WHAT CAME BACK — Part 3 of 4: The Woman Down the Road Kept Hers for Forty Years

The reservoir falls forty feet and a drowned town rises out of the mud — stone walls, a half-melted steeple, and a graveyard breaking the surface in neat pale rows. At the waterline Nora meets Edith, an old woman who has been watching for this since the water started to drop, because it happened to her once too: 1976, the summer it didn't rain, the summer her own drowned boy came home. Edith knows what's in Nora's house, what it wants, and how it feeds — on the keeping of it, hollowing out everyone real until there's no one left. And she knows the...