1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

“ R ency, I think you might be dead.” My cousin Caroline’s voice is disembodied, faded. Around me, the floorboards of the old building creak and groan as if slowly waking up alongside the still-lingering spring outside. Summer is late to arrive this year, and in spite of it being mid-June, the tulips are still bright spots of color along the cobbled sidewalks. Everything smells earthy and damp, even inside this ancient house.

I know all of this, of course, because I’m not dead.

“I don’t feel dead,” I call back, sidestepping a rickety antique chair with a red ribbon crossed over its arms to prohibit visitors from using it as a resting place.

“That’s not what this death certificate says,” I hear Caroline reply, still in the next room over. The half-house, half-historic funeral home we are touring is one of those small-town attractions that my cousin and I have passed dozens of times but never ventured into. It’s only now, looking to burn some time before walking to our dinner reservation, that we’ve paid the requisite three dollars to take a tour of the rickety building.

“Why not pop inside?” Caroline had said, elbowing me as we strolled down the quaint street in front of it. “If you’re going to move here, you might as well be acquainted with some local history. After all, you’re the history buff of the family, Miss History Teacher.”

“I don’t think the local funeral home-turned-museum really is at the top of my history to-do list,” I’d replied. “Plus, I’m just here for the summer to look out for Grandma Lydia. I am not moving here.”

“Sure you’re not,” she’d replied, blithe, before tucking her arm into the crook of my own. “Let’s tour anyway.”

And touring, we are. The woman who is walking us through looks mostly annoyed and barely engaged in our tour process. She hasn’t offered much commentary, instead wandering away in order to let us read the plaques that detail the roles of the different rooms, restored to look like they had in decades past. At Caroline’s comment about death certificates, though, she’d appeared, lingering at my cousin’s elbow.“There’s a death certificate right here, with your full name on it,” Caroline tells me as I approach. She points down at a binder of papers laid out on an antique dresser .

“That is a marriage certificate, actually,” the guide says. “Not a death certificate.”

“Why would you have a marriage certificate at a mortuary?” Caroline asks.

“Funeral home,” the woman corrects her. “But that is actually an interesting question. It’s not a well-known fact, but in the 1800s—and even into the mid-1950s—our town passed a law that allowed necrogamy.”

“Isn’t that bringing back people from the dead?” Caroline asks, faux scandalization tinting her voice. “I hardly think a town needs to pass a law for that. It’s literally impossible.”

I’m already breaking down and putting the word back together, so before the guide can correct her, I interject. “You’re thinking of necro mancy , Caro. Necro gamy is… marrying the dead?” I say it more like a question than a statement, and the tour guide raises her eyebrows, impressed.

“That’s right. It’s a practice that came over from places abroad, where fiancées could still get their partner’s pensions if they died during a war. Since 1883, over a hundred years ago, those living in our town could marry the dead—with the right paperwork, of course. For example, there would have to be an announcement of the marriage already published in the paper, and the families would have both already agreed to the union. That sort of thing. It had to be within two weeks of the knowledge of the person’s death. If the person had died in, let’s say, a war, then it’s possible that the fiancée wouldn’t have known of it for some time. Once she found out, she would have two weeks to decide if she wanted to move forward with the marriage.”

“So, you have a binder of old marriage licenses here… so the deceased can still get married?” My cousin’s curiosity is one of my favorite parts of her personality, but she is like a dog with a bone when it comes to finding answers.

“This license is part of a very specific collection of marriage licenses that also had published announcements of weddings but whose relationships were never fulfilled due to the death of one of the pair. The records were kept in case there was a case made for a posthumous wedding. Obviously, this one was never fulfilled, but the records were stored for some unknown reason and, a few years ago, rediscovered. We thought we’d put them on display, considering that we are one of the only towns in the United States to have allowed the practice. Some of these licenses are even partially signed, since there really wasn’t much of a consistent practice here in the township for decades after these laws fell out of use.”

“So maybe you are dead, Rency.” Caroline smirks. She taps the page of the album in front of me, and there it is: my name in a wide, fancy cursive scrawl—Florence Faber. This Florence Faber was born in 1909, over a hundred years ago. Her husband—no, her fiancé—had already signed the license, his own name a series of near-indecipherable loops. Just her signed name—my name—is missing from the contract.

