The Ozark Sisters’ Too Evil for History Books Mercy & Temperance Things

The road into Canain Hollow was never entered on any county map, and the men who cut it were dead before the century turned. The ridges come together there like cupped hands, holding a cold that does not lift until noon. In that hollow from 1889 until 1911, two sisters named Mercy and Temperance Hail kept a boarding house for aged and infirm women, and they were paid for it every quarter by the government of the United States.

In November of 1911, a federal pension examiner named Elias Ward walked up that road to ask why the money kept moving after the women stopped. Here is what the record says, and the record does not flinch. Temperance Hail was buried by Halloway County in 1898 in a closed box with a minister present. And Temperance Hail went on writing letters for 13 more years.

How does a county bury a woman who has not died, who fills a grave and then goes home to supper? and why when Ward finally counted the names in that ledger were only nine of the 51 women at all. Before we go up that road, tell me in the comments what city you are in and what time it is where you are right now. I want to know who is out there in the dark with me tonight.

And if you want more stories that history tried to bury, subscribe because this is the only place they get told. Elas Ward was 43 years old, a clerk by temperament and an examiner by promotion, and he had come to the Ozarks with a leather case containing 17 quarterly vouchers he could not reconcile. He was not a lawman.

He carried no weapon and had no authority to arrest anyone. What he carried instead was a question about money. and money, as he would learn that winter, is the one witness that cannot be talked out of its testimony. The livery man in Halloway put him down at the mouth of the hollow, and would not take the wagon further. There was a reason given, and it was not a good one.

The road was soft, the man said, and the mayor had been favoring a foot. Ward looked at the road, which was frozen hard as a rail, and he looked at the mayor, which was sound, and he wrote in his field book that evening that the man had lied to him pleasantly and without effort, in the manner of somebody who had given the same lie many times before.

That is the first entry in the Ward file. It is dated the 9th of November, 1911. It says nothing about murder. It says only that a man would not drive a wagon up a good road. So he walked. The last mile of Cane Hollow rises steeply between two limestone ridges, and the timber there is oak and hickory, and in November it stands bare and gray, and lets the wind come straight down the cut.

Underfoot the ground is not soil so much as a thin skin of leaf mold over rock. The whole of that country sits on limestone. The water has been eating for a very long time, and it is hollow beneath in ways no one has ever fully mapped. Springs come out of hillsides where no stream goes in. Streams go into hillsides and are not seen again.

The old families in Holloway County had a word for a place where the ground gave a hollow sound underfoot. They called it a drum, and they did not build on it, and they had reasons that had gotten mixed up with superstition over four generations, but had begun as ordinary good sense. The Hail House stood at the head of the hollow, where the ridges closed.

It was a two-story frame building with a deep porch and a stone foundation, and behind it, dug into the hillside, a spring house of the same stone. Ward saw it first from a quarter mile down the cut and the last of the afternoon light. And what he noticed was not the house. What he noticed was the chimney.

There was a light moving behind the windows on the ground floor going room to room the way a person carries a lamp. There were two lamps burning steady on the upper floor. It was 31° and falling, and the wind was coming down the hollow hard enough to make the bare hickories knock together, and no smoke came from that chimney.

None, not a threat of it. Ward stood in the road for some while doing the arithmetic that clerks do, which is the arithmetic of things that do not add. A house with lamps lit is a house with people in it. A house with people in it in the Ozarks in November has a fire in it.

He wrote in his field book in a hand that is noticeably smaller than his other entries that the house appeared to be inhabited but not warmed. Then he crossed that out. Then he wrote it again. He was still standing there when the bell rang. It hung on a post at the corner of the porch. an ordinary iron farm bell of the kind used to call men in from a field with a rope on it that came down to a peg.

Nobody was on the porch. Nobody was in the yard. The rope hung slack against the post, and Ward could see the whole length of it, and he saw the bell swing once, and then a second time, and heard it carry down the hollow, flat, and cracked, the way iron sounds in cold air. Then it stopped. The rope had never moved.

I want you to sit with that for a moment because Elias Ward did. He was a man who trusted paper over eyes. And in his field book that night, he wrote a sentence that a federal examiner has no business writing. And then he underlined it twice. There is an explanation for the bill. There is an explanation for the chimney. Both of them are in this story.

And both of them are worse than what he was afraid of. To understand what Ward walked into, you have to go back 22 years to the spring of 1889 when two women stepped off the train at Halloway with four trunks and a bankdraft. They gave their names as Mercy Hail and Temperance Hail, sisters of Ohio.

Mercy was the elder, 34 that year, a tall woman with a long jaw and a habit of standing very still while other people talked. Temperance was 31, smaller, sweeter-faced, and it was Temperance who did the talking. The station master remembered them for 20 years afterward, and what he remembered was that they were dressed in mourning that was slightly out of fashion, and that they were the most agreeable pair of women he had ever had occasion to help with luggage.

That word comes up again and again in the depositions. Agreeable, not charming, not beautiful, not clever, agreeable. People felt easy around them and later they could not say why and some of them never got over it. They bought the old Ketchum place at the head of Cane Hollow for $410 which was under its value even then because nobody in Halloway County wanted it. The Ketchums had left in 1881.

The reason they left is not in the deed record and the family did not discuss it. What is in the record is that the property included 71 acres, a house in fair repair, a good stone spring house, and a spring that ran cold and heavy with dissolved mineral all year and never once froze. That spring is the whole business.

Understand the spring and you understand everything the Hail Sisters did for the next 22 years. Because in 1889, mineral water was not folklore. It was medicine and it was an industry. All through the Ozarks, towns were selling themselves as health resorts on the strength of water that tasted of iron and sulfur, and people with money, and people without it came by rail to drink it, and bathe in it, and be made well.

Eureka Springs had grand hotels. So the sisters were not proposing anything strange. They were proposing something ordinary in a place where the ordinary thing had a market. The advertisements began appearing in the autumn of 1890 and they ran for the better part of two decades in church weeklys and Veterans Association papers and the small city dailies of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. They were never large.

Ward eventually collected 68 of them and they are in the file cut out and pasted onto cards and the language barely changes across 20 years. A quiet country home for aged and infirmed ladies healing mineral waters Christian attendance terms reasonable and arrangements made for ladies in receipt of a government pension.

That last line is the hook and it is the reason this story exists and it was aimed with real precision. After the Civil War, the United States paid pensions to the widows of Union soldiers. And by the 1890s, those payments had been broadened and raised until an elderly widow might draw 8,10 a month for the rest of her life. It was not a fortune.

It was, however, reliable. It arrived by mail, and it followed the woman wherever she went. There were tens of thousands of such women scattered across the middle of the country by the turn of the century. Many of them without husbands, many without children living, many of them a burden to relatives who did not say so out loud, but felt it every day.

