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  For Connie Akers, who won’t get to read this, but without whom none of this would exist

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lia

  Lia’s mother disappeared one month before the Panic at Limetown. Unlike those three hundred plus, hers was a gradual vanishing. She had been pulling away for months, maybe longer. Retreating from Lia and her father, to a hidden space no one else was allowed.

  In the beginning, the space was mental. Lia’s dad would ask her mother a question at dinner and receive a delayed response. She would forget minor anniversaries, which most people wouldn’t celebrate in the first place, but that were treated like national holidays in the Haddock household. Gone was the mom who gave the house a housewarming gift ten years to the date she and Lia’s father closed. The mom who well into Lia’s teens snuck into her bedroom and left two quarters under her pillow in honor of the day Lia lost her first tooth. In her place was a woman who asked no one about their day, who made everyone coffee but drank her mug in the study, alone.

  Lia was a senior in high school and had tragedies of her own. A boy she told herself she should like died stupidly over winter break. His name was Brad. They had been neighbors early in Lia’s childhood, friends even, or so she was told, in a time and a house Lia didn’t remember. This, before her mother received tenure and her father started his own landscaping company, affording the family a larger home in a more sterile part of town.

  At school, Lia had watched all the other girls pair off with all the boys, coupling together, splitting apart, before finding another partner and starting the process all over again. It was like observing some sort of live biological experiment, one that Lia had never felt the need to participate in. Though, she supposed Brad was as good a candidate as any for a crush. He was everything she was not: popular, athletic, carefree, quick to laugh. But when she imagined what it would be like to walk down the hall with him, holding his hand or hanging onto his arm, as she had seen other girls do with their boys, she felt nothing.

  Brad wasn’t exactly a bad boy, though he had owned a used motorcycle. One night in late December, while on break before what would have been the final semester he and Lia shared together, Brad did what teenagers do. He threw a party, drank, made a bad decision, and crashed his bike off the state road. It was after midnight. No one found him until the following afternoon.

  Lia sometimes thought about Brad lying on the side of the road. He always wore his helmet, so he wouldn’t have died right away. He would have had time to wonder. Why him. Why now. Maybe near the end Brad would call out to someone. His father. His mother. Maybe Brad would shout God’s name. Or maybe he would whisper, Lia.

  Old mom would have consoled her daughter. She would have asked what was wrong and offered advice Lia wouldn’t truly appreciate for years. But when Lia broke the news to new mom, she simply lifted her head from her coffee mug and said, “That’s awful.”

  Old mom was gone.

  A week later, the first day of spring semester, new mom was gone too.

  * * *

  Which was worse? Losing someone in an instant, or watching them disappear over time?

  Lia didn’t know anything was wrong right away. Her dad did a good job covering for her mother. Partners until the end. It helped that Lia was a self-admitted moody teenager. The fall semester of junior year, she had to take a strengths assessment, this boring exam that asked a hundred questions designed to determine what kind of person you really were, so you could plan your looming career accordingly. At the end, it gave your top five strengths, and the bottom three. Your weaknesses. Lia’s number-one strength was intellection, which meant she was an introspective person who liked to be mentally challenged, and who liked to be alone.

  At the bottom was sympathy. This came as a shock. She’d always thought of herself as a nice person, someone who could sense how others were feeling, when they were happy or sad. And maybe that was true. But her number-two strength was empathy, which meant, yes, she was very perceptive about the emotions of others, but that didn’t mean she cared. She simply understood and, in her case, moved on.

  She thought about that test often, wondering if her lack of empathy was the reason she never paired off with anyone. Or if it explained why she did not have any friends at school. She had acquaintances in Newspaper, and smiled politely to the girls she sat with at lunch, but beyond that her classmates seemed to recognize she wanted little to do with them. Everyone gave her space, a fair distance from which she could safely watch the world around her, which for reasons she could never explain, she never felt a part of.

  The first week her mother was gone, her dad claimed she was at a conference. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “I think I would have remembered,” Lia said. She had a good memory, and thanks to her Newspaper teacher, Miss Scott, one of the saints of public schools, she had become quite observant.

  “Oh, well, nothing to worry about.” He patted her on the shoulder and retreated upstairs.

  A conference was conceivable. Her mother was a biology professor at the local community college, and although her department showed little interest in whether or not she published, she attended at least one conference per year to stay up to date on the latest findings, as she put it. But Lia’s quick Internet search revealed no stateside conferences the week of her disappearance. When pressed, her dad said the conference was probably very small, but very affordable.

  * * *

  Lia’s first newspaper assignment when she returned to school was a preview of the basketball team’s upcoming season. Under normal circumstances she would have promptly completed the assignment, but she was having trouble getting started with this one. Old mom might have wondered if her reluctance was related to Brad, who had been a starter on the basketball team before he died. What if, old mom might ask, the story isn’t what you’re really avoiding?