“Ha ha,” I say, but my eyes are drifting to the wedding announcement. There is a photograph on the page, small and a bit blurred, but I can tell that the woman in the picture has the same signature riot of uncontrollable curls that runs in my family. “I wonder if this is the Florence Faber I’m named after.” There is a ring hung on a chain around my neck that belonged to my namesake. I try to remember how many “greats” separate me from her. Great-great-great-grandmother, maybe?

“She must be,” Caroline says. “Since you are moving here, you will have plenty of time to figure out that mystery. Maybe Grandma Lydia will know.”

Our tour guide drifts to another room, disinterested. And while I may not be dead, the sight of my name, written out in whorls reminiscent of the curls on both this woman’s head and my own, is making me feel a bit… off.

“You should sign it,” Caroline teases, fishing out a pen from her purse. “It’s like the town is welcoming you back into its arms. Stay a while, have a husband.” She pushes the pen into my hand.

“You shouldn’t joke about that,” I tell her, head swimming. “Look at the article—her fiancé died.” The man in the photograph—handsome, smartly dressed, face and figure somewhat blurred with the edges of time—had died on the day of his wedding. There is a tightness in my chest at the thought of that. What would it have been like, to be so close to marrying the person you loved, only to have them ripped from you?

My eyes sting at the sudden surge of emotion.

“It was a century ago,” Caroline points out. “I don’t think anyone is around to take offense anymore. But— oh my gosh, are you okay? Are you crying because of this dead guy?”

My eyes squeezed closed, I shake my head. “No, no. I just think this place is moldy or something. I don’t know, I feel off. I’ll be fine though.”

Caroline’s phone rings, a perky jingle that is not museum appropriate, and I crack my eyes to see that Caroline’s own fiancé’s name is displayed on the screen. In the next room, I hear our tour guide shush us. Caroline rolls her eyes before scanning me once more. “Are you sure you’re okay? Not crying over lost loves and all that?” I nod, and the woman hushes us again. “Okay, I’ll take this outside. Meet me there when you’re ready? Javier must have gotten us a table if he’s calling.”

I nod, feet rooted to the ground. “Sounds good. Be there in a second.”

Caroline answers the call in a whisper, stepping towards the door. As her footsteps fade, I’m gripped with a pounding need to examine the marriage license once again. I touch the paper, and I feel strangely connected to the aged page. The contact makes the pad of my finger tingle, as if I’m losing the sensation in my fingertip.

Yes, there is my name. Florence Faber. No one calls me that—it’s a family name. A family name. The thought rattles in my brain. Florence Faber, a family name. Yes, this is someone who was my blood. It’s impossible for it not to be. I feel it with full certainty. Our shared name.

Our shared name.

And with that thought, impossibly, irresistibly, my hand is lifting up towards the paper. I uncap the pen and, with the deftness of a signature scrawled hundreds of times in my twenty-six years of living, I sign my name on the dotted line.

I wake up the next morning with a slight headache and a strange twist in my stomach that has nothing to do with the red wine I drank at dinner. Even though I rarely have a glass, I’d agreed last night. “To celebrate your move to Oak River,” Caroline had insisted.

“I’m not moving here,” I’d reminded her.

“Then to celebrate that, for the summer, you’re only a thirty-minute drive from me,” she had replied. “And that we can be close-proximity, in-person besties, at least for the next few months.”

To that, I agreed to a glass.

As of three days ago, I’m a temporary resident of my grandma Lydia’s house. My father, aunts, and uncles are all worried about her. Almost a year ago, she’d had a stroke, and ever since then they have been going back and forth on what to do about her health and her house. Encourage her to move into one of their homes? Have someone move out there? Take turns spending weekends with her? Ask her to sell her house and move into a retirement community, one with rows of cute condos and managed lawns? No one can decide what the best thing to do is, but there is one clear consensus: Grandma Lydia needs help cleaning out the attic, filled with a century or more of family history and “heirlooms” and clutter, and she needs someone around to make sure that she doesn’t overtax herself like she did last summer.