The advertisement spoke to those relatives. It said in the politest possible language that there was a clean Christian place in the hills where the difficult problem of an aging woman could be solved and that it would cost the family nothing because the government would pay. The first border came up the hollow in June of 1891.

Her name was Hannah Sloum. She was 67 years old and she was the widow of a corporal of the 21st Missouri who had died of dysentery at Shiloh without firing his rifle. Her nephew in Quincy, Illinois put her on the train and he wrote to a friend afterward that the arrangement had been a great relief to his wife. He never visited.

The distance is 190 mi. Hannah Sloum lived at Cain Hollow for one year and eight months. There are three letters from her in the file and they are worth your attention because they are the first draft of a document the Hail Sisters would go on producing for 20 years. The first letter is recognizably a person.

She complains about the road. She says the water tastes of pennies and that she does not care for it. she asks after a dog. The second letter, four months later, is warmer, vagger, and much more pleased. The complaints are gone. The road is picturesque now. The water is doing her good. The third letter from the winter of 1892 is one long, soft paragraph about how kind the sisters are, and how well she is sleeping.

and it asks nothing and mentions no one by name and the handwriting has changed in a way that the nephew who was not a suspicious man put down to age. Hannah Sloum was recorded dead on the 14th of February 1893 of heart failure which was a diagnosis that meant a person had stopped living and no one intended to ask further. The certificate was signed by Dr.

for Alonzo Grady of Halloway. She was buried in the small plot on the hillside above the house because the roads were bad and it was February and her nephew did not come. Her pension continued to be drawn for 11 more years. Now hold on to that number because Elias Ward did not know it yet.

standing in the parlor of that cold house on the evening of the 9th of November 1911 with a woman who called herself Mercy Hail bringing him a cup of tea he did not drink. He knew only that 17 vouchers were wrong. She was courteous. She was everyone agreed agreeable. She told him she kept a full book of the house’s affairs because she was a great believer in a tidy account, and she said it as if she were offering him a slice of cake.

Then she went and got it. It was a bound ledger with a green cloth cover, and the entries went back to 1891, and the hand was clean and even and easy to read. Ward turned to the record of deaths because that was the number he needed and he ran his finger down the column and he found the entry for a border named Elvira Doss.

Beside her name was a date of death. Beside the date was a note of the certificate, and beneath both of them, in the same clean hand, was the ink entry that made his hands go cold in that unheated room, because the ink had been laid down and blotted, and dated a full 2 weeks before Elva Doss died. He looked up at the entry above it to be certain he had read it right, and that one had been written by somebody else.

The second hand was smaller than Mercy Hails, and it leaned backward rather than forward, and it belonged to a woman who had been in the ground for 13 years. Ward did not know that on the 9th of November. He knew only that two people kept the book, and that the woman across the room from him had said in the parlor, in a pleasant voice, that she attended to the accounts herself, because her sister was gone, and there had been no one else to do it since. He wrote down the exact words.

He was a clerk. Exact words were his trade, and by the end of that winter, the exactness of that one sentence would put four men in a federal courtroom. But to see how the thing was built, you have to leave the parlor and go back to 1894 and to a widow in St. Louis named Adeline Row. She was 61 years old that spring, small and brisk and troublesome, and she had a temper that her family described as spirited when they were being kind and other things when they were not.

Her husband Josiah had served three years with an Illinois volunteer regiment and had come home with a wound in his hip that never properly closed, and he had died of it slowly across two decades. Adeline drew $12 a month on his account. She lived with her daughter Karen in three rooms above a dry goods store on Cass Avenue and Karen had a husband and four children and a fifth coming and the rooms were three and there is no villain in that arithmetic.

There is only a family with more people than space. Karen Rode Dietrich answered the advertisement in a church weekly in March of 1894. She kept the clipping for the rest of her life. It is in the file because she gave it to Ward herself 17 years later sitting in a rented room in Holloway with her hands folded and she asked him to read it aloud to her and then she asked him to read it again.

The correspondence that followed is preserved almost entire and it is the most instructive document in this entire history because it shows you the machine working on a person who is not a fool. Temperance Hail wrote the letters that was her office in the partnership. Her hand was small and neat and slightly backwardleaning, and her pros had a quality that 50 years of confidence men have not improved upon.

She never oversold. She raised the objections herself before the family could. She wrote that the road was poor and that she would not pretend otherwise. She wrote that a lady used to the noise of a city might find the hollow lonesome at first, and that some never took to it, and that if Mrs. Ro should be unhappy after a season, no one at Cain Hollow would think ill of her for going home.

She wrote that the terms were $8 a month, that this was less than the cost of keeping a lady in town, and that the balance of a pension above that sum would, of course, remain the lady’s own. to spend as she pleased. Read that last part again. The sisters never asked for the whole pension, not in writing, not ever.

Asking for all of it would have looked like what it was. They asked for 2/3 of it and left the rest in the woman’s hands, and that fraction of restraint is what made the whole thing survive for 22 years. Adeline Row went up the hollow in September of 1894. Karen rode with her as far as Halloway and remembered afterward that her mother had been in a fine sharp mood all the way down on the train, criticizing the seats, the coffee, and the conductor’s mustache.

That is the last picture Karen had of her mother as her mother. The letters began 3 weeks later, and they came like clockwork for 4 years. And here is the shape of them. The early ones are Adeline entire. She reports that the food is plain and that she has told mercy hail. So she reports that there are five other ladies and that two of them are dull and one snores through the wall.

She says the water tastes of pennies and old nails and that she drinks it under protest because temperance stands there until she does. She asks about the children by name. all four of them. And she asks about the baby, and she gives instructions about a christening gown that she does not trust Karen to launder correctly. By the following spring, the letters have begun to smooth over.

The other ladies are no longer dull. They are dear. The food is no longer plain. It is wholesome. She still asks after the children, but not all four by name now, and she has stopped giving instructions. By 1896, she is sleeping a great deal and says so happily in nearly every letter as though it were an accomplishment.

There is a phrase that begins to recur that she is very comfortable. It appears 11 times across 19 surviving letters. Karen noticed it. She wrote back and asked plainly whether her mother was being given anything to make her sleep. And the answer came from Temperance Hail on Adelyn’s behalf, explaining that the mineral water had a quieting property well known in the district, that older ladies often took to it that way, and that Mrs.

Row had lately been in the best spirits anyone at the house could recall. That answer was true in every particular except the reason and we will come back to what was in the water and who sold it and why it was perfectly legal to buy it by mail. Karen visited once. The visit is important. She came in June of 1897 on the train and hired a wagon in Halloway and the delivery man drove her up without complaint because in 1897 he had no reason not to.

She spent 4 hours at the house. She sat on that deep porch with her mother and drank lemonade and met Mercy who was quiet and attentive and temperance who was warm and asked after the children by name and got all four right. The rooms were clean. There were flowers cut and set in a jar on the hall table.