  That isn’t the problem, Lia told herself.

  Then what is?

  Lia told Miss Scott she wanted to interview some of the players’ family members, so that she might go beyond surface level facts. And although Miss Scott lifted her eyebrows, she let Lia leave campus to work on the assignment. Miss Scott was great like that, giving her students enough rope to hang themselves, but trusting that they wouldn’t. There was a rumor that before she started teaching she worked for the local newspaper until she was fired for exposing the corrupt city manager, who happened to be the brother of the paper’s editor in chief. She must’ve known what it would cost her, Lia thought, to publish the story. Lia always admired people like that, those who knew the rules but broke them anyway. She believed that although many rules were arbitrary, most existed for a good reason. Her mother said she must’ve got that way of thinking from her dad, the kind of man who always sorted his recycling.

  Lia drove straight to Brad’s house and parked across the street. She hadn’t been there since the night of the party. She’d gone with a girl who by all accounts she should have been friends with, and the two of them snuck away from the crowd and into Brad’s room. The room was small and ordinary. A poster of an athlete on one wall, a band Lia knew but thought were terrible on another. It was all so—expected. The girl dared Lia to smell Brad’s sheets or steal his underwear, but Lia had n
o desire to touch any of Brad’s possessions. She felt nothing standing there, minus the small buzz she got from trespassing with her classmate, standing in the dark room with her. She eyed the girl for a moment, until the girl caught her looking and backed out of the room.

  Lia left the car running in front of Brad’s house and what she was told was her childhood home. Both houses were small, though hers had an extra window just below the gabled roof that must’ve belonged to an attic. A few minutes passed before Brad’s mother came out to grab the morning paper. She noticed Lia idling across the street, and stared in her direction for a moment, confused, before offering an unsure wave. Lia put the car in drive and sped away.

  You’re afraid, old mom said, in her head.

  I’m not.

  You are. You’ve never felt loss before and you don’t know what to do with it.

  It’s more than that.

  You liked him.

  I didn’t. I only wanted to.

  Why?

  I thought I was supposed to.

  And now?

  Lia thought of the girl in Brad’s room, of the slight buzz she felt from staring at her. It was a feeling that was both new and old, and that she pretended she didn’t understand.

  I don’t know what I want.

  Lia turned onto her street. Without thinking she had driven to the home she remembered. The garage door opened. She slowed down and watched her dad, who should have been at work hours ago, back out and head in the opposite direction of his job.

  You want to follow him.

  Lia stayed a few cars behind, like in the movies she’d seen, but her dad didn’t look back in any of his mirrors. He drove over the speed limit, odd for such a stickler for the rules. Lia still had no clue where he was going, other than that he was headed downtown. Her mind wandered to various possibilities, none of which made sense. Besides her mother’s conferences, her parents were boring. They never went anywhere. They worked, came home and cooked, and one weekend out of the month they went to a movie Lia had no interest in seeing. Yet now her mother was gone. And her dad was going who knows where.

  She almost missed him when he veered down an alley and into the back entrance of a parking garage. Lia let her imagination churn. She saw her dad meeting some mystery man. The two of them sharing a cigarette, though her dad never smoked. A manila envelope stamped shut with a secret symbol would be exchanged, tucked safely into a trench coat.

  But if he were meeting a conspiracy theorist or whistle-blower, this was the worst place. The lot was chock-full of squad cars. This was parking for the police station, which must have resided above. As she considered the possibilities, her dad’s car disappeared from view.

  Lia circled around until she found her dad’s car, on the lowest level. He wasn’t in it. She checked her phone. No service, but Lia’s hour was almost up. If she left now, she could make an excuse Miss Scott wouldn’t buy, but might permit. She parked instead, across from her dad, and waited. Fifteen minutes. Half an hour. The entire time her mind listed all the rules she was breaking, the ways she would get into trouble.

  Finally, her dad appeared. His hands were empty, his head hung low. He didn’t get in his car immediately. He leaned against the trunk. Maybe he was waiting for someone. The mystery man. Or maybe he was waiting for Lia’s mother.

  He heard Lia get out of the car.

  “Hello?” he said. He couldn’t see fully, not in the dark of the parking garage. “Who’s there?” There was a tremble in his voice Lia hadn’t heard before. Had she ever seen her dad cry? A sappy children’s movie, maybe. In a picture of him in the hospital, right after Lia was born. “I’m not playing any stupid games, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Lia stepped forward. “Dad, it’s me.”

  “Lia? What in the world—”

  He pulled her in for a hug and scratched Lia with his rough face. Before today, he hadn’t gone a day without shaving for as long as she’d been alive.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was worried about you,” Lia said.

  “Why aren’t you at school?”

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  He laughed, a small sob catching at the back of his throat.

