The Dry House

Chapter 1: The Ashes Behind Them

The fire took everything in eleven minutes.

Casey Cullen knew because she had been sitting on the porch steps timing herself holding her breath — a stupid game she played when she couldn't sleep — and she had looked at her phone at 2:07 a.m. when the first orange light bloomed in the kitchen window. By 2:18, the volunteer truck from Salyersville was still nine miles out and the house was a column of heat so intense it bent the air above the ridge like a living thing.

She had gotten Macy out. That was the fact she held in both hands during the days that followed, the way you'd hold a live coal because dropping it would be worse than the burn. She had gotten Macy out through the bedroom window, the twelve-year-old's bare feet slapping the porch roof, then the wet grass, then the gravel of the county road where they stood and watched the only life they'd ever known turn to cinder and char.

Their mother did not come out the window. Their mother did not come out at all.

Loretta Cullen had been drinking since sundown, which was not unusual, and had fallen asleep with a Pall Mall still burning between her fingers, which was not unusual either. Casey had smelled the smoke before she saw it, that particular smell of old wallpaper and pine paneling catching, and she had known with a certainty that bypassed thought entirely. She did not try the bedroom door. The heat behind it told her everything.

The weeks after were a blur of county offices, donated clothes that smelled like other people's closets, and a series of adults who spoke to Casey in the soft, careful voice reserved for animals that might bite. Macy cried. Casey did not. A social worker named Phyllis — no, not Phyllis, her name was June Goins, a tired woman with a Magoffin County accent thick enough to stand a spoon in — explained that there were no close relatives on their mother's side. Their father had been gone since Macy was two, last heard of somewhere in Indiana, and the state of Kentucky had no particular interest in tracking him down.

But there was an aunt. Darlene Sharpe, née Cullen, Loretta's older sister. She lived on a farm out on Dry Fork, past where the blacktop ended and the creek road began. She had a husband and two sons and enough land to justify the word "farm" on the tax rolls. She had agreed to take the girls.

"She's family," June Goins said, as though that word had never been used to justify a single terrible thing.

Casey sat in the back seat of June's county car with Macy pressed against her side, watching the road narrow from two lanes to one and a half, then to something that was barely a suggestion carved into the hillside. The trees closed overhead — tulip poplar and red oak and shagbark hickory, their branches lacing together until the sky became a series of bright coins glimpsed through a dark canopy. The creek ran alongside the road, brown and quick after recent rain, and every quarter mile or so a rusted culvert pipe jutted from the bank like a broken bone.

"How far is it?" Macy asked. Her voice was small and flat, the voice of a child who had learned in the space of two weeks that asking questions was mostly a way of confirming bad news.

"Not far now," June said.

It was another twenty minutes. Casey counted.

The farm appeared around a bend where the creek forked — the left branch running shallow over limestone shelves, the right disappearing into a hollow choked with laurel. A mailbox leaned at the mouth of the drive, its door hanging open, the name SHARPE painted in white letters that had yellowed with age. The drive itself was packed dirt and creek gravel, rutted deep enough to scrape the undercarriage of June's sedan.

The house sat on a slight rise above the creek bottom, a two-story frame structure with a tin roof gone to rust in patches and a porch that wrapped around three sides like a jaw. It had been white once. Now it was the color of old teeth. Behind it, a series of outbuildings stepped down the slope toward the tobacco field: a stripping shed with corrugated walls, a corn crib on stilts, a chicken house, a collapsed smokehouse, and beyond all of that, at the very edge of where the cleared land met the tree line, a shape Casey couldn't quite make out — low, dark, built from logs that had gone black with age.

Darlene Sharpe was waiting on the porch.

She was a tall woman, taller than Casey had expected from the single photograph their mother had kept in a kitchen drawer — a faded Polaroid of two girls standing in front of a church, one smiling, one not. Darlene was the one not smiling, and twenty-five years had not changed that. She had a long face, sharp at the jaw and broad at the forehead, and her hair was pulled back so tight it seemed to stretch the skin at her temples. She wore a housedress and an apron and work boots, and she stood with her hands clasped in front of her the way a preacher stands before delivering news that will not be pleasant but is, in his estimation, necessary.

"Girls," she said. Not a greeting. An inventory.