Two other ladies came out and sat with them and were perfectly pleasant. and one of them held Karen’s hand for a long moment and smiled at her without saying anything and Karen thought that was only age. Karen went home and told her husband that she had been worrying over nothing and she believed that for 14 years. There was one thing.

She mentioned it to Ward in 1911, and she said she had not thought of it once in all that time until he asked her to describe the house, and then it came back to her hole. The hall on the ground floor ran straight through the house from the front door to a back door, and about 2/3 of the way along it, there was a second door on the left, and that door had a padlock on it.

not a lock, a padlock, on a hasp on the inside of a house in the middle of the day. She had asked about it lightly, the way you ask about anything on a pleasant afternoon. Temperance said it was the winter store, and that Mercy was particular about the preserves. Everyone laughed. Adeline laughed too, and Karen, sitting in that rented room 17 years later, told Ward that what she remembered was not the padlock.

What she remembered was that her mother had laughed a half second after everybody else, the way a person laughs when they are copying the room. Now we come to 1898 and to the death of Temperance Hail. She took sick in January. The nature of the illness is given in the county record as a wasting fever. Dr. Alonzo Grady attended her four times across five weeks and was paid and the payments are entered in Mercy’s ledger in her own forwardleaning hand.

On the 2nd of March 1898, Temperance Hail was recorded dead at the age of 40. The funeral was held at the head of the hollow on a raw morning 3 days later. A minister named Vance came up from Halloway and read over the box. The undertaker was a man named Corwin Cypes who had a shop on the square and a contract with the county for popper burials.

There were 11 people present and their names are in the church record. And among them were the postmaster of Halloway, a man named Pervvis Tol and the doctor and the livery man, and two of the borders from the house, who stood at the back in borrowed shawls and did not speak. The coffin was closed. Seeps explained to anyone who asked that the wasting fever had left the deceased in a condition her sister did not wish remembered and that Miss Mercy had asked particularly that the box not be opened and everybody thought that was a decent and womanly

thing to ask and nobody opened it. Mercy Hail stood at the graveside in black and did not weep. And afterward she thanked each of the 11 by name and gave them coffee in the front room. And there is not one account from that day that suggests any person present felt anything but sorrow for her. She was alone now.

That was the phrase the county settled on, and it followed her for 13 years and did more work than any lie she ever told. Poor Miss Mercy alone up there with all those old women to see too. Six weeks after the funeral, the Halloway County Court approved the transfer of the county’s indigent care allowance, a small quarterly sum to Mercy Hail on the grounds of her increased burden.

Pervvis Tall, the postmaster, sat on the board that approved it. Corwin Cypes submitted the burial invoice to the same board, and it was paid in full, $18, for a plain box, a hearse, and two men with shovels. Stay with me now because this is the hinge of the entire history, and it turns on a piece of paper.

The letters from Adelyn Row stopped in the autumn of 1898. Karen wrote twice with no reply, and then a third time worried. And on the 11th of December, she received a letter from Mercy Hail informing her with great gentleness that her mother had died in her sleep on the 28th of November, that a doctor had attended, that she had been laid in the hillside plot beside her friends, and that she had spoken of Karen and the children at the last, and had been in her final months very comfortable. Karen Dietrich did not go.

Her fifth child was 2 months old and it was December and the fair was $7.40. She has been judged for that by people who have never had five children and $7. She wrote to the doctor and received a courteous reply confirming the particulars. She had a notice put in the paper. She hung black on the door. She mourned her mother properly and completely, and she went on with her life for 4 months.

And in April of 1899, a letter came to the rooms above the dry goods store on Cass Avenue, addressed in a hand Karen had known since childhood, the hand that had written out receipts and christening instructions, and 40 years of household lists. It was her mother’s hand, not an imitation of it. hers, down to the way she made a capital D, down to the little upward flick that ended every line as though she were in a hurry to get on to the next thing.

It said that she was very comfortable and had asked after the children by name, and it was dated the 2nd of April, 1899, 4 months after Halloway County had recorded Adeline Row into the ground. Corin Dietrich read that letter standing in the doorway with the baby on her hip and then she sat down on the floor of the hall and her husband found her there 20 minutes later still holding it.

What she did next is the thing you have to understand if you are going to understand how a house like Cain Hollow survives 22 years. She wrote to Mercy Hail. She did not write to a sheriff or to a lawyer or to the pension office. She wrote a frightened apologetic half-s sentence at a time letter to the woman who had told her that her mother was dead, and she asked whether there had been some terrible mistake.

The reply came inside a week, and it is a small masterpiece of cruelty. Mercy Hail wrote that she had wept over Mrs. Dietrich’s letter. She wrote that she knew the hand well because she had seen it every day for four years. And then she explained that in the last summer of her life, Adeline Row had taken to writing letters and putting them by whole batches of them to be sent at intervals after she was gone because she had a horror of being forgotten and wished her daughter to go on hearing from her.

Mercy wrote that she had promised to post them and had been posting them and that if it caused pain, she would stop at once, and she begged forgiveness for a kindness clumsily done. Karen wrote back and asked her to keep sending them. They came for 11 years, two or three a year, never more, dated in a rolling sequence that never quite ran out.

She was very comfortable. She asked after the children by name, and the names went on being right. All four, and then the fifth, whose name Adelyn Row had never in her life heard spoken. That detail is in Karen’s deposition, and Ward marked it in the margin with a single vertical line, which was the strongest thing that man ever did with a pencil.

Now leave St. Louis. Go back up the hollow into the house itself because so far we have only stood on the porch. Everything you have heard until now came from outside from letters and deeds and county minet books. What happened inside those walls is known to us from exactly one living source and she was 14 years old when she started work there.

Her name was Ivy Coyle. She was born in 1990 on the far side of Hobs Ridge, the fourth of seven children in a family that farmed 40 stony acres and did not own them. Her father broke his shoulder in the spring of 1904 and did not set it properly. And by summer, the family was letting out its children.

Ivy went up Cain Hollow in July to be a house girl at $3 a month and her board. Her mother walked her up. Mercy Hail met them on the porch and looked at Ivy for a long moment without speaking and then said that she seemed a quiet sort of girl and Ivy’s mother said yes, she was. And that was the whole of the interview.

Ivy Coyle worked in that house for 7 years. She was 21 when she gave her statement to Elias Ward across four days in December of 1911. and that statement runs to 61 pages and it is the only interior view of Cain Hollow that exists anywhere. She described the work first because that is how people describe their lives.

She was up at 4 to lay the kitchen fire. She carried water. She carried trays. There were between six and nine ladies in residence at any time in her years on the upper floor, two to a room, and she took a tray up to each of them in the morning and again in the evening, and she took down the trays and washed them.

She swept, she scrubbed the hall floor on Fridays. On Tuesday, she walked the four miles down to Halloway with a canvas satchel and collected the mail from Pervvis Tull at the post office and carried it back up. And she never once looked inside the satchel because Miss Mercy had told her the first week that the lady’s correspondence was private and that a girl who opened another woman’s letter was a girl with no character.

