Matt
My house made one sound in the morning, and it was the coffee maker.
I’d lived there nine years. Three-bedroom on Alder Street, bought at a foreclosure price, fixed up one room at a time on day-off labor until everything in it worked, closed, latched, and drained the way it was supposed to. The gutters were clean. The smoke detectors were synchronized.
I drank a cup standing at the counter, looking out the window at a backyard I kept mowed for nobody, and then I went to work, because I was on shift, and that was the entire plan.
The shift was quiet the way late summer shifts are quiet.
No school zone traffic, which was nice; a fender tap on Main; no injuries; just two drivers who’d known each other for forty years and wanted me to settle a dispute that turned out to predate the fender.
A call about a suspicious individual on Cedar that turned out to be a scarecrow, which I documented with a straight face because Mrs. Pruitt was my kindergarten teacher and I respected her too much to laugh before I was back in the cruiser.
Quiet was good. Quiet meant the town was fine.
I’d spent my whole career trying to keep this town quiet and most of my life before that trying to keep one corner of it quiet above all, and now the corner was handled and the town was fine and I drove my loops and clocked my mirrors and could not shake the feeling, lately, that I was a guard posted on a building everybody else had moved out of.
I didn’t use to think like that. I knew exactly when it started, too, which is the worst part of being trained to notice things. You can’t even lie to yourself with any professionalism.
It started twenty-six days ago, on a dance floor, with a question.
I wasn’t going to think about the question.
Thinking about the question was not productive.
What I thought about instead, briefly, at every red light, in a way I had decided didn’t count, was the eleven days it had been since I’d had a reason to stop at the Stop she has known about me and right angles since childhood—and folded her hands on top of it like a loan officer. “How was your morning?”
“Becca.”
“Did you settle the Hendersons’ fender thing? Donna says it goes back to a boat in the nineties.”
“Beccaaaa,” I repeated, drawing it out so she’d know I was serious.
“Okay.” She took a breath, and the mischief on her face shifted into something steadier underneath, which worried me more, because the mischief I could handle. “Matt. The Harvest Festival is in October.”
“I’m aware. I work the traffic every year. It gets bad.”
“You do,” she said. “You work it. You work the parade, you work the Fourth, you worked my entire wedding—don’t argue, Levi counted, you checked the side gate eleven times—” I made a note to discuss confidentiality with Levi “—and the last time you did something in this town that wasn’t working it, gas was cheaper.
So.” She slid the folder across the desk.
“I entered you in the Mr. Pumpkin contest.”
There was a moment where I genuinely believed I’d misheard her.
The station was loud—Trevor Hale was on the phone two desks over, and had been for an hour, walking the county sheriff’s office through the case he’d been building all month.
So between his call and the radio’s static, I thought she had said something else, and my brain had assembled her words wrong.
I opened the folder. It was a copy. SWEETbrIAR HARVEST FESTIVAL—MR. PUMPKIN OFFICIAL CONTESTANT ENTRY. My name. My actual name, printed in my sister’s handwriting, with a checkmark in a box that said the contestant agrees to participate in all five rounds, rain or shine.
“Pie eating,” I read out loud. “Costume showcase. Pumpkin carving. Talent—” I stopped, and I knew my face had screwed up in disgust. “Talent,” I repeated, wincing as my voice cracked on the word.
“Mm-hm.”
“Rebecca Lynn Hartford.” I huffed. “Shit. I meant Barrett. What the hell?”
“Don’t full-name me; it’s filed.” She said it the way I’d announce a road closure—regretfully, but the road is closed, and there was nothing to do about it.
“It’s official, it’s public, it’s on the list at the Stop the word comes out one notch too careful.
“Out,” I said.
There was a version of this where I nodded, said huh, and went back to my paperwork, and Becca left without a single thing to report.
That version required me not to care where Elizabeth Starling was and not to let my sister see that I cared, and I could manage exactly one of those on a good day.
This was not a good day. She was standing in the doorway with her face set to casual, which meant she’d baited the hook on purpose and was already counting the seconds till I bit.
I bit.
“Out where?”
Becca paused. “Her grandmother had a dizzy spell. They took her to Sweetbriar General—she’s okay, they kept her for tests, it’s all fine.
” She watched me the way she does, which is to say, the way I do.
“She should be home now. I’ve been texting Elizabeth, but she keeps saying she doesn’t need anything and made about three different jokes about it. ”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” Becca said, left, and did not tell me to do anything about it, which, from her, was a tactic.
I worked the rest of the shift. I clocked out at six, drove home, stood in my kitchen, and ate dinner over the sink like a man being filmed for a documentary about how to be boring.
At Becca’s wedding, a woman in a green dress had asked me what I wanted, and I’d gone room to room in myself and found everything squared away, and tonight every room I checked had Elizabeth in it.
It was not my place to check on her. The Starlings had each other, in quantity.
Elizabeth Starling had a mother and a sister and two aunts and a bunch of cousins, and what she had from me was a coffee order and one dance and whatever that half-second yesterday had been before I’d left.
Men do not show up at hospitals on the strength of a half-second.
There was no call to take. Nobody had dialed my number.
I washed the one plate. I checked the locks, both doors, out of order just to prove I could.
And then I got in my truck, turned left on Main past the dark Stop & Go, out the county road with the radio low—and if my drive happened to run past the white sign for Sweetbriar Starling Farm, that was geography, not a decision.
The Big House was lit up late, every window downstairs bright against the dark fields, the way houses light up when nobody in them can sleep. The little house by the pumpkin patch had one light on, in the kitchen.
I slowed down. I didn’t stop. There was no reason to stop.
But at the end of the farm’s fence line, where the wildflower field went gray in my headlights and the hive boxes stood in their crooked row, I took one last look in the rearview mirror, occupants accounted for.