“Thomas,” Catherine said, the little sister’s voice high and quick, spilling like a secret. “He didn’t have a last name. He said we’d call him Father. He said—” She stopped and hugged herself, shuddering. “We had to stay quiet. If we made noise he locked us in the little room. I don’t like to think about it.”
Later, in the medical ward, a doctor asked questions from a list that had been made years earlier in some university office: How many houses? How many rooms? What did the food taste like? Did anyone touch you? The Dalton girls answered what they could. They remembered a house — but the house did not sit on any lot anyone could find. They remembered a front room the color of old bone, a kitchen with a big iron stove, a cellar that smelled like apples and coal. They remembered prayers said in a voice that was not their own. They remembered rule after rule: Do not look at the window. Do not ask about the world. Do not speak of your mother.
But the police found no house, no man with thinning hair, no marked trailward — only acres of hills and scrub and the occasional collapsed miner’s shack with a rusted bathtub. The more detectives walked the ridges the more the town’s eyes narrowed. Stories began to tangle. In a place like Harland, rumor is a currency richer than truth, and folks have a devil’s knack for spending it.
Some said the girls had run away to a traveling minstrel or gang of drifters. Others, who had drunk and got meaner with the years, said they’d run off with lovers and lied to spare their mothers’ shame. The paper ran a small piece listing the facts: the Dalton girls missing in 1952, the Dalton girls found in 1963, no evidence to corroborate the story. The headline said “Return Raises Questions.” The subheader said, with a civilized cruelty, “The Truth Remains Elusive.”