She said the house was clean. She said that 12 times. It seemed to matter to her that people understand this. It was a clean, quiet, well-ordered house, and the ladies were fed properly, and the sheets were changed, and there was never any shouting in it, not once in seven years. The ladies themselves are where her account starts to bend.

They were pleasant, she said. They were always pleasant. They sat in the upstairs rooms and in good weather on the porch, and they smiled, and they said kind things to her, and they slept a great deal, and they did not go anywhere. Not down the road, not to the spring, not to church ever in 7 years.

When Ivy came in with a tray, a lady would look up and smile and be pleased to see her. And Ivy might come back 4 hours later and be greeted with exactly the same words in exactly the same tone, as though the first visit had not occurred. They took the water twice a day, morning and night. Miss Mercy carried it up herself in a covered pitcher and stood while each lady drank, and Ivy was not permitted to do that part, and she never questioned it, because there were a great many things a house girl was not permitted to do.

She did notice one thing about the water. It was not always the same water. Most days, Miss Mercy filled the pitcher at the spring house, but once or twice a week she filled it in the locked room off the hall, and Ivy knew that because she could hear the pump handle through the door, and she could smell what came out, and it was not the pennies and iron smell of the spring.

It was sweeter than that. It smelled, she said, like a cough remedy. Now the locked room. The hall ran straight through the house, front door to back, and twothirds of the way along on the left, there was a door with a hasp and a padlock, and the padlock was fastened whenever Ivy was in the hall, without exception, for 7 years.

She was told it was the winter store. She was never sent into it. In seven years, she never once saw it open in daylight. She saw it open at night twice. The first time was in her second winter, 1905. She had come down for a rag because a lady on the upper floor had been sick, and the hall was dark, and the padlock was hanging open on the door was a jar by a hand’s breath, and there was light coming out of it, not lamp light.

It was lower and steadier and colder than lamplight, and it came up rather than across, as though it were rising from below the level of the floor. She stood there long enough to hear something, and what she heard was a sound of water moving, a lot of water, more water than a house has in it.

Then Miss Mercy spoke to her from the dark at the far end of the hall and asked what she was doing out of her bed. And Ivy said about the rag. And Miss Mercy said, “Get it then and go up.” And Ivy did. And when she came back through the hall 2 minutes later, the door was shut and the padlock was closed and Miss Mercy was gone.

She was 15. She told nobody. Who would she have told? her mother, four miles over a ridge, who had seven children and a husband with a ruined shoulder and $3 a month coming in from that house. Then there was the singing. It began in her third year, or rather that is when she first let herself notice it, and it happened perhaps once a fortnight, always late, always after the house had gone quiet.

She slept on a cot in a small room off the kitchen and the kitchen had a plank floor over a shallow crawl space and the singing came up through the floor. She was very careful with word about how she described it. She said it was not words. She said if you woke suddenly and heard it, you would think it was a woman humming to herself somewhere below you in the ground a long way down and that the pitch of it wandered.

She said sometimes it was one voice and sometimes she thought it was two. She said it stopped if you got up and put your ear to the boards and started again when you lay back down. And she said that with the flat patience of a person who has explained something many times and been smiled at. She did tell somebody about the singing. She told Dr. Alonzo Grady.

He came up the hollow every second Wednesday, and he had been doing it since before Ivy was born. He was a heavy red-faced genial man of about 60 who called every woman in the county daughter and was liked. And in 7 years, Ivy Coyle testified she never once saw Dr. Grady examine a border, not listen to a chest, not take a pulse, not go up the stairs. He came in the front door.

He sat in the front room with Miss Mercy for perhaps 40 minutes. He drank coffee. He wrote for a while at the little table by the window and he left. Ivy told him about the singing on a Wednesday in 1906 in the hall while he was putting on his coat because he was the only educated person who ever came into that house.

She was 16 and she was frightened and she told him plainly that she heard a woman singing under the kitchen floor. Dr. Grady laughed. He put his hand on her head, and he told her that a growing girl who works from half 4 in the morning until 9 at night will hear all manner of things, and that it was the wind in the rocks, and that this whole country was hollow underneath and full of noises, and that she was not to trouble Miss Mercy with it, because Miss Mercy had burdens enough.

Then he went out to his buggy and drove down the hollow. And in his bag folded, were four blank certificates of death that he had signed that afternoon at the little table by the window with the date and the name left empty. Ivy did not trouble Miss Mercy with it. She stopped mentioning the singing to anyone at all, and she went on carrying trays for five more years, and she came to believe in the way a young person does when every adult agrees against her that there was something faulty in her own hearing.

The last night of her seventh year, in the second week of November 1911, a stranger came up the road on foot with a leather case and stood a long time in the yard looking at the chimney, and Ivy watched him from the kitchen window and thought that he was going to freeze standing there.

She was laying the table in the front room after he had gone up to the room they gave him. And Miss Mercy came in behind her and stood in the doorway and watched her work. “Set four places,” Miss Mercy said. Ivy stopped with the plates in her hands. “There was herself who ate in the kitchen and never at that table.” “There was Miss Mercy.

There was the gentleman from the government,” she said. Miss Mercy, there’s three. And Mercy Hail said in the same pleasant voice she used for everything that she was aware of how many there were, and that Ivy was to set four. Ivy Coyle set four places, and she was sent to the kitchen before supper was served, and she never learned who sat in that fourth chair. But she heard the chair move.

She was three rooms away with the door shut and she heard the legs of it drag on the boards. And then she heard under the murmur of talk a second woman’s voice. Words field book for the evening of the 9th of November records supper with Miss Hail and mentions no one else at the table.

He wrote it, however, in the smaller hand, and on the facing page, without explanation, he had written a single line. The house has more rooms in it than it has doors. He was a clerk. He had been counting. The Hail House presented from the road a plain twotory frame front of 38 ft. Ward paced the outside of it the next morning, which was the 10th, on the pretext of admiring the ridge. Then he paced the inside.

The hall ran the length of the house, the front room, the dining room, the kitchen, the small room off the kitchen where the girl slept, the stairs six rooms above. He totted it up the way a man totals a column, and he came up 9 ft short on the ground floor on the left side behind the padlock door. Nine feet is a closet.

9 ft is a winter store, exactly as he had been told, except that in that 9 ft on the previous night, Ward had heard a pump handle work, and a pump handle means a shaft, and a shaft means the thing it draws from is underneath. Now, we have to go under the house. And to do that, we have to go back four years to the summer of 1907 and to a woman named Vera Sykes, who is the only border in 22 years who ever got out of Cane Hollow on her own feet.

She was 58, which made her young for that house, and she was the widow of a sergeant of the 14th Iowa, and she had been at Cain Hollow 11 weeks. Her sister-in-law in Kyok had made the arrangement. Vera Sykes had a bad heart, genuinely diagnosed by two physicians, and she had also, it turned out, been raised on a farm in a limestone county, and knew the taste of good water from bad.