June Goins got out of the car and began the ritual of paperwork and reassurance. Casey watched from the back seat as June handed over folders, explained temporary custody arrangements, mentioned a follow-up visit in thirty days. Darlene nodded at everything without appearing to listen to any of it.

A man appeared at the corner of the house — Wendell Sharpe, Casey guessed. He was shorter than his wife by three inches, with the sunken look of a man whose body had been used up by work and then kept going out of habit. He wore overalls and a cap pulled low, and he did not approach the car. He stood where he was, hands in his pockets, eyes on the ground, and waited to be told what to do.

Two boys emerged from the stripping shed. The older one, Rick, had Darlene's jaw and a way of walking that took up more space than his body required. He was nineteen, broad through the shoulders, with a chew of tobacco already pouched in his lower lip. The younger one, Alan, was sixteen and built like a fence post — narrow, angular, as though he'd grown upward in a hurry to avoid something at ground level. They stood behind their mother and looked at Casey and Macy the way you'd look at stray dogs someone had dropped at the end of your driveway.

"Well," Darlene said when June had finished. "Get out of the car."

Casey got out. She helped Macy out. They stood in the gravel drive with two garbage bags of donated clothing and a shoebox that contained everything they had saved from the fire, which was nothing, because they had saved nothing. The shoebox held things people had given them afterward: a hairbrush, a Bible, a pack of colored pencils for Macy, a ten-dollar Walmart gift card.

"You'll share the back bedroom," Darlene said. "Supper's at six. You're late, you don't eat. You're lazy, you don't eat. You talk back, you don't eat. This is not a hotel. This is not a vacation. Your mother, God rest her, raised you in a manner I do not intend to continue. You will work. You will mind. You will be grateful."

Macy's hand found Casey's and squeezed.

"Yes ma'am," Casey said.

Darlene's eyes moved over Casey's face the way a hand moves over a wall looking for a crack. Whatever she found there, she did not comment on it. She turned and went inside. Wendell followed. Rick spat tobacco juice into the gravel and went back to the shed. Alan lingered a moment, his eyes flicking between the girls and the house, and then he turned and followed his brother without a word.

June Goins touched Casey's shoulder. "I'll check in," she said. "Thirty days. You call the office if you need anything."

She handed Casey a business card. Casey looked at it. The office number had a Prestonsburg area code. She did not see a cell phone number. She did not ask for one because she did not have a phone anymore.

"Thank you," Casey said.

June got in her car and drove away. The sound of the engine faded into the hollow, replaced by the creek and the wind and the particular silence of a place where no one would hear you if you screamed.

Casey picked up both garbage bags. Macy picked up the shoebox.

They walked into the house.

The inside was dark and cool and smelled of lye soap and bacon grease and something underneath both of those — a sour, mineral smell, like well water left standing too long. The floors were bare pine, worn smooth in the traffic paths and rough everywhere else. The furniture was old and heavy and placed with the precision of someone who would notice if a chair was moved two inches to the left. There were no pictures on the walls except a framed print of Jesus in Gethsemane and a cross-stitch that read THE LORD DISCIPLINES THOSE HE LOVES.

The back bedroom was at the top of the stairs, past the bathroom and past a closed door that Casey guessed led to Rick and Alan's room. It was small — barely large enough for the iron-frame bed and the pine dresser that were its only furnishings. The window looked out over the back of the property, down the slope toward the outbuildings and the tree line. From here, Casey could see the dark shape she had noticed from the driveway. It was a building, she realized. A small one, maybe twelve feet square, built from logs so old they had turned the color of charcoal. Its door was heavy planking, and even from this distance she could see that the hinges were on the outside.

She turned away from the window.

"I don't like it here," Macy said.

"I know."

"Can we go somewhere else?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because there isn't anywhere else."

Macy sat on the bed. The springs creaked with a sound like a small animal in pain. She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, and Casey saw their mother in the gesture — Loretta on the couch after a bad day, folding herself small, making herself a target that was harder to hit.

"We'll be okay," Casey said.

She did not believe it. But she said it, because that was what you did when you were seventeen and the person you loved most in the world was twelve and looking at you like you were the last wall between her and the dark.

"We'll be okay," she said again, and the house listened, and the house did not agree.