Chapter 6: Everyone in Stillwater Has Extra Teeth

By noon, Stillwater had begun to dress itself for something it should not have survived long enough to celebrate.

From the upstairs hall window, Mara watched lengths of colored paper sway between telephone poles on Main Street. Lantern frames, hundreds of them, hung upside down to dry in the weak October sun like skinned fruit: red, gold, milk-white, a blue so dark it was almost black. People moved beneath them in a steady patient current, carrying bundles of reeds, sacks of flour paste, cardboard boxes of tea lights. The town had looked half-abandoned the day she arrived. This morning it pulsed with a thin bright purpose.

At the basin’s edge, tiny from this distance, ladders stood against the cracked slope where the old lake had once lapped. Men and women climbed up and down, fixing lantern hooks into the packed clay, stringing wire in neat arcs that descended toward the center. From above, it looked less like festival preparation than rib work. A cage being built around an absence.

The house behind her creaked in the cooling air.

Mara stepped back from the window so quickly the floorboard snapped under her heel like a knuckle. She had not slept. Every time she had closed her eyes, she had seen the flooded tunnels under the house and that impossible shaft dropping down and down through wet stone while something on the other side of the wall took long patient breaths. By dawn she had given up, showered in water that smelled faintly of pennies, and checked her camera three times to reassure herself that the photographs from below still existed.

They did. Circular masonry swallowed by black water. Timber braces slick with some pale growth. A section of wall marked with chalk dates in different hands—1901, 1927, 1948, 1973, 1999—as if the house had been rebuilt over that shaft again and again, each generation laying fresh boards over the same mouth.

She had emailed the images to herself before breakfast. The message sat unsent in her outbox despite the fact that her phone showed three bars.

On the vanity beside the bed, one of the journals she had found in the house lay open where she did not remember leaving it. The page was blank except for a single wet thumbprint at the bottom margin.

Mara shut it and went downstairs.

The kitchen smelled of old varnish and yesterday’s coffee. Her mother’s mug still sat upside down in the drying rack, chipped at the lip. Mara looked at it too long, then took her keys and camera bag and walked out before the house could settle into another shape behind her.

The air had sharpened overnight. Fallen leaves skittered over the road in brittle little flocks. As she drove toward town, she passed front porches draped in strings of paper lanterns and hand-painted boards that read FLOAT NIGHT in curling gold letters. Children sat on steps folding tissue around thin wicker rings with solemn concentration. A woman in a yellow apron brushed paste over a lantern frame while singing under her breath.

Mara only realized she knew the tune when she found herself tightening her grip on the steering wheel in time to it.

Three notes down. Two held too long. Then the little turn at the end that made her jaw ache with the effort of almost remembering.

You know this.

“No,” she said aloud, and the word disappeared inside the car.

Main Street had filled. The hardware store had a table out front stacked with wire frames in the shape of boats and birds and houses. Outside the diner, old Mr. Pritchard painted names on strips of mulberry paper with a brush so fine it looked like a single hair. Mara parked opposite the post office and sat for a moment with the engine ticking down.

No one stared at her anymore. That was somehow worse.

When she had first come back, she had gotten the wary measuring glances reserved for outsiders and debt collectors. Now people raised a hand in greeting before going back to their work, as if her place among them had been settled overnight.

Her skin crawled.

She got out and crossed toward the diner, planning on coffee, information, and maybe a decent enough internet signal to force her email through. Halfway there, she saw the butcher’s wife laugh at something a man unloading reeds had said.

The laugh itself was ordinary. It was the mouth that wasn’t.

Her lips parted too far back along her cheeks, not grotesquely, not enough to turn heads, only enough for the eye to snag and then slide away. Inside, behind her neat front teeth, another row flashed white for a second before the smile closed.

Mara stopped dead on the sidewalk.

The butcher’s wife turned. “Morning, Mara.”

Her voice came in two layers, one exactly on top of the other and one a breath behind, like a recording played twice out of sync.

Mara forced herself to move again. “Morning.”

The woman’s hands were covered in paste up to the wrists. There was a smear of red on one sleeve that might have been paint. Her fingers curled around the reed bundle with too many pauses in the joints, each one bending a fraction farther than it should. Not broken. Not dislocated. Simply articulated at a point where a finger had no business articulating.

Mara walked faster.

Inside the diner, the heat hit her face along with coffee, frying onions, and old grease sunk so deeply into the walls that no amount of scrubbing would ever get it out. Every stool was full. Locals leaned over pie plates and enamel mugs, talking about weather, turnout, the old songs, whether the ground in the basin would hold if the rain came early. The conversations knitted together into a soft dense murmur.

At the counter, Dot Hensley looked up from pouring coffee and smiled.

There they were again.

Extra teeth. Not a monstrous grin, not fangs, not anything dramatic enough to permit panic. Just too many. Small, pearl-bright, crowded behind the front row like eager children pressing against a fence.

Mara stared before she could stop herself.

Dot’s smile thinned. “You all right, honey?”

The second voice underneath the first made the question sound borrowed.

“Did you…” Mara swallowed. “Did you get braces?”

Silence blinked across the nearest tables, brief and insectile. Dot’s brows pinched.

“At my age?” she said, and one of the men at the counter barked a laugh.

Mara heard the layered voices there too now, all through the room, a faint chorus of delayed selves. Once noticed, it would not leave. She wondered if it had been there from the moment she arrived, if the house had sharpened her hearing, or if she was simply finally losing whatever remained to lose.

“Coffee to go,” she said.

