently, but it was flat under the gentleness, the way a river was flat over a rock. “Your mother knew what she knew and she kept you out of it, and she was right to. That’s all I’m going to say. I’m an old man with a diner and I don’t ask questions about the ridge and I close on the moon and I’ve made it to sixty-four. You want to be forty-four someday, you’ll do the same.”
Tessa opened her mouth.
Dutch stood up.
He didn’t do it the way he usually did, in stages, back end first and then a stretch and a yawn. He was lying down and then he was standing, all at once, and his ears were up and his whole body was pointed at the front door like a compass needle.
“Dutch?”
He didn’t look at her. Low in his chest, so low she felt it more than heard it, something started.
“What is it, buddy.” She set the plate down and got off the chair arm. “There’s nothing out there. There’s nobody. It’s just the—”
The clock on the wall said 11:58.
Mateo hadn’t moved. He was sitting very still with his fork in his hand, and he wasn’t looking at the dog. He was looking at the window. Up.
“Mateo—”
“Shh.”
“Don’t shh me in my own—”
“Tessa.” He didn’t raise his voice. “Please.”
She shut her mouth. She stood there in the burnt-coffee air of her mother’s lobby with her hand on her locket and her old dog growling at nothing, and she listened.
The ice machine hummed. The clock ticked. Out on 43 nothing moved, no trucks, no cars, no wind. The cottonwoods along the creek stood still. She could hear the trucker in room 3 snoring through two walls, because the Pinecrest had been built in 1961 and the walls were a suggestion. She could hear her own heart.
Then, up on the ridge, something screamed.
It wasn’t a wolf. She’d heard wolves — you couldn’t live in the Big Hole and not hear wolves, some winters they came down to the river and you heard them from your bed and pulled the blanket up and felt very small and very old at the same time. That sound was long and rising and lonely and almost beautiful.
This wasn’t that.
This was short. This was torn out of something. It started high and cracked in the middle and went ragged, and there was pain in it, and there was rage in it, and there was something else under those two that she didn’t have a name for. It came down off Blackridge and across two miles of dark timber and rolled over the town like a dropped sheet of tin.
Then it stopped.
Tessa realized she had grabbed the edge of the desk. Her knuckles were white. The pie had gone over on its plate and she hadn’t seen it fall.
“What,” she said. Her voice came out in pieces. “What in God’s name was—”
“Elk,” Mateo said.
“That was not an elk.”
“Cat, then. Mountain lion. They scream like that.”
“Mateo, I have lived here my entire life. I know what a cat sounds like. That was not a cat. That was—” She didn’t know what it was. Her ears were ringing with it. Her skin was crawling under her shirt like she’d walked through a spider web. “That was hurt. Something’s hurt up there.”
“Then it’s hurt up there,” he said. “And we’re down here. And that’s how it stays.” He stood up. He put his fork down on the counter very carefully, like it might make a noise. “Lock the door behind me.”
“I never lock the door. It’s a motel. People come in.”
“Lock it tonight.”
“Mateo—”
“For once in your life, Tessa Reyes, do what a person asks you.” He was already at the door. His hand was on it and he stopped and looked back at her, and for the first time in her memory Mateo Ochoa looked afraid. Not of her. Not of the dark. Of something he’d been holding shut for a very long time and could feel, tonight, pushing at the latch.
“Your mother’s gone,” he said. “There’s no one — the arrangement, the—” He shook his head hard, once, like a dog shaking off water. “Nobody’s watching anymore. You understand? Just — stay in tonight. Stay in the light. Please.”
The door jangled. He went across the road fast for a man his age and his shape, not running but not walking either, and she watched him let himself into the dark diner and heard the deadbolt go from all the way over here.
The little lamp stayed on. CLOSED FOR THE MOON.
Tessa locked the door.
She stood with her hand on the bolt for a while after. Then she went back behind the desk, because that was where she was supposed to be, and sat down in her mother’s chair, and picked up the pencil, and put it down again.
Dutch had not moved.
He was standing in the exact center of the lobby, four feet from the door, and he was staring at it. Not at the window. Not at the road. At the door, at the brass handle and the crack of dark under it, like he expected it to open. The growl had stopped. That was worse. He was completely silent, and his ears were straight up, and every hair along his gray spine stood like grass in wind.
“Dutch. Come here.”
Nothing.
“Dutch. Ven. Come on. There’s nothing there.”
He didn’t so much as flick an ear.
She got up and went to him and put her hand on the back of his neck. He was trembling. Not shivering — trembling, fine and fast, the way an engine trembled before it caught. Under her palm his skin was hot. She crouched down beside him and put her face by his and looked where he was looking, and there was nothing. Just the door. Just the glass, with the lobby reflected in it, her own face and her own dog and the elk print and the key rack and the pot of coffee that had been burning for three hours, all of it laid over the dark like a picture that hadn’t been painted right.
“It’s okay,” she told him. Her voice was steadier than she felt. “It was just a noise. Some animal. It’s gone now.”
Dutch stared at the door.
Up on the ridge, nothing screamed again. That was almost worse than if it had. The silence up there was the kind that came after, and every one of Tessa’s nerves knew it even if she couldn’t have said how.
She stayed crouched on the carpet with her hand on her dog for a long time. The clock ticked over to twelve-fifteen, twelve-thirty. Her knees started to ache. The trucker in room 3 kept snoring. The locket lay warm against her collarbone, and when she finally reached up and closed her hand around it she found she was pressing so hard the crescent mark on the back was biting into her palm.
Nobody’s watching anymore.
“What did he mean,” she said aloud, to the dog, to the room, to the picture in the glass. “Mamá. What did he mean?”
Dutch stared at the door.
Somewhere on the far side of two miles of black timber, something started walking down the mountain.
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