The Hollow

3

She had lied, she had read his letters to Emilia. Mahala had angrily gone through her half-sister's cedar chest and found his letters, dozens of them, in the bottom under Emilia's trousseau and other little keepsakes. Mahala kept her gloves on as she read the first letter, written before the war, before he had left for West Point. His script was tight, angular, restrained, but the words were fiery, poetic, and as she moved on to letters from his time commissioned to the front... Mahala wondered what Emilia wrote back to him, and knew it was most likely on a much less eloquent note. Emilia was beautiful, but not bright, and after her behavior with the neighbor, Mahala was not exactly feeling warm or accommodating to the silly girl.

Captain Walker had never looked at Mahala, no one really did, but Mahala had always looked at him. Of course, with Emilia, no other woman seemed to exist. Emilia was like sunshine, dazzling to look at. Mahala was like starlight, faint, and in the background. No one, since her mother's death, saw her, and that was all for the best. And yet, as Mahala read Captain Walker's letters, she wished they had been addressed to her.

It was clear that Captain Walker wanted Emilia, wanted her in a way that propriety demanded marriage. Mahala may never have been with a man, but she was not ignorant, and she was not, in any way, proper. Her childhood had destroyed the prospect of being proper. Being the daughter of a noted spiritualist brought her in contact with strange and oft times interesting situations. While her mother had made a good living with her talents, it was not without scandal. Margot Wilson-Hiner had always been a peculiar woman, and two years after giving birth to Mahala and her twin brother, Adam, she ran from her loving and understanding husband as if the devil were on her heels. Margot, for a reason unknown at the time, took Mahala, but left Adam, and settled in upstate New York in the house of a distant cousin. Margot claimed she had had a vision, and lived for the next six years near Albany, working as a maid some days, and a medium most others. It was during this time that disease and influenza took most of the children in the countryside, including Captain Walker's older brother Philip, and most of the old, including Mahala's grandfather and grandmother Hiner. Even Adam had fallen ill, but recovered, stronger than ever. Her mother had had a vision that Mahala would die, and that alone had seemed to be Margot's reason for fleeing.

It had not made sense to Mahala at all, but little her mother did or said made much sense to a very smart and logical little girl.

When Margot Wilson-Hiner began to show illness herself, cancer, it was believed, Mahala was retrieved by her father on the day her mother died. Wilhelm Hiner was a doting father, and Mahala knew him the moment he stepped into her mother's sick room. He was a tall man with fiery red hair and intense blue eyes, her brother Adam resembled him in his manhood. As for Mahala, she was almost a facsimile of her dead mother--raven curls, brown eyes, too pale and perfect skin, diminutive height, and slight curves. Her father took her up in his arms and took her to the home of her birth, the house Wilhelm had built for his strange wife over the ridge from the popular spring resort of Warm Springs.

From the age of seven to the night Captain Walker returned home, Mahala had never left her father. She was only parted from Adam for the length of his commission in the Union Army to his wounding at Bull Run. Mahala never had a suitor and Adam never sought a wife due to his injuries.

Wilhelm Hiner had remarried to a woman in the county after forcing a divorce from her mother soon after she fled for Albany. The second wife, Emilia's mother, died in childbirth and Mahala never knew the woman who was said to be great beauty. Emilia was a beautiful child, spoiled in a different way than Mahala. Whereas Mahala wanted schooling and books and stories, Emilia wanted to go to the nearest town, Union, and look at the meager wares in the stores and order clothing