Dot filled a cup. “You headed down to the basin tonight?”

“I didn’t know there was a tonight.”

Dot blinked at her as if she had made a joke in poor taste. “Lantern Float.”

“Right.” Mara put cash on the counter. “I forgot.”

The man beside her, Sheriff Vale’s deputy—Conner, she thought—turned on his stool. “Forgot Float Night?” His mouth was wrong in a different way. His teeth weren’t merely doubled. They were arranged too deep, receding in pale little terraces into his skull. “That ain’t like you.”

“A lot’s changed.”

Conner’s eyes rested on her face. “Has it?”

The way he said it made the back of her neck go cold.

She took the coffee and left before she had to answer.

Outside, the daylight seemed thinner. Main Street had acquired a faint sweet smell under the paste and dust: pond water left too long in a bucket. Mara stood beside her car and breathed through her mouth.

A child trotted past holding a lantern shaped like a fish. His knees bent strangely under his corduroys, too many hinges making the cloth buckle in the wrong places. He looked up at her and grinned with his whole face.

Too many teeth.

Mara fumbled her camera from its bag and raised it on instinct. The shutter clicked. The boy froze, then ran to catch up with his mother.

On the playback screen, his smile looked normal.

Her own hand was shaking hard enough to blur the image.

“You still do that when you’re scared.”

Mara spun.

Raina Mercer stood in the doorway of the florist shop with a bundle of willow switches in one arm and a strip of blue tissue hanging from her mouth while both hands worked a lantern frame. She pulled the tissue free with two fingers and smiled, and for one suspended second Mara saw the girl she had spent entire summers with—barefoot, feral, freckled from scalp to shoulder, always one scraped knee ahead of trouble.

Then Raina smiled wider, and the second row of teeth showed like a secret the rest of the town had stopped bothering to keep.

She had cut her hair short since Mara last saw her in person, though that had been twelve years ago and ought to have made her unrecognizable. Instead, something in the cant of her head, the sarcastic warmth in her eyes, struck Mara with such force it nearly unbalanced her.

“Raina,” she said.

“There she is.” Raina came down the shop steps. “I was wondering how long you’d lurk around taking pictures before you admitted you knew somebody.”

“I didn’t know you worked here.”

“I don’t.” Raina lifted the willow. “Everybody works everywhere this week.”

Mara looked at her properly. Brown sweater, jeans with wax on one thigh, small scar under the chin from the time they had tried to ride a stolen sled down Miller’s embankment and hit barbed wire instead. It was so familiar Mara felt briefly sick.

“You look…” She stopped. Not good. Not well. Not possible. “The same.”

Raina laughed. Layered voices. Too many teeth. “That’s rude as hell.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you aren’t.” Raina hooked an arm through Mara’s as naturally as if they had parted yesterday and started steering her down the street. “Come on. You can help before you make yourself weirder standing out here glaring at children.”

Mara resisted just enough to make the point. “I’m not helping with whatever this is.”

“You say that every year.”

Mara’s feet stopped. Raina took another two steps before turning back.

“What did you say?”

Raina’s expression altered almost invisibly, amusement flattening into caution. “I said you always hated paste duty.”

“No. You said every year.”

“Mara.” Raina lowered her voice. “Don’t start on the street.”

“Start what?”

“This.” She moved one hand in a little circle between them. “Acting brand-new every time something pinches.”

Mara stared at her. “I haven’t been here in fifteen years.”

Raina’s face did not change. That frightened Mara more than if she had laughed.

“Come inside,” Raina said.

The florist shop had been converted into a workshop. Buckets of cattails and dried grasses lined the wall where bouquets should have been. Every flat surface held lanterns in stages of assembly: little folded boats, long cylindrical processional lamps, elaborate houses made of waxed paper stretched over wicker ribs. The room smelled of paste, dust, old stems, and candle wax warmed by too many hands.

Three women sat at a table cutting paper stars. They looked up when Mara entered, smiled, and went back to work with the deferential silence of people listening in. Their scissors flashed. One woman’s wrist bent backward an inch too far as she reached for more paste. None of the others seemed to notice.

Raina set the willow down and leaned against the workbench. “Talk.”

Mara remained standing. “I went away. I built a life somewhere else. You know that.”

“Do I?”

“You were at the bus station.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Yes.” Mara heard the edge rising in her own voice and hated it. “You and your brother took me. I had one duffel bag and thirty-eight dollars and you stole cigarettes from your aunt and told me Philadelphia smelled like piss in summer.”

Raina looked at her for a very long moment. Then she sighed and reached under the bench.

She brought up a plastic storage tote scarred with old tape. Inside were scrapbooks, the kind with stiff black pages and little photo corners. Raina laid the top one on the bench, opened it, and turned it toward Mara.

A photograph showed the basin under strings of lanterns. Not with water—dry and cracked as it had been for decades—but crowded with people carrying lights down into the hollow while dusk bled purple above them. In the front left corner stood a girl of seventeen with one hand on her hip, hair hacked blunt at the jaw, looking directly at the camera with open irritation.

Mara.

“No,” she said immediately.

Raina flipped to another page. Winter parade, 2012. County fair booth, 2015. Volunteer fire department fish fry, 2018. There was Mara in all of them, older each time, face leaner, hair changing, but unmistakably present. Never centered. Never posed. Always just there, caught in the background carrying a box, squinting into light, turning away from someone who wanted her attention.

“That’s fake.”

“With what budget?” Raina said quietly. “Stillwater can’t keep the pharmacy open and you think we forged a decade of candid photos to mess with you?”