She followed him down the walkway to the right. On their left, the massive old brick mill loomed. It was a beautiful building, three stories tall with large windows, a big bell tower over the front entrance. There were men on the roof, and she could hear power tools and hammering inside. Beyond it, she heard the murmur of the river. The man in the white hard hat walked quickly, speaking as he went along.

“The story goes that management was tired of the girls sneaking out for smoke breaks or to meet their fellas or whatever it was they were sneaking out for. So they took to barring the doors from the outside once all the workers were in. Let ’em out when the bell rang for lunch, then at quitting time.”

“They locked them in?” Helen was horrified. Her eyes fell on the tall doors leading into the mill, imagined fists pounding on them, the crushing weight of all those women trapped inside pushing, desperate for escape.

“That’s what folks say. The ones who remember. The ones who made it out of the fire. I’m from right here in Lewisburg, so I grew up hearing the stories. That day, maybe someone was having a smoke inside because they couldn’t go out anymore? I guess we’ll never know how it started, but they say the building went up fast. Dry timbers, all that cotton.”

They got to the end of the building, and Helen could see that the whole last quarter of it was redone in new brickwork, the bricks a more vivid red, the mortar more pale.

“This whole end of the building was gutted. We had to tear it down, rip everything out, and rebuild.”

Helen looked over to the right, down along the river where a massive amount of rubble had been bulldozed into a pile: burned and snapped boards and timbers, rusted machines and gears, a small mountain of bricks with black fire marks.

“Since they couldn’t get out the doors,” he said, “they broke windows, jumped through. Some made it. A bunch didn’t.” He shook his head, the hard hat shifting a little. “Hell of a way to go.”

Helen imagined what it must have been like to be trapped inside, lungs filling with smoke, the heat from the fire growing stronger, screams and chaos all around you. Hopefully it was the smoke that got them, not the flames.

“You know,” he said, “between you and me, it’s probably a good thing you’re not interested in a condo.”

“Why’s that?”

He looked around, lowered his voice. “You couldn’t pay me to live here.”

The skin on Helen’s arms prickled.

This was it, she thought. This was why she’d come.