She stopped drinking what was in the picture. She was clever about it. She held the cup to her mouth and tipped it and let it run into the collar of her night dress. And she did that twice a day for 9 days. And on the 10th day, for the first time in 11 weeks, Vera Sykes woke up. That is her own phrasing, woke up.

She said afterward that she had not been asleep exactly, but that the 11 weeks behind her were like a corridor she had walked down without looking at any of the doors, and that she could remember agreeing to things and being pleased and being very comfortable, and could not remember a single thing she had thought. What she did in the following three days is a small monument to human nerve. She went on smiling.

She went on being agreeable. She let Mercy Hail stand over her while she pretended to drink, and she began quietly to count the ladies in the house, because something in her had noticed that there were more meals carried up the stairs than there were faces at the porch. There were seven ladies she could see. Ivy Coyle carried nine trays.

On the third night, Vera Sykes got out of her bed and went barefoot down the stairs and stood in the hall and the padlock was open because it was a Wednesday and Dr. Grady had been that afternoon and Wednesday nights were when the work got done. She opened the door. Her account of what she saw is four sentences long in the deposition Ward took from her in Kiokook in January of 1912.

and he did not press her for more. And I am not going to embroider what she gave. She said that behind the door there was a room the size of a pantry with a pump in it and a shelf of bottles. She said that in the floor of that room there was a hatch standing open with a ladder going down into it and that the air coming up was cold enough to see her breath by in July.

She said there was light down there and the sound of water, a great deal of water, and the smell of it was sweet, the way a sick room is sweet. And she said that a woman’s voice down in the rock was talking low and steady and unhurried, the way you talk to a child who is going to sleep, and that a second voice, which she knew because she had heard it twice a day for 11 weeks over the rim of a cup, answered it.

Vera Sykes closed the door. She went back up the stairs and at 4:00 in the morning she walked out of that house in her night dress and a shawl and went down Cane Hollow barefoot in the dark. She got three miles. A man named Alton Pertie found her at first light sitting in the road at the bottom of the hollow and she was not raving.

And this is the part that matters. She told him in order, in a level voice, what she had seen and what she counted, and what she had stopped drinking. Alton Pertie put her in his wagon, and he drove her back up the hollow. He was not a monster. I want to be careful here, because everything about Halloway County makes sense only if you stop looking for monsters.

Alton Pertie was a 40-year-old farmer with a wife and a mortgage. And what he had in his wagon was a barefoot old woman in a night dress out of her head three miles from the house where poor Miss Mercy looked after the ones whose families had given up on them. He had heard about the ones who wandered. Everyone had.

That was the story the county told itself about the borders at Cain Hollow, and it was a kind story, and it explained everything, and it had been carefully planted in the county’s ear over 18 years. So he drove her back, and Mercy Hail came out onto the porch in her wrapper with her hair down, and thanked him and cried a little, which people remembered because she never cried. And she took Vera Sykes inside.

Vera Sykes was recorded dead 5 days later on the 29th of July 1907 of heart failure attested by Dr. Alonzo Grady. A telegram went to Kiouk. The sister-in-law did not come and here the machine made its one real mistake in 22 years. Vera Sykes did not die. What Mercy Hail gave her that week put her deep enough to pass for it, and the certificate was written and filed, and the pension paperwork went in, and Corwin Cypes was called up from Halloway with a plain box.

And when Cypes got there, Mercy Hail told him what she had told him 11 times before, which was that the box was to be closed, and that she would attend to the laying out herself, except that Corwin Cypes had been drinking that afternoon. He had buried a child that morning, a real one, a girl of five in Halloway, and he had gone back to his shop and got into the whiskey.

And when the call came up from Cain Hollow, he drove out sullen and unsteady. He carried the box in. He was alone with it for 4 minutes in the front room, while Mercy Hail went to fetch the doctor’s paper. Corwin Cypes was an undertaker with 22 years in the trade and he was drunk and he was tired of the closed box at Cain Hollow and he lifted the lid to look.

The woman in it was breathing. Now everything you have heard so far, everything about this county comes down to what Corwin Cypes did in the next 10 seconds. and he had 10 seconds because that is how long Mercy Hail was out of the room. He put the lid back down. He testified to all of it in 1912 in federal court in exchange for a consideration that I will tell you about at the end of this.

And he said that his first thought was not for the woman in the box. His first thought was of the 11 boxes before her. He said that he understood standing in that front room with his hand on the lid that if this woman was alive then he had been part of something for 11 years and that there was no version of the next hour in which Corwin Cypes went home an innocent man.

So he chose he took the $18 and he took the box down to the hillside plot and he and a hired boy put it in the ground and he went home and he did not sleep properly again for 4 and 1/2 years and when he finally talked he talked for 6 hours without stopping. Vera Sykes of course was not in the box that went into the hillside.

She was in the house, and she was in the house because Mercy Hail had seen Sepson’s face when she came back into that room with the certificate, and had understood exactly what had happened, and had made a decision on the instant, and had waited until his wagon was down the road before she went back to the front room, and opened the lid herself, and found what she had expected to find.

What went into that grave was two feed sacks of creek gravel and a bolt of muslin, and Vera Sykes went down the ladder. This is the point at which the county’s tidy horror becomes something else. And I need to tell you plainly what was under the hail house before we go back to Elias Ward standing in the cold with a shovel because I do not want you thinking when we get to the exumation that you are being asked to believe in anything supernatural.

The Ketchum place had been sold cheap in 1889 because the ground under it was a drum. Beneath that house, entered through a natural shaft that the Ketchums had floored over and the Hail Sisters had fitted with a ladder, was a limestone chamber roughly 60 ft long and 20 at its widest, with a ceiling that came down to a crawl at both ends.

A spring ran through the length of it, cold, heavy with dissolved calcium and magnesium, and it went out through the rock and came up again as the famous mineral spring in the yard. The temperature in that chamber, summer and winter, stood between 52 and 54°. The sisters called it the cooling room. That is not a phrase invented by a newspaper.

It is written in Temperance Hail’s small backwardleaning hand at the top of a page in a memorandum book that Ward found in a bureau above a list of dates and initials and quantities. It was a store room at first honestly used because a cold cellar is worth money to anyone keeping a house. Then it was a place to put a body in February when the ground was frozen and a family in Ohio had asked for the remains to be held until spring.

Then it was a place to put a body that was not going to be sent to Ohio at all because the certificate said the woman was in the hillside plot and the hillside plot was where the county believed her to be and a grave is a great deal of digging and gravel is cheaper. And then at some point that no document fixes exactly, and that I would guess was in the winter of 1898, it became a place to put a woman who was not yet dead.

