Page 58 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

“Most fools do.”

Again, she had to force her laugh back down. There was no bite under his words at all, only a plain acceptance.

“Can I ask you something, Mr. Gleason? You were born and raised in Whistlerun. You ever come across the version where the Threshing Man isn’t the one doing the taking? Where a long time back, the town gave him something first. A girl. Maybe a bag of gold and jewelry. And after that he was more a guardian over the fields than anything somebody needed to fear.”

“The bride and her dowry.” Edgar had his answer ready before she finished. “Sure, I know it. My grandmother told it the old way plenty of times. The Threshing Man kept the corn coming up gold, year on year, long as the county kept faith and paid what it owed.”

He flapped a spotted hand toward the fields.

“But there’s not a soul alive who believes that version anymore, and you’d be hard put to blame them. Too many folks walked into that corn over the years and never walked back out. Guardians don’t empty a county of its young, now do they?”

“Young girls, you mean.”

“Wasn’t always so.” Edgar stepped wide around a puddle spreading across a low rut. “The old-timers will tell you it took what it took, back in the deep of it. Man or woman, child or graybeard, made no difference to the thing. Then somewhere along about the middle of the last century it turned choosy. Only young girls from then on.”

His lips pulled thin and hard.

“Which is right about when the elder Telfort got to his business, of course. So, you tell me where the story leaves off, and a wicked family hiding behind it takes up. That whole bloodline had a rot bred down through it. You sort out which is which after all this time, you’re a finer chief than the county’s paying for.”

“But do you think any of the old part is true? The bargain.”

“I think it hardly matters a lick what an old moonshiner believes.” Edgar drew up short a good twenty feet from the mailbox. “But I’ll tell you what not a soul around here will say out loud. Nobody went missing last year. First harvest in longer than I can rightly recall that came and went and didn’t take a living soul out of this county.”

Edgar set off again, slower now, as they came up on the mailbox.

“And you know all about that, don’t you? You’re the one who brought Missy Claymont back home last fall, after that Telfort boy had kept her a whole year.” Edgar drew to a stop beside the post. “Girl walked into that festival two years back and didn’t walk out, and half of three counties had already made their peace with never seeing her again. Then you went and found her breathing. The whole business ran backward for once. You want to sit up nights chewing on what’s true and what ain’t, you go on and chew on that one.”

Hadley had no answer ready, so she turned her attention to the mailbox. It stood straight and sure on its fresh-tamped post, the dirt around its base still dark and mounded from the old man’s work. And there in the tuft of tall grass grown up beside it, half drowned in the wet blades, lay a hammer and a screwdriver with a yellow handle.

Edgar followed her gaze. He stared at the tools, then at the mailbox, then back at the tools, and a deep flush climbed up out of his flannel collar and spread over his entire face.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

He bent with a grunt and gathered them out of the grass, and when he straightened, he leveled the screwdriver at her, yellow handle wrapped in his fist and the worn tip aimed square at the middle of her chest.

“You breathe one word of this to a living soul. One word about Old Man Gleason losing what marbles he’s got left, and I will look you dead in the eye and deny every last syllable of it.”

This time, Hadley let the laugh come out naturally.

“Mr. Gleason, I don’t believe there’s a person in this whole county who’d take my word over yours.”

That drew something close to a smile out of the old man’s weathered face. He carried both tools in his right hand as they turned back up the drive together. The rain had gone to the finest mist, hardly worth the umbrella she still held over her head, and off to the west a seam of paler sky had begun to work open under the clouds.

She ought to have been turning her mind toward Earl Vinton, toward the east field and the miles of late afternoon still ahead of her. Instead, Edgar’s words kept turning over in her thoughts.

Nobody went missing last year.

He had it right, and she’d never once looked at it from that side of the fence. The whole while she’d been home, she’d been counting the taken. She’d never stopped to count the year that broke the line. The harvest that came, and went, and kept every last soul it had.

Except Reed.

And Reed’s death seemed to be more tangled up with the Threshing Man by the hour, but not in the way the missing had been all those years. Reed hadn’t walked into the corn and vanished. Reed had been put on a road and set on fire, and that was a different kind of taking, if it was a taking at all.

Hadley walked the rest of the way up the drive at Edgar’s side, wondering for the first time whether Cane County had at last paid its debt in full.

Or whether the debt had finally been refused.

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