And I’m the perfect person to help.

First of all, since I’m a teacher, I don’t have to take any time off from work to help out. Second, I love Grandma Lydia, her house, and Oak River. And even though the thought of packing my bags, quitting my job, and permanently moving doesn’t appeal to me and my take-no-risks attitude toward life, I’m delighted to spend a summer here. It’s two and a half hours closer to Lake Michigan than my hometown, where I still live and work, and it's thirty minutes from Caroline, who, while being my cousin, is also my best friend.

And third, I love history of any kind. Knowing more about the past makes me feel comfortable about the present. I love it so much that I’ve made a career out of it as a high school history teacher. Last year, I almost quit teaching so I could go to graduate school for a Master’s degree in History, Archive, and Museum Studies, but I couldn’t let go of the security of a job with health care and a steady paycheck. So, I let the opportunity slip by, not even deferring my acceptance. I wonder about that missed opportunity regularly, but I can’t decide if I regret letting it go. It would have been the unknown, and the unknown is a murky, scary place. I prefer the transparency of the known.

When my dad approached me about moving to Oak River, he knew exactly how to hook me in. “Don’t think of it like cleaning,” he had said. “Think of it like a family history project.” Grandma didn’t want the attic to be pawed through, its decades of contents thrown out and sorted by a rushed, uncaring hand. She’d always hoped someone in the family would be interested in helping put together a family history book. Of course, that was an irresistible carrot for me. I can’t help but love a good project, especially when it comes to history and stories and helping out my grandmother.

So, that’s why I let Caroline pull me into a celebration last night. I’m here for the summer and, other than helping Grandma around the house and working on the family history project, I’m free as a bird, boyfriendless, and (for the summer) jobless.

But no, it’s not the celebratory glass of Malbec that is making me feel off.

It’s because I signed that paper. I can't believe I did. I’m mortified. I am a historian. How could I deface a historical document? It was so stupid. Even though I felt so compelled in the moment, the act of signing that marriage license meant nothing. How could it? Sure, I imagine falling in love and getting married just as much as the next girl, but it’s not so much on my mind that I would sign a dead relative’s marriage certificate. It’s ludicrous. Completely ridiculous. Here I am, twenty-six years old, and I’m defacing property like an errant teen. What is wrong with me?

I resolve to go back and apologize today. To confess, to make amends, to pay for it. Anything to make this feeling go away. I feel… incomplete. Unfinished. Antsy and both exhausted and unable to lay in bed anymore.

Going to the museum and telling them what happened would make it go away, I’m sure of it.

I’ll go immediately.

Right after a coffee.

Downstairs, my grandmother is already awake. The bird clock on the wall indicates that it’s barely eight thirty, but I am sure that she’s been busy in her kitchen for at least an hour. The pot of coffee has at least two mugfuls missing already, and a small pan of cinnamon rolls is still steaming on the counter. The scene fits the aesthetics of the house, which is an old foursquare picked from a Sears catalog and built from a brick and wood kit before even my great-grandmother was born. It’s nearly as familiar to me as my own childhood home. I can’t bear the thought of it being sold.

“Woah, fresh cinnamon rolls?” I exclaim, peaking past the kitchen and into the small study my grandma has claimed as her “cozy corner.” She’s in her favorite chair, iPad on her lap and teacup of milky coffee at her elbow.

“How else will I convince you to move in with me permanently?” she says, not looking up from her lap. Even from a distance, I can tell she’s playing Wordle. The woman is addicted.

“Not you too,” I groan, stepping back into the kitchen. “Caroline was at me about it all last night.”

“Caroline!” I hear my grandma huff as I pour myself a cup of coffee into one of the few mugs in her cabinet. The teacups are cute and all, but I need something that isn’t rimmed in gold if I’m going to be productive today. “Oak River Canoe Rush 1998!!!” the mug declares in faded pinks and purples and teals. It’s older than me, but it’s kitschy and I like how everything in my grandma’s house has a story.

And right now, she has an attic full of stories waiting to be exhumed and for life to be breathed back into them—right after this cup of coffee.