That is what the tonic was for, not to kill. Killing is fast and messy, and produces a corpse on a schedule you do not control. What the sisters bought by mail by the case from a wholesale house in Cincinnati was a patent preparation for the quieting of nervous complaints and its stated ingredients printed on the label because the law before 1906 did not require anyone to hide it were alcohol syrup, a small quantity of chloral and morphine.

It was legal. It was ordinary. It sat in 10,000 American medicine cabinets and a woman of 70 given a rising dose of it twice a day in mineral water becomes within 3 months agreeable. She sleeps, she smiles. She is very comfortable. She signs what is put in front of her and later she cannot tell you what she signed and later than that she cannot tell you her daughter’s name without being reminded.

And the whole time she is perfectly happy, and she looks to any visitor on any porch, on any June afternoon, exactly like an old woman enjoying the sun. The deaths, when they came, were mostly real. That is the part the county could never afterward wrap its mind around. Withdraw the tonic from a heavily habituated woman of 75 and she will very often die in 3 days of what a physician in 1900 would honestly and accurately call heart failure.

Alonzo Grady did not have to lie on those certificates. He only had to not ask and to sign them in advance so that Mercy Hail could enter the date at her convenience. which is why an entry could be written in ink 2 weeks before the woman it described stopped breathing. Elas Ward worked that out on the 11th of November, sitting on the bed in an unheated upstairs room with the green ledger he had asked to borrow and been given without hesitation.

And what he did next was the bravest and stupidest thing in this entire history. He asked Mercy Hail at breakfast whether she would object to the county opening a grave. She said she would not object at all. She said it as though he had asked to borrow an umbrella. The exeumation was held on the 14th of November 1911 on the hillside above the house in a wind that took a man’s hat off twice.

Ward had no authority to order it and knew it. So he had gone to Halloway and gotten a magistrate to sign and the magistrate had signed because a federal examiner had asked and because it seemed a small thing. They opened the grave marked for Elvera Doss dead the previous February because hers was the entry written two weeks early.

There were nine men on that hillside. Ward, the magistrate, two hired diggers, a deputy, Dr. Alonzo Grady, who had insisted on attending, Corwin Cypes, who had gone white in the wagon on the way up and been asked twice if he was ill, and Mercy Hail, standing at the edge of the hole in a black coat with her hands folded, watching.

They brought the box up at 20 minutes to 4 in the afternoon and set it on two planks, and the lid came off, and every man there took a step back. The woman in the coffin had not decayed. She was whole. Her face was intact, and her hands were folded, and her skin had gone a pale, waxy gray, like tallow, firm to the touch.

and she had lain in that ground for nine months and there was no corruption in her at all. One of the diggers dropped his shovel and walked 20 feet down the hill and was sick. The deputy said the Lord’s name out loud and Dr. Grady, who was the only man present with any medical training, stood at the foot of the box with his mouth working and did not say the word that would have explained it.

Because there is a perfectly good word for what happens to a body buried in cold ground saturated with mineral water. And Alonzo Grady knew it. And every second he stayed silent was a second in which nine men looked at that coffin and thought about the devil instead of about a doctor’s signature. But it was not the condition of the body that ended the Hail Sisters.

Ward barely mentions it in his summary report and he spells it correctly and he moves on in two lines. What ended them was that Elias Ward had spent 4 days going house to house in Halloway with a description and he had in his coat pocket a photograph borrowed from a nephew in Quincy. and he looked down into that box on the 14th of November and knew with total certainty the way you know a thing you have already proved on paper that the woman lying there in perfect preservation was not Elvira Doss. Elva Doss had been 69 and heavy

and had lost her left hand to a threshing machine in 1884. The woman in the coffin had both her hands. She was slight. She was, by the look of her, no more than 50 years old. And Corwin Cypes, standing at the back of that little group with his hat in his fist, made a sound that everyone on the hillside heard.

Ward turned around, and Mercy Hail was already looking at him, and she had not moved, and she had not changed her expression, and she said quietly into the wind that she supposed he would want to see the book now, not the ledger. She had given him the ledger freely on the first night, the book. She turned and walked down the hill toward the house ahead of nine men at an ordinary pace without looking back.

And that is the last free minute Mercy Hail ever had. The deputy arrested her in her own front room at 10 4 in the afternoon on a magistrate’s warrant sworn out on the spot and the charge was not murder. Missouri could not charge murder in November of 1911 because Missouri had a body it could not name and no cause of death for it.

The charge was violation of a sephiler which carried 2 years. It was enough to hold her while Ward worked and Ward worked for 11 weeks. What he did in those 11 weeks is the reason we know any of this. And I want you to notice that he never once looked for a body. He looked for signatures. Because a pension is not a payment.

A pension is a chain of paper. And every link in it has a name on it. To move a widow’s money, you need a voucher. And the voucher must be signed by the pensioner, and her signature must be witnessed by two persons of good character. And periodically the bureau requires a certificate of the pensioner’s continued survival and that must be attested by a physician or a notary or an officer of the post.

Every quarter for every woman for 22 years Ward sat in a rented room over a feed store in Halloway with a fire going and requisitioned all of it from Washington crate by crate. And he laid it out and he read it. The signatures of the borders were forgeries. That much he expected. What he had not expected was how good they were.

And it took him three weeks to understand what he was looking at because they were not good in the way a forger’s work is good. A skilled forger produces a signature that resembles the original. These did not resemble the originals. These aged. Hannah Sloum’s signature in 1892 was firm. In 1896, it had begun to waver at the crossbar of the H.

By 1900, the letters had opened out, and the line had gone thready, and it trailed off at the end, the way an old woman’s hand trails off when her grip fails. Across 11 years on paper, Hannah Sloum grew old and infirm exactly as the actuarial tables and the bureau’s own examiners would expect, and she did it for 9 years after she was dead.

Nobody in Halloway County was capable of that. Ward wrote in his report that the work exhibited a patience he could not account for and a familiarity with the subjects that suggested daily observation over years. Then he turned to the witnesses and the whole thing opened up like a door. Every voucher required two witnesses of good character.

across 22 years and something over,00 vouchers four names recur to the near exclusion of all others. Pervvis Tol postmaster of Halloway whose cancellation stamp also appears on every letter those dead women wrote to their families. Alonzo Grady, physician, who supplied the certificates of survival for women he had never examined and the certificates of death for women he had never seen dead.

Corwin Cypes, Undertaker, who filled boxes without opening them and took the county’s $18 each time. and a fourth name appearing from 1902 onward as a testing notary. Harlon Bethun, clerk of the Halloway County Court, who also happened to be the man who drew and recorded the quarterly indigent care allowance paid to Mercy Hale.

Ward went at them in that order, weakest first, and Corwin Cypes broke on the 2nd day of December, 1911, and talked for 6 hours, and gave up the other three. The search of the house was conducted on the 16th of November, and took 2 days, and I am going to give you the inventory the way Ward gave it, flat, because it does not need help.

