The second lawyer was the one who got through.
The first had died. Beau Arceneaux explained this without elaboration. The firm had been handling the Vauclain estate, the original attorney had passed, and Beau was probate. He'd been handed the file.
"You're the sole heir," he said. "Forty acres and a house in Vauclain Parish, Louisiana. Your great-aunt Hortense passed in April."
I was standing in my kitchen in Columbus with the phone against my ear and the remains of dinner on the counter. The window unit running, the neighbor's dog barking at something in the alley.
"I didn't know she'd died," I said.
"The estate has been trying to reach you since May. Your family name—" A pause. Papers. "The records list a Vauclain. Your surname is different."
"My grandmother changed it when she left Louisiana. Told her children the family down there was gone."
"Your great-aunt was very much not gone," Beau said. "She lived on the property until she died. The parish coroner's report says natural causes. She was found in her home."
I looked around the kitchen. Five years of the same apartment, the same school, the same twenty-minute walk.
"What do I need to do?" I asked.
"Ideally, come see the property. The estate can't close without your signature on several documents, and the property itself—" Another pause. "I'll be honest with you, Ms. Vauclain. The house is in a condition that requires an in-person assessment. I can meet you there."
He called me by the name my grandmother had left behind. I didn't correct him.
I drove.
Fourteen hours from Columbus to the Atchafalaya Basin, broken across two days with a motel in Mississippi that smelled like chlorine and carpet cleaner. Clothes for a week. The pour-over cone and a bag of coffee. A flashlight, a tape measure. The orange protractor from my classroom supply closet.
I packed and drove south the day after the call. The landscape changed by degrees: Ohio's flat farmland giving way to the hills of Kentucky, then the long green corridor of Tennessee, then Mississippi, then Louisiana arriving in the air itself before the road signs confirmed it. Heavier. Wetter. The light holding longer in the canopy, as if the trees were keeping it.
I followed the parish road past the gas station to the access road, unpaved past the first quarter mile, and pulled up to the house at four-thirty on Thursday.
It was wrong in ways I recognized immediately but couldn't name. White clapboard, antebellum, two stories, a front porch with columns that had been repainted several times and were peeling again. The wisteria on the east side had gone feral, climbing the columns, working into the eaves, covering the east-facing windows. Front steps were sound when I tested them. Porch boards were not. Third and seventh gave under my weight in a way that suggested the joists beneath were compromised.
From the porch I could see the property.
Forty acres. The front of the house faced the access road and beyond it the parish route. Behind the house the ground dropped to low land, a slope of maybe fifty feet to standing water, cypress roots visible at the margin. A body of water that was not a pond and not a lake. Darker than it should have been for the depth.
I put the key in the front door. It turned, and I went inside.
The hallway smelled like old wood and something else underneath that I couldn't identify. Like deep-earth. Everything was solid but the house was wrong and I couldn't have told you why if you'd asked me.
Something about the back of the house. As if it had a center of gravity and it wasn't where the floor plan said it should be—it was further back, deeper, pulling at something below my ribs that I didn't have a name for. I kept walking toward it without deciding to.
The kitchen was at the back. I found it by following the hallway past a parlor and a dining room, both dark, both sheeted. The kitchen was different. It was warm. Not heated. The warmth was sourceless, present in the room like a smell without an origin. One mug in the cabinet. A kettle on the stove. Window that looked out over the slope and the low ground and the dark water below.
I stood at the window. The heaviness in my chest was stronger here. Not painful, not frightening, just present—like the awareness of a door behind you in a room you've never been in. The light outside was going gold through the cypress.
I'd come to sign papers and assess a property and drive home. There was another reason too: because he'd said Vauclain and I wanted to know why my grandmother had run from that name.
The house made sounds around me. I told myself it was settling. Old wood, old pipes.
I made tea with the kettle and the one mug. Sat at the kitchen table. Took out my legal pad and wrote:
Arrived 4:30 pm. The water out back looks wrong.
I drank the tea while the light through the kitchen window went from gold to amber to the deeper amber the cypress took into itself before the dark. The kitchen kept its warmth. Outside, the frogs picked up. The pull in my chest didn't go anywhere.
I went out to the car for the rest of the bags. The porch boards complained under the third and seventh. I stood on the gravel with my arms full and looked at the house from the outside in late light: white clapboard, the wisteria gone feral, the windows on the east side dark behind the leaves. The dark was settling under the cypress at the slope's edge.
Inside, peanut butter on crackers from the cooler. Water from the tap, which tasted like iron and standing on the hill above a pond. The first drink of well water in my life.
I took my bag upstairs.
The west side. Room as far from the east hallway as I could get without thinking about why I wanted the distance. Bare mattress. The sleeping bag I'd brought from Ohio. My jacket folded twice for a pillow.
I left the window open because the house was still oddly hot.