“You tell that granddaughter of mine that she should visit me more!”

“I’m sure she will practically haunt this place now that Javi is busy with his residency,” I call back. “You’ll be sick of her in no time.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.” I’m eyeing the cinnamon rolls when, like a mind-reader, my grandma says, “Help yourself to a bun while they’re warm, Rency dear.”

I do just that, scooping one onto a plate before joining my grandmother in her cozy corner. As I balance the plate on my knee, I use the arm of the sofa as a table for me to scrawl out a to-do list. Grandma’s property is sprawling, but thankfully she sold the portions that included the big barn and the farm, along with nearly fifty acres, about fifteen years ago. The historic home is still hers, along with its accompanying parcel of sixty acres.

The house itself is tidy, the spaces fairly decluttered but for books and photos, but I know that the attic is stacked up to the eaves with boxes, all filled with family stories and rarely-looked-at trinkets. A hundred years of memories and family history crammed together in a tumble of cardboard. The last time I’d peeked up there was a decade ago and, intimidated by the dim lighting and the dusty shelves, I’d carefully eased myself back down the steep steps and never returned.

I know the instant my grandma completes her Wordle. “Ah ha!” she declares, looking up at me for the first time that day, triumph in her eyes. “Haunt! The word of the day.”

“Congratulations,” I say.

“I haven’t missed one in three weeks,” she confides, setting aside her iPad to pick up her teacup. “It keeps me sharp. Well, that and that language app you downloaded on my iPad for me.”

“You’ll be speaking like a local in the French countryside in no time,” I tease. “Ready to fall in love again?”

“Oh hush, you. I’m too old for all that.”

I shrug, a teasing tilt to my head. “I thought you were always telling the aunts and uncles about how young and spry you are.”

“I’m in my late seventies,” my grandma says, peering at me over the lenses of her glasses. “I’m hardly an invalid. Still, my love is all for my family these days. This, of course, says nothing about yourself. Maybe you should come with me to France and fall in love yourself.”

I huff out a laugh, but it’s audibly tinged with cynicism. “Highly unlikely,” I tell her. “I’m not sure the right man for me is out there.” Dating has been a rare but disappointing affair for me, featuring men who are more focused on fishing, video games, or the gym than in getting to know someone and sharing a life with them.

Grandma tsks. “It’s true. They don’t make them how they used to.” Her eyes are creasing at the edges, a clear indicator that she’s teasing me right back. “Besides, you’re an old soul.”

“Some people say that calling someone an old soul is just another way of saying they are weird,” I point out.

Her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline, the edge of a tumble of once red but now graying curls she still piles on top of her head. “Well, if the shoe fits,” she mumbles, pushing herself up to standing.

I gasp in mock offense. “Grandma!”

She tilts her head back, laughing. “Come on now, granddaughter of mine. I have something for that list of yours.”

She has, apparently, a lot of somethings. Still wrapped in my robe, I tour the property with the sort of detail that my previous visits as a guest hadn’t afforded. I realize after we stop at the detached garage and she makes me pull out an ancient metal toolbox that this isn’t going to be the look-at-my-flowers sort of tour, but instead a list of home repairs. The shutters needed to be cleaned, the nails on the sprawl of a porch needed to be hammered down, previously purchased but never installed sunshades needed to be hung.

My grandmother’s house is old, from the 1920s. Of course, it has been added to and modernized, but its setting—isolated, tucked back on a lonely road surrounded by fields and forest and decades-old lilacs—gives it a distinct creepy-old-house aesthetic.

For me, though, the house has nothing but good energy. My memories of this place are of spillings of sunlight through lazy dust motes, slow-spinning fans and percale sheets, of sparkling Christmas trees in a fire-warmed house during a snowstorm, all of us in hand-knit socks. It’s part of why, even though I’ve agreed to help with the family history project this summer, I can’t do what some of my aunts and uncles want me to do: convince my grandma to sell her land. Apparently, real estate in the area has become increasingly popular, and developers are scrambling for a chance to rezone land and build subdivisions and multi-use strip malls.

