Page 43 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

Hadley had held everything back when they’d spoken earlier in the week. This time, she decided to give a little. Maybe some of the pieces would knock a memory or two loose.

“A week before Reed was killed, he wrote Roland Mercer a citation for trespassing on a piece of property in Whistlerun. Then he buried it. Never filed it. I found it in his desk earlier this week with a note on the folder, saying he wanted to talk to me about it.”

“Reed never mentioned it to me.” Nora’s eyes narrowed as she worked at a connection she couldn’t quite find. “Are you saying whoever killed Reed…killed Roland?”

Hadley didn’t have an answer, which was the reason she pushed on with the interview. She asked whether Reed had ever brought up the Mercer family, whether Nora had heard any talk of Roland’s research, whether anything or anyone about that wedding or that side of the family had ever circled back around. Nora answered each one plainly, and it all added up to nothing, right up until the questions pressed a little too close.

“I’m sorry.” Nora’s voice broke, and she turned the back of her hand against her eyes. “I just miss him so much, Hadley. It’s been almost a year, and the ache in my chest never loosens. Some days I can’t get a full breath. Like there’s a hand pressing down on my sternum and it won’t ease up.”

Hadley wasn’t sure she was the right person for Nora to share such emotions. There was a lot of tangled history that should have kept her hands in her lap. Instead, her palm found its way to a slow circle across Nora’s back. After a moment, she drew a breath that shuddered going in and came out a little steadier.

“God. I’m sorry.” Nora let out a small, wet laugh and tucked a loose strand behind her ear. “I’ve had a rotten day from the jump, and you did not sign up to watch me fall apart on a bench.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me.” Hadley drew her arm back and stood. Nora didn’t need pity piled on top of everything else, and it was plain enough she had nothing more to give on Roland Mercer. “I’ll keep you posted. Anything I can tell you, I will.”

Nora rose as well, settling the tote back on her shoulder.

“I think I’ll call my cousin. Whatever’s between our families, he’d talk to me about Roland’s research if I asked.” Nora frowned as she turned toward the parking lot. “You said he was obsessed with the Threshing Man?”

“He was. I’m working the case alongside the sheriff.” Hadley fell into step with her. “Once everything’s processed, I’ll have access to all of it. The maps, the boxes, the research. I’ll go through every page to see if any of it leads back to Reed or Whistlerun. Chances are there’s nothing to find. I might be chasing thin air, so please don’t set your hopes on it.”

Nora stayed quiet until they reached the curb. She stopped under a buzzing lamp, the dark fields breathing off to the west, and then, without warning, she stepped in and put her arms around Hadley. It caught her off guard. She brought one arm up and returned the embrace, a little awkwardly.

“It’s okay if it leads nowhere.” Nora had spoken against her shoulder. She then drew back, mindful of the mug in her hand. “Don’t you see? It means you haven’t given up on him. That’s more than anyone else has given me in eleven months.”

Nora managed something close to a smile and walked off toward the well-lit end of the lot. Hadley stayed near the curb. The wind had picked up, and the corn rasped low and steady beyond the field’s edge, a hundred dry voices moving at once. She stood, listened to them for a moment, and wondered if they’d been trying to tell this county something important for a very long time.

19

Hadley Dawkins

September 2026

Wednesday – 10:28 pm

Aslow country ballad drifted from the speakers built into the living room walls of the apartment above the police station. Reed had wired them himself, and the sound came through clear and clean. Little reminders of him turned up everywhere, and she’d come to cherish every single one.

Hadley wasn’t listening to the words so much as letting the music keep her company. She’d pushed the coffee table aside earlier in the evening, giving herself enough room to lean against the couch while she sorted through the reams of paper that had come off the old printer downstairs. Her first task in the morning would be to order more toner. She’d been lucky to have enough left in the back room to finish printing the material Nick’s deputy had sent over that morning.

The old song wound down and bled slowly into another.

She rolled her shoulders as she set a small stack of pages aside, images of the contents of one of Roland’s spiral notebooks. There wasn’t a single reference to Vinton’s fields in them, which was the search she’d started a little after five that afternoon. It had taken her a good two hours of sifting before she caught the pattern.

Every time she came upon a passage or a notation about the east fields of Cane County, it led nowhere. A note with an asterisk beside it, never once followed up. A reference to a name with no name attached. A sentence that ran clear to the edge of the paper, then stopped, with another small star.

She’d come to the conclusion that Roland had intentionally left out the details on the east fields. And every time she found one of those little asterisks, the missing flash drive came back to mind. Unless she was making connections where there weren’t any again.

She’d also made the mistake of getting lost in the accounts themselves.

The old ones, dated back long before she was born, taken down from people who were now dead and buried in Whistlerun’s cemetery. A farmer who swore the corn went dead silent the autumn his daughter walked into it and never walked out. A woman who’d sworn a tall shape stood at the edge of a field and called out her name over and over again. She hadn’t told a soul until she was on her deathbed, and it no longer mattered. Story on story, all of them circling the same husk-wrapped shape, and somewhere in the reading of them the old Victorian had started talking back.

Every settle of a joist.

Every tick of the refrigerator.

Even the screech of a branch dragging itself across the upper window, doing its level best to pull her attention off the page.

Hadley groaned at the discomfort she’d talked herself into and pushed up off the floor, her knees stiff from the hours against the couch. She added an alarm system to her to-do list, somewhere between the toner and Martin Cox. Something simple. Four cameras to cover each side of the Victorian, motion lights for the backyard and both sides of the house.