In the padlocked room off the hall, a hand pump drawing from the water below, a shelf of 41 bottles of the Cincinnati preparation, 31 of them empty, and a hatch in the floor. In the chamber beneath, 60 feet by 20 at the widest, entered by a ladder of 11 rungs, a plank table, two chairs, three oil lamps, a rop c with blankets on it that were dry and had been recently used, and laid along the north wall on a natural shelf of rock above the waterline, the remains of 19 women. They were not concealed.

They were laid out in a row, each one wrapped in muslin, each with a paper tag tied at the ankle bearing a name and a date in a small backward-leaning hand. Several of them were as intact as the woman on the hillside had been. The deputy who went down first came back up the ladder and sat in the yard for an hour.

And in the far corner, past the lamps, where the ceiling came down toward the crawl, they found Vera Sykes. She had been dead about 4 years. Her tag was tied and dated in the same hand as the others. in a bureau in the upstairs back bedroom in a room that Ivy Coyle had cleaned twice a week for seven years and had always been told was kept ready for a lady who might come.

The memorandum book headed the cooling room and beneath it a practice book. The practice book is the object I would most like you to picture. It is an ordinary school copy book ruled with a marbled cover and it is filled front to back in a small backwardleaning hand and what it contains is the name Adeline Row written out 460 times not identically in sequence.

The first pages are firm and even. The middle pages waver. The last pages are thready and trailing and old. Somebody had sat at that bureau over years in lamplight and had practiced growing old as another woman. There were 11 more such books in the drawer. Ward came back up out of that house on the evening of the 17th and wrote one line in his field book, and it is the only sentence in 900 pages of federal paper where the man’s voice cracks.

There is a second person living in this house and she has been living in it for some time. They took temperance hail on the 19th of November 1911 in the crawl at the north end of the chamber where she had been for 5 days with a lamp and a jar of water and a blanket and where she had gone on the afternoon of the 14th when she heard nine men on the hillside.

She was 53 years old. She had been legally dead for 13 years and 8 months. She was pale in the way of a person who does not go out, and she was in good health otherwise. And when the deputy put his lamp on her, she said good evening to him and asked whether her sister had eaten. Here is how it had worked.

And it is so simple that it took Ward 3 weeks to believe it. In January of 1898, the sisters had a problem. Temperance had been the one who wrote to the families. Her hand appeared on hundreds of letters, and her name appeared on documents, and she had begun by then to be a person the outside world could ask questions of.

Two women running a boarding house are two witnesses. One woman running a boarding house alone, worn down and pied, is a thing the county will protect. So temperance died. Grady wrote the certificate. Cypes closed the box and there was creek gravel in it and Cypes knew because Cypes carried it. And from the 3rd of March 1898, Temperance Hail lived in the back rooms of that house and in the chamber below it and did the writing and never once in 13 years walked out into the yard in daylight. She was the second hand in the

ledger. She was the voice under the kitchen floor. She was the woman who wrote to Karen Dietrich twice a year for 11 years in her dead mother’s handwriting and asked after five children by name. and she got the fifth name from Karen’s own letters which came up the hollow in a canvas satchel carried by a 14-year-old girl who had been told that opening another woman’s mail showed a want of character and she was the fourth place at the table on the 9th of November 1911 because Mercy Hail had looked at a mild federal clerk with

a leather case and decided he was harmless and had let her sister sit down to supper for the first time in 13 years. Ivy Coyle gave her statement across four days in December in the front room of a widow’s house in Halloway with a stenographer and a woman from the church sitting with her. She was 21.

She had walked out of Cain Hollow on the 15th of November with a cloth bag and had not been back. She was steady until page 54, which is where Ward asked her about Dr. Grady and the singing. And she asked the stenographer to stop. And then she asked her to start again. And she said that she wanted it written down, that she had told a doctor she heard a woman under the floor, and that the doctor had put his hand on her head and told her it was the wind.

She said she had believed him. She said she had believed him for 5 years and had thought there was something the matter with her ears. Ward asked her whether she had ever heard the singing after Vera Sykes was buried. She said yes. He asked her how often, and Ivy Coyle said that it depended on the week, and that some weeks it was only the once, but that in the spring of 1910 there had been a stretch of about 2 months, when she heard it nearly every night, and that during those two months there were seven ladies at the porch, and she

carried eight trays. Ward closed his book. He did not ask the next question, and it is not in the file, and I think he could not make himself put it on paper because there is no paper answer to it. Some of the women on that rock shelf had been down there while they were still alive. The tags are dated in Temperance’s hand, and the dates do not always agree with the certificates, and in 11 cases, they disagree by weeks.

By the middle of January 1912, Elias Ward had it all. 51 names. Nine of them were the borders whose vouchers he had originally been sent to reconcile. 19 were the women on the shelf. The rest were the names on the hillside plot and in the county book and in the correspondence, women who had come up that road between 1891 and 1911, and had never gone down it, and whose pensions had continued to arrive on time quarterly for as long as the paper hill.

And in the back of the green ledger in the last 11 pages in Mercy Hail’s forwardleaning hand was a second set of accounts entirely. Names down the left dates across sums Grady AL Pipes Cthun H. 22 years of quarterly payments tallied and totaled and carried forward in a clean and tidy hand because Mercy Hail was a great believer in a tidy account.

Ward had the ledger, the memorandum book, the 11 practice books, the vouchers, the depositions of Cypes and Coyle and Vera Sykes sister-in-law, and a federal grand jury seated in Springfield for the 3rd of February. On the 28th of January 1912, he packed the physical evidence in two wooden crates and lodged them because the law required it in the evidence room of the Halloway County Courthouse on the square.

And he took the train to Springfield to file. At a quarter 2 in the morning on the 30th of January, 1912, the Halloway County Courthouse burned to the ground. It burned from the inside and it burned from the ground floor. And the fire was in the north corner of the building where the evidence room was. And the county’s own report concluded that a stove had been left banked in a room where paper was stored.

No one was ever charged. The building was a total loss. Every deed, every plat, every minute book, every will and marriage record in Halloway County went up with it along with two wooden crates. The green ledger burned. The memorandum book burned. The 11 practice books burned. The paper tags that had been cut from 19 ankles and preserved. They burned, too.

And Halloway County has never from that morning to this one been able to produce a single document from before 1912, which is the ordinary sort of tragedy that happens to courouses all across this country and which has meant that for over a century, anyone trying to check this story at the source has found nothing there to check.

But Elias Ward was a clerk. He was a clerk of the sort that infuriates everyone around him. And in the 11 weeks he spent in that room over the feed store, he had copied out by hand in pencil on federal fool’s cap every page of the green ledger, both sets of accounts the whole of the memorandum book and long extracts from four of the practice books.

He had done it because bureau regulations required an examiner’s transcript to accompany a referral, and he had done it in full because he was constitutionally incapable of doing it in part. Those transcripts, along with the original vouchers, which had never been in Halloway at all because they were bureau property and had gone straight back to Washington, were in his case on the train to Springfield.

