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By Root 510 0

there’d been that awful robbery. She’d heard the thief rustling around—she continued to be blessed with good hearing and eyesight—and she’d gone out to her porch with what was said to be the founder’s rifle. But the stranger had disappeared into the woods. Ruth was afraid she’d break her shoulder if she fired that old gun, if the thing even worked at all, so she let him run. Her family had lived in the grand house that was now the museum. They’d had so many children every room had been filled. But things had changed. Now she resided in the cottage that had once been a barn where sleighs and carriages and horses were kept. She had a son, but he’d gone off to California with some of the other young men in town, and although he kept promising to come back home, she had yet to see him.

Ben Levy kept writing as he ate his red flannel hash. He was starving, and his feet hurt from all the walking he’d been doing in his best shoes. His only shoes, really, since his boots had fallen apart right before he left New York. He thought about New Year’s Day at the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel. He imagined walking in, tossing his files on the table, perhaps even reading his case studies aloud. Listen to this one, he’d call, recounting the story of the old woman who had lived in the museum, reciting the recipe for red flannel hash as if it were Hamlet’s soliloquy, amusing the other men with his research and wit, winning the bet hands down.

In exchange for room and board, Ben worked on the cottage, which was in sad shape. He repaired the roof, cleared the wooden gutters, took down the dilapidated fence that was listing to one side, rebuilding it with the use of old slats and wire. In the evenings, Mrs. Carson let him wander through the museum, where he faithfully took notes. He described the wolf in a glass case, the ragged stitches crisscrossed through the threadbare pelt, the mouth pulled back in a snarl. He drew pictures illustrating the smooth, snail-like fossils that had been found in Band’s Meadow, made sketches of the founding families’ wagon wheels and pots and pans, and wrote descriptions of the bats that hung inside a glass case, yellow eyes forever open.

Ruth did him the favor of making introductions in town. When he said he wanted “characters,” she did her best. She took him to the Jacobs, who lived behind the church. Ben took notes while speaking with Mrs. Jacob, who organized the food drives and the knitting and sewing circles, then he interviewed Mr. Jacob, who had fallen from his position of bank president to become church janitor and was now convinced the Lord had a lesson in mind: Money was the last thing he should think about. Redemption, he insisted, could be found in the churchyard, which he faithfully raked every morning.

Ben thanked them and set off to go. As he was leaving, one of the Jacob sons, Calen, the bookish one, heard that the stranger interviewing his parents had gone to Yale. The Jacob boy followed and asked if he could walk Ben back to Mrs. Carson’s. On the way Calen told him there was a mermaid living in the Eel River and that for two dollars he could show Ben exactly where she could be found. Calen was an individual who knew what he wanted, and that included getting out of Blackwell and the church cottage. He disagreed with his father’s philosophy concerning money and redemption. Perhaps Yale was in his future as well.

“Let me guess,” Ben said, thinking back to his encounter with Joshua Kelly at the bar. “The fisherman’s wife.”

“Yes, sir,” Calen said.

“Well, I don’t believe in such things, and I don’t have two dollars.” Ben Levy clapped the boy on the back. “Nice try,” he said, and kept walking.

Ben had a busy schedule with little time for nonsense. That afternoon, after lunch, Ruth was taking him to meet Lillian Gale, a distant cousin of the Partridges, direct descendants of the town founders. Miss Gale, the oldest woman in Blackwell, lived up the hill with an assortment of animals she’d rescued. She had a raccoon that sat on a chair and drank tea from a cup, along with two hound dogs that had come