Between the Lines

Mara Kline had not intended to stay more than a week. The town—Ashwell—was the kind of place that unstitched a life slowly, with polite inquiries and haunted looks, and she had work waiting across the state and a flat that smelled faintly of someone else. She had come for a single practical thing: to sort her father’s affairs after the small ceremony, to box up books and tax forms and the kind of mundane artifacts people kept to prove they had existed. Instead she found the kind of quiet that made secrets loud.

Her father’s cottage sat at the edge of town like a pause between two sentences. Arthur Kline had been a volunteer at the public library for thirty years—quiet, obliging, with hands that smelled of paper and varnish—and in his house were a thousand small certainties: a chipped mug that had always been on the right side of the sink, a row of felt-tip pens in a jam jar, a hat that might have gone out of style decades earlier. Mara walked through rooms with boxes and carried lamps and listened for the missing sound of him in the floorboards. She kept expecting movement; only dust and the tick of a clock answered.

It was in the study, among a stack of local histories and an old, battered copy of the Ashwell Chronicle, that she found the marginalia. Arthur had made notes—tiny, neat, the kind of handwriting that never wavered—with pencil and fine ink. Most were ordinary: dates, the names of donors, a note to renew the library’s membership in the county archive. But tucked in a section that covered the town from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, she found a list. Names. Dates. Short annotations in the corners. Some entries had been circled; one phrase had been circled twice until the line went soft and gray: between the lines.

Her fingers hovered over the paper, feeling the groove left by a pen that had crossed the same word too many times. In the margin, in what looked like Arthur’s pencil, someone had scribbled: KILN / 11–14. The shorthand felt like a map. She turned the page and another fell out—a small photograph, around the size of a thumb, a black-and-white group portrait of town children and a few adults. One face was not there. The space where it should have been had been scratched, as if someone had not wanted that particular person to be seen. A chill that was not only grief ran through her. There were things her father had noticed and had not spoken of.

She slept badly that first night with the photograph on the bedside table. When the morning came she returned to the study and opened a drawer she had not noticed before. Tucked beneath a stack of receipts was a tiny locket, its chain knotted into a small, stubborn knot. The locket was not engraved with Arthur’s initials. It did not fit in his modest lore. Inside was a minute, folded scrap of paper and a faded ribbon the color of summer grass. The scrap had been written in Arthur’s hand, but the ink was newer than anything else in the house. The sentence was sparse, almost pleading: If you find this—start at the kiln. I couldn't finish.

She had not expected the words to be for her. The last few months of Arthur’s life had been slow and straightforward in the way of small illnesses; there had been lists, and medications, and a calendar in the kitchen with days crossed out. Yet the ink looked recent, as though he had written the line in a sudden fit of urgency. Who had he been trying to warn? Who else had known? Mara felt the pull of something that had once been routine for her: curiosity. Grief sharpened it instead of blunting it. She told herself that curiosity could be practical—she could find the kiln, find what her father had meant, and then leave. The town, of course, had another idea.