  “Why are you at the police station?” Lia asked. Her dad looked around, his car surrounded by a sea of cruisers. “Is something wrong with Mom?”

  Her dad looked away. Growing up, he was the softer parent, the one she ran to when the other said no. “There’s nothing wrong with your mother,” he said. “She’s at a conference.”

  “Dad.”

  “It has nothing to do with you, okay? It’s just . . . your uncle.”

  “My uncle?”

  “Emile. Now let’s get you back to school. You shouldn’t be here.”

  He walked Lia to her car and opened the door. Lia repeated her uncle’s name to herself. “Emile.” She tried to conjure a picture of her dad’s brother, but she had no real memories of him, only a faded dream of the two of them lying in a field somewhere, staring at the blue sky and making shapes out of the clouds. He was the black sheep. She knew that much. At home, the only time his name was spoken was when Lia’s parents badmouthed him in hushed voices, whispers that quickly dissipated when she entered the room.

  Her dad shut the driver-side door. “Seat belt.”

  Lia buckled up, put the car in reverse, but lingered on the brake. “Is he okay?”

  “No,” her dad said. “But he never will be.”

  * * *

  Lia returned to school in time for fifth period. It was peer review day in English, which meant she sat in the back and watched the two girls in front of her evaluate each other’s poorly written essays for five minutes before they gossiped for the remainder of the class. They talked about their hair mostly, or the laundry list of things that annoyed them: Abby’s skirt, the cafeteria lunch that day. They also talked about Brad.

  “Did you hear there’s a memorial this Friday?” one asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Are you going?”

  “Of course. You?”

  “Of course. One time we were this close to hooking up.”

  At the end of class, the TV bolted to the corner turned on automatically to air NewsNow, a fifteen-minute news program in which young, theoretically cool journalists tried to relay some piece of national news to the most inattentive generation in history. The girls in front of Lia continued to gossip, but she tuned them out. The reporter, a twentysomething woman, was talking about a place called Limetown, a town that until a few months ago didn’t exist. Lia was certain she had heard the name before, though she wasn’t positive where. Perhaps it was over dinner with her parents. They often talked about the news of the world for Lia’s benefit, doing their best to encourage what then was a mild interest in journalism. But what they said about this place she couldn’t remember.

  The reporter said that if you asked the people of Sparta, Tennessee, who at fifty miles away were Limetown’s nearest neighbors, the whole place appeared overnight. Magic, one man said. Not magic, his wife said. The government. The reporter, however, had done some digging. She was from Sparta originally, which, she explained, was the only reason she’d heard about Limetown to begin with. She hadn’t found much, but she did discover a name: R. B. Villard, a telecommunications giant who, in the eighties and nineties, made the kind of money people sell their soul for. Role tape A: Villard, predictably male, white, and old, testifying before Congress, swearing to God that his recent purchase of three rival telecom companies did not pose a threat to the sovereignty of the field’s remaining competitors. Role tape B: a montage of reporters from major networks reporting on the settlement Villard’s company, Realore, was forced to pay shortly after.

  “So, do we bring candles to this thing or what?” one of the girls said.

  “Yeah,” the other girl said, “it’s BYOC.”

  “And now, this,” the reporter said, gesturing toward the chain link fence behind her, tall a
nd wide as the camera’s frame. The fence appeared to be guarding nothing other than the Tennessee woods, but according to the locals, the fence made a semicircle around the town, which lay some hundred yards or so past the fence. The fence ended when it ran into a ridge. The ridge led to a small range of mountains, beneath which, the reporter said, were a tangle of caves that extended for miles, like tree roots.

  Lia felt a heaviness in her chest. This town had nothing to do with her, but its mystery reminded her of the others in life. Her missing mother, her father’s strange behavior. The feeling she felt at school, observing all the couples. That something inside her was missing.

  “Locals claim the caves are where the town gets its name,” the reporter said. “They’re made of this.” She held a small chalky rock up to the camera. “Limestone.”

  There were no pictures of Limetown. No records or blueprints at the county courthouse. NewsNow did not have the money for a helicopter, the reporter explained, but even if they had they were told on multiple occasions that because of Limetown, White County, Tennessee, was now a no-fly zone. It was the only no-fly area in the country that wasn’t a federal building or military base.

  “So will his family be there?”

  “No,” the other girl said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s a secret. For close friends. No one else is supposed to know about it.”

  “For the moment,” the reporter said, “all we know is what Realore tells us.”

  A week before the news story was set to air, after a deluge of phone calls and requested interviews, Realore issued a statement. Not to the reporter specifically, but to all media. It was brief, vague, and intriguing. The press release read:

  The mind is a tool humans have yet to maximize. Limetown and its inhabitants aim to change that. And in the end the world will be better for it. Far best is he who knows all things himself.