But I have always been overly sentimental when it comes to this place. It’s the epitome of home, a symbol of family, a physical construction of love.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to do all of this,” I confess. I can pound nails in with the best of them, and I can YouTube how to clean the dryer vents, but her list is extensive and involves ladders to heights I’m scared to climb and skills I don’t have.

“Of course not,” she says. “We will get a handyman. I know just the fellow. But I have to go to those doctor appointments of mine, and I have my morning volunteer work and then the church office work too, so I thought that, while I was away, you could be in charge. These workmen rarely show up when they say they will, and I can’t spend my whole life waiting around for them.”

She sends me off to get changed out of my pajamas and claims that she’ll be back by one in the afternoon—two at the latest. “So we can get started on our project together,” she promises.

By the time I dig through my suitcases for acceptable work clothes and shove a hat over my barely wrangled braid of dark curls, my grandma is long gone. The list of tasks I scribbled out is on the kitchen countertop, the handyman’s number scrawled at the top with the message “mornings only!” circled. I’m glad she’s already called—she’s a local, and I’m sure she’ll get the best deal on something like this.

Pouring the dredges of coffee carafe into my mug, I decide to tackle the porch first. Maybe a different girl would leave it all to the handyman, but every job he does is money from my grandma’s pocket, and there’s no way I’m letting her pay some guy to pound nails into the wooden decking.

The deck is a bit wobbly in some places, so I return to the shed, determined to find something to solve the problem. Thanks to my deceased grandfather’s organization of all of the assorted nuts and bolts and screws into carefully labeled plastic drawers, it only takes a few minutes for me to find the deck nails. I carefully grip a handful, turning to open the partially closed door of the shed only to nearly drop them all when a cat appears, seemingly fabricated out of nothing but the shed’s shadows, in the doorway. I yelp; it arches its back, and every hair on its back lifts, a caricature of a scared black cat, before darting away. My heart is pounding and I have to laugh at myself—since when has a stray barn cat ever scared me? The farm has always had them.

Forty-five minutes later, I’m nearly done when I catch a glimpse of the handyman striding around the side of the house.

“Hey!” I call out, waving with the hammer in hand. “Over here! Sorry, I didn’t expect you so soon.” Grandma had talked about unpredictability, but this guy was here in no time at all.

The man pauses, looks up as if startled to see me. “Me?” he says, looking behind him.

“You’re the handyman, right?”

He blinks at me. Even though there are a few dozen feet between us, I can see how pale his eyes are, a contrast to his rich, dark auburn hair. He nods slowly, as if convincing himself of the answer, and I’m suddenly suspicious. He’s dressed in a nondescript sort of way, in a heavy cotton button-up and some sort of dark work pants, but he hardly looks like the stereotypical tee-shirt-and-tool-belt repair guy I expected.

“That’s me. Henry the handyman. Here to help with the Faber place.” He points beyond me, to the house at my back. Clearly I look skeptical, because he adds, “Sorry to look so confused. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Ah yes, anticipating a spunky elderly lady, huh?”

“Exactly. Lydia’s quite the woman.” His voice holds a confident familiarity, and my suspicions ease.

“She’s left quite the list for you, too,” I reply, a smile on my face. “But I doubt I’ll be quite as meticulous a supervisor. ”

His evaluative gaze moves from me to the pile of tools I’ve pulled out onto the porch.

“I’m good with lists,” he offers, stepping towards me. I hold the clipboard out to him. Right as he reaches for it, my fingers feel suddenly numb, and I fumble the pass. The man huffs out a laugh even as he catches it, and had I been a redhead like my grandma or Caroline, I’m positive I would have turned beet red.

“Sorry,” I say. “Not enough coffee yet today, I guess.” Really, it was something else that had caused me to suddenly drop the list: a tingling in my fingers, right at the moment his hand had touched it. It was a strangely familiar feeling, but shocking nonetheless.

The man doesn’t reply, which makes me feel even more embarrassed. “I’m going to get another cup while you look it over. Want one?”

“I’m all set,” he replies, already reading my neatly printed list. “Thanks though.”

