Page 44 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

The people here could go on believing the world stopped at the county line, that the worst thing waiting in the dark was the stories their grandmothers told to keep them out of the corn. Hadley knew better. She’d stood over the real and ordinary horror of a gruesome scene more times than she cared to count back when she carried a state detective’s badge. The Threshing Man could spin people’s imagination until they couldn’t tell what was real from what wasn’t, but it wasn’t the legend that kept her up at night. It was the hand that had shoved Roland Mercer through a broken railing. The finger that had pulled the trigger on Reed. Those were the things that had her locking the station up tight the moment the sun went down.

She stepped over the minefield of paper toward the kitchen.

Her first instinct was to put on a pot of coffee, but she thought better of it. She wanted to be up before the sun, out to see Martin Cox and then to ask Earl Vinton whether he’d mind her walking his fields. She wanted to understand what had drawn Roland to that ground, beyond the Threshing Man. She turned from the coffee maker and reached into the cupboard for a glass instead.

Movement outside caught her attention through the window over the sink.

The glass pane overlooked the narrow backyard and the gravel patch behind it where she’d parked Reed’s old cruiser. She went still with her hand in the cupboard. It could have been Hank, the ancient orange tomcat who ran the alleys downtown and answered to no one, cutting through the way he did most nights. It could have been absolutely nothing but her imagination.

Still, she hated the way her pulse kicked up.

Rather than overreact, she ran the tap and filled the glass. Then she made her way to the switch, unhurried, a woman getting a last drink of water before bed, and with a flick, the kitchen dropped into darkness. She edged back to the window, to the sheer curtain she’d been meaning to replace. She slipped her fingers between the fabric and the frame and peered down into the yard.

There.

Right at the edge, where the gravel gave way to the strip of grass and the dark beyond it. A shadow. Long and upright, set apart from the trash bins, the leaning post, and the bulk of the cruiser. She held her breath and waited for it to resolve into something ordinary. The moon hung three-quarters full and scudding behind cloud, and the shifting light changed the yard as she observed it, so she couldn’t say for certain whether the shape had moved or the shadows had slid around it.

Whether it was a man.

Whether it was anything at all.

Anger swiftly rose inside her. She’d let a stack of dead people’s ghost stories crawl into her head, and now here she stood in her own dark kitchen, jumping at nothing. She made herself step back, one hand flat on the counter.

Then she made a snap decision, turning to collect her firearm.

Her service weapon was stored in a fingerprint safe on the nightstand in the bedroom. Once she was standing in front of it, she pressed her index finger to the reader and waited for the lid to pop. The weight of the weapon in her hand settled her more than any amount of talking herself down had managed to do in the last few minutes. Before long, she was down the stairs and at the back door with its new deadbolt, the one she’d installed the week she took ownership.

She turned the lever slowly to prevent it from clacking before stepping outside. The night air had gone cool, the first real bite of the season in it. She let the door rest against the frame behind her while she stood still for a moment, giving her eyes the time to adjust.

It was quiet.

Too quiet.

No crickets, no cicadas, none of the low September racket that should have filled a yard this time of year.

The backyard ran deep, the way the old lots used to be sold back in the day. The broad stretch of lawn gave way to unkempt grass toward the rear, where the ground sloped off, and the dark gathered thick past the reach of the house lights. An overgrown hedge marked one side of the property, tall and untrimmed for years, and an abandoned clothesline ran between two posts near the back step. Two trash bins stood off to the side.

Plenty of dark to work with, and plenty of places a person could stand in it.

Hadley eased along the near side of the lawn with the firearm low in both hands, moving down the length of the hedge. The rank smell of grass grown too long hung in the air, though the woodsmoke drifting up from the neighborhood to the south had all but buried it. The crickets hadn’t started up again. Without their chorus, the sound of her own heartbeat was a bit much.

She reached the spot where she thought she’d caught sight of someone.

Or something.

The tension in her shoulders eased by degrees. The ground wasn’t disturbed. Nothing waited for her there. She lowered the weapon and stood still.

Little by little, the night settled back around her. One cricket started up, then another, and soon the whole chorus had found its rhythm again, filling the dark the way it had before she’d ever come outside. She scolded herself for overreacting and started back toward the house. Chasing scarecrows, because she’d read one too many bedtime stories meant to keep children out of the corn.

Would it be so bad to take one of the sleeping pills her shrink had prescribed?

It had been over a year since she’d managed a full eight hours, and she’d come to lean harder and harder on caffeine to drag herself through the day. She passed the cruiser, and the thought of Reed brought the rest of it up with it. It wasn’t only his death that had wrecked her sleep.

What if Mason actually took her advice?

Her old position wasn’t sitting there waiting for her to ask, and she sure as hell wouldn’t stay on in Whistlerun. Hell, she was standing in her own backyard with a weapon in her hand because of an overactive imagination. That wasn’t her. She didn’t get caught up in all the folklore.

A tall, dark silhouette came around the corner of the house.