That is why this story exists. A man too pedantic to summarize. The federal case went forward. It went forward on paper in a federal court on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and misuse of the males because those were charges that lived in Washington where the courthouse had not burned. Mercy Hail and Temperance Hail were convicted in April of 1912.

Mercy received 25 years. Temperance received 20. Alonzo Grady was convicted and received 12. Pervvis Tull received eight. Harlon Bthun, the county clerk, whose office had been in the north corner of the courthouse ground floor, was acquitted on the grounds that the ledger pages bearing his name no longer existed, and that Corwin Cypes’s testimony as to their contents was the word of a self-confessed accomplice.

He went home to Halloway. He was elected to a further term in 1914. He died in 1931 and there was a notice in the paper calling him a public servant of the old school. Corwin Cypes served 2 years having testified and came out in 1914 and sold the shop and left Missouri and where he went is not recorded.

Missouri never brought a murder charge. It had 19 women on a shelf and it could not in 1912 prove how a single one of them had died because the tags had burned and the certificate said heart failure and the only physician who could have contradicted them was in a federal penitentiary for signing them. The state indicted no one.

22 years, 51 names, and not one homicide count in the history of Halloway County. Temperance Hail died in 1919 in custody of influenza in the pandemic that took so many. Mercy Hail served 19 years and was released in 1931 at the age of 76 and she lived four more years in a county home in Illinois under her own name.

And the matron there said afterward that she had been the easiest woman in the building, that she never complained, that she was helpful with the accounts, and that everybody found her very agreeable. Now, let me close the doors I opened, because I told you at the start that nothing here was going to be left standing on the far side of an explanation, the chimney that made no smoke.

The Ketchum house had been built over a shaft, and when the sisters fitted the chamber below for use, they needed a way to warm it and vent it, and what they did was run the kitchen flu down and back into the natural chimney of the cave system rather than up through the roof. The smoke went sideways and down and traveled through the rock for something over half a mile and came out of a sinkhole on Hob’s Ridge, where local people had for two generations reported seeing what they called ridge fog on cold mornings and had never once connected it to a house

they could not see. A lit house with no smoke was not a haunting. It was plumbing installed to hide the fact that the sisters were burning lamps and a stove 60 ft underground. The bell that rang on a slack rope. That cave breathes. All big caves breathe. When the outside air pressure drops, the air in the chamber pushes out.

When it rises, air is drawn in. And a large system can move that air hard enough to slam a door. The Hail Springhouse sat over a secondary opening, and the yard between it and the porch funneled that airflow, and on the falling barometer of the evening of the 9th of November, 1911, a gust came out of the ground and pushed an iron bell twice.

Ward himself worked it out in February and wrote it up in an appendix nobody has ever read. And he noted dryly that the phenomenon was well known to the local people who had a saying about the hollow blowing before weather, the singing under the kitchen floor. Ivy Coyle was hearing exactly what she said she was hearing.

Limestone carries sound extraordinarily well, and the chamber ran directly beneath the kitchen wing, and temperance hail sang to the women down there. That is what Vera Sykes heard, too, on the ladder, and she used the right word for it in her deposition. She said it was the voice people use for a child going to sleep. She was not being poetic.

Those women were frightened and they were confused and they were dying. And the woman who was killing them sat by them in the lamplight and sang. The bodies that did not decay at a pacere. When a body lies in cold ground or cold water heavy with dissolved minerals and the temperature holds near 52°, the fats of the body convert into a stable waxy substance and the corpse does not rot.

It goes gray and firm and keeps its face. This is documented. It is unremarkable to any pathologist. And Alonzo Grady knew it, standing on that hillside in the wind, and said nothing for the length of a minute, and let nine men believe they were looking at something unholy, rather than at a body in mineral water, and the consequence of his own signature.

The agreeable ladies who smiled and never left the porch. A morphine and chloral preparation. Legal mail order. 12 doses to the bottle. Sold openly until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 made a manufacturer print what was in it and sold quietly for years after. The letters from the dead. A woman in a lockedback room with 13 years of samples.

460 repetitions to a copy book and nothing else in the world to do. And Temperance Hail herself buried by a county and walking around in it for 13 years, which is the impossible fact I gave you at the beginning. a closed box, a drunk undertaker, two feed sacks of creek gravel, and a whole town that found it easier to pity a woman than to look at her.

That is the last thing, and it is the reason this never got into the histories. We have plenty of American murder houses in the books. We have poisoners and boarding house killers, and the ones the newspapers made famous. Those stories get told because they have a monster in them. And a monster is a comfortable thing to read about. A monster is a defect.

A monster is not you. Cain Hollow had no monster in it. It had a business. It had a doctor who signed blanks at a little table by the window, and a postmaster who cancelled the stamps on letters from dead women, and an undertaker who put the lid back down, and a county clerk who drew a quarterly allowance for a burden that did not exist, and a livery man who would not drive up a good road, and a farmer who found an old woman in the road at dawn, and did the kind thing, and drove her back, and a whole county that told itself a gentle story about

ladies who wander. 51 women, 22 years, two convictions for murder, which is to say none, because there were none. Halloway County did not bury this story because it was too horrifying. It buried it because the horror had names in it that people still had to do business with and because those names were on 11 pages that burned on the 30th of January 1912 at a quarter 2 in the morning in a stove room in the north corner.

Ivy Coyle married in 1915, a man named Doyle, and had three children and lived until 1978, and told one of her grandchildren the whole of it in 1971 on a porch in Arkansas, and the grandchild wrote it down because she thought her grandmother was becoming confused. Ivy said one thing that afternoon that is not in any federal file.

She said that for the rest of her life when she was in a house at night and it went quiet, she would lie still and listen, and that she was not listening for singing. She was listening for a grown man’s voice, telling her it was only the wind. Karen Dietrich went to Springfield for the trial and sat in the gallery every day.

She asked for one thing afterward, and she was refused because it was evidence. and then the evidence burned and so she never got it. She wanted the copy book. She said she wanted to see her mother’s name written 460 times by the woman who killed her because she had loved those letters and had waited on them and had read them to her children at the table and she wanted to know exactly how a thing like that is made.

Elas Ward went back to Washington and filed his report and was commended in writing. And he worked in that bureau for 19 more years and never again investigated anything remotely like it. And his file box went into federal storage where it sat unread by anyone until it was transferred to the National Archives in 1958. The house at the head of Cane Hollow stood empty until 1924 when it burned in an ordinary fire of the sort that happens to empty houses in the Ozarks.

The stone foundation is still there, and so is the springhouse, and the spring still runs cold and heavy and never freezes. And the hillside plot is still up there with the stones fallen and the names weathered off and none of the names on them were ever the right ones. And on the far side of the ridge, better than half a mile from where that house stood.

There is a sinkhole in the rock that the local people have always called a fog hole. And on cold mornings when the pressure drops, the ground there still breathes