I fumble through making another half pot of coffee, oddly unnerved from the interaction. I’m not grace personified, but usually I’m not quite so embarrassing, cute guy or not. As I wait for it to brew, I eat another half of a cinnamon roll. When I return to the porch, mug in hand, the handyman is looking out towards the edge of my grandmother’s property, where the fields meet the forest and our land merges into the neighbor’s.

At the sound of the screen door hitting the doorframe, he turns. The sun catches his eyes, and they look nearly opaque in its light—seafoam-green flashes of color under dark eyebrows. The color is shocking—magnetic, somehow—and I have to intentionally focus on my words.

“Thoughts?” I say, nodding at the clipboard in his hand.

“It is quite the list,” he agrees. “I think it will take me a while.”

“Well, so long as you keep it to the mornings, you should take as long as it needs. I, um, did Lydia already talk to you about the rate?”

“We haven’t,” he replies, hesitating a bit. “Should I wait until she and I talk about it before beginning?”

“Well, what’s your estimate?”

He looks over the house, eyes tracing the outline. “Mornings only? I think five days. A few hours a day. So, let’s say an even five hundred.”

My eyes pop at the number. A hundred a day doesn’t seem right for a half day of labor. “Is that your standard rate?” I ask.

“For Lydia? Yes,” he replies. “Do you think it’s too high?”

“No, the opposite, actually. Maybe I’m just used to city prices.” Last time I needed a quote on something in my rental, the guy wouldn’t even come to the house to look at it for less than a hundred dollars, let alone fix it.

“Probably. But Lydia and I have worked together before. I don’t think she’d expect any different.”

“Have you?” I ask, fishing a bit.

“That’s right. I’ve been maintaining the little stone house in the woods for years now.” He points out towards the treeline, back to where a thin driveway pulls into the forest, leading to another building.

Back to the little house in the woods.

That’s what everyone calls it, when they think to talk about it at all. They say it like it’s a title: The Little House in the Woods.

I’m startled to hear this man talk of it. No one ever does, not really. In fact, the little house is one of the strangest parts of my childhood. Due to a surveying error, it straddles two properties—my grandparents’ and the neighbors—but neither my family nor the neighbor, Karl, ever seemed interested in doing anything with it. Instead it sits, alone and eerily preserved in the forest.

Or, I suppose, not so eerily, if this man—Henry, he said his name is—has been keeping it up. Still, it’s strange to hear anyone mention it. Ever since I stumbled on it during a childhood game of hide and seek, I’ve been fascinated by its stone walls, the hand carved arch of its entryway and hazy glass of its attached greenhouse, but I’ve always been the only one who seems curious about its strange existence.

When I told my younger cousins about it, they’d never seen it before. The older ones shrugged, saying that they knew it was there but didn’t care about it at all. For me, though, it’s an object of endless curiosity. Throughout various points in my life, I’ve peered into its windows, even jiggled its handles. It was always empty of people, even though the interior seemed perfectly clean.

When my father found out, he told me I should stay away from it but didn’t offer a reason. My grandfather had a similar response of disinterest and discouragement. “It’s not worth thinking about,” he said after I had asked question after question.

And that’s how it really was—no one thought about it at all.

Except for me.

And, apparently, Mr. Henry Handyman.

“The little house in the woods?” I repeat.

“Ah.” The man nods. “You haven’t heard of it.” He says it as if he knows it to be true. As if, of course, I wouldn’t have known about the building nested in a small clearing of the woods.

“I have,” I say, defensive. His eyebrows shoot into the sweep of his bangs.

“Really. That’s interesting.”

I open my mouth to tell him that it isn’t all that interesting, considering how many weeks and months I’d spent here on the property owned by my family for nearly a hundred and fifty years, when he taps on the list with my pen. “So, is it a deal? Five hundred for the week?”

I snap my mouth closed, perturbed. “Yes. Fine, it’s a deal. Five hundred for the week.”

We look at each other, his pale green eyes meeting my own light brown gaze. He shifts his weight, and for a second, I think he is going to stick out his hand for us to shake on the deal. Instead, he simply nods.

“Let’s get to work, then, shall we?”