Matt
I’d spent days thinking it over, and there was no way. Me in a pageant. No. Not happening. So. The farm. The form. Before lunch. Problem solved.
I should have known the morning was already lost when I parked and saw the farm stand.
It was open and doing business like any other day, cider and honey and a line at the register, but the table by the door where the festival paperwork lived had been cleared off entirely, and a paper sign was taped where the forms should have been, in handwriting I’d have known anywhere from a thousand register receipts—FESTIVAL HQ AT THE BIG HOUSE, FOLLOW THE PUMPKINS—with an arrow, and then, smaller, YES OFFICER HARTFORD THIS MEANS YOU.
I stood there and looked at my name on a sign for a while. Then I followed the pumpkins.
They’d lined the farm lane with them, fat and orange in the wet grass, all the way up to the Big House, where the wraparound porch had been converted into something between a command post and a county fair.
There was a folding table with a label maker’s entire output taped along its edge.
There were three clipboards on nails. There was a whiteboard, an actual whiteboard, with the festival schedule blocked out in colors that meant something to somebody, and a column down the side that said CONTESTANTS with names in a list, and there, fourth from the top, in marker—M. Hartford.
And in the center of it, in a rocking chair angled to survey her entire operation, wrapped in a barn coat, with a quilt over her knees and a mug of something steaming at her elbow and the bright, frustrated eyes of a woman who had been told to rest and had instead relocated her empire to the porch, sat Iris Starling.
“Officer Hartford,” she said, before my boot hit the first step. “You’re just in time. Sit.”
“Mrs. Starling.” I stopped at the foot of the steps and took off my hat without deciding to—a Sweetbriar PD ball cap I’d had on backward all morning, the way I wore it off-duty and out of the cruiser. I held it in both hands. “I heard you were in the hospital.”
“I was. Now I’m on the porch. It’s a very short story, and everyone keeps wanting to tell it slowly.” She gestured at the chair beside her with the authority of a woman seating a dinner guest. “Sit down, you’re blocking my light.”
There was no light to block. The sky was the flat pearl gray of an Oregon day that was thinking about raining.
But I’d learned a long time ago that there are people you don’t argue with, so I climbed the steps and sat where she told me.
The rocking chair received me like it had been waiting, and somewhere inside the house a screen door banged and feet crossed a floor and I had the brief, cornered sensation of a man who has walked into a building with one exit and watched somebody quietly take up a position near it.
“I came to talk to whoever runs the contest,” I said.
“You’re looking at her.” She lifted her mug. “Acting capacity for now.”
“The form to withdraw—”
“Withdraw.” She said the word the way you’d repeat a price you found insulting.
She turned her head and looked at me, full on, and I understood why an entire town did what this woman said.
It wasn’t loud. It was just that her attention had weight, like a hand on your shoulder, and it didn’t move until she was done.
“You want to withdraw from the contest?”
“I do. With respect. It was entered without my—”
“Do you know where the money goes this year, Officer Hartford?”
I did not. I had been so busy planning my exit that I had not done the one thing the job had trained into my marrow, which was to find out what was actually going on before I acted. The question landed there, in that gap, and I felt the morning begin its long slide away from the plan.
“Every year the Harvest Ball tickets raise money for a town cause,” she said.
“Each year a different one. The fire department got a thermal camera. The library got its roof. Last year it was the river cleanup, you’ll remember; your sister ran it.
” She let that sit, she said it lightly, like it cost her nothing, which is how I knew it was costing her everything. “This year the cause is this farm.”
The porch was very quiet. Out past the lane the pumpkins sat in their wet rows, and the corn maze stood tall, and gold and secretive, and the tarp on the far barn lifted at its loose corner and settled, and I looked at that tarp now with different eyes, the way you reread a sentence once you know how the paragraph ends.
“The barn,” I deduced.
“The barn, yes.” She wrapped both hands around her mug.
“And before you go feeling sorry for us, understand something. We’ve poured into this town since we came here, a hundred years ago, give or take.
We give every year. This is the one year we’ve had our hand out, and we’ll have it back in our pockets and giving again by next fall, when it’ll be somebody else’s turn.
” For just a second—half a second, the unit of time I was apparently measuring my life in lately—her eyes went somewhere far off, and she looked exactly as old as she was.
Then she came back. “So. You want to withdraw. From a contest that this year exists to keep my granddaughter from working herself into the ground saving the only home she’s ever had.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t reach for the form. ”
I knew, sitting there, exactly what was being done to me. I had run this play myself, on people, for the right reasons—you find the lever, you don’t push it hard, you just rest your hand on it and let them see you know where it is.
The trouble was where she’d set her hand.
Working herself into the ground. I thought about the smudge under Elizabeth’s eyes yesterday at the register, and the honey selling out, and the entry forms in her car and her kitchen and, she’d said, her shower, and the way she ran the Stop the entire architecture of it isn’t my place to help, went quietly out from under me like the barn’s tarp letting loose in the wind.
She looked at me sitting on the steps of her grandmother’s porch with my hat in my hands, and I watched her do the very thing I’d have done—clock the whole scene in one sweep, the sign, the lever, the trap, her grandmother’s innocent face—and arrive at the bottom of it about a second before I finished arriving there myself.
“Oh, Grandma,” Elizabeth said. “What did you say to him?”
“He came to withdraw,” she said placidly, rocking.
“He came to—” Elizabeth turned the full green-eyed weight of her attention on me, and I’m not proud of the fact that my pulse did something erratic. “You came to withdraw?”
“I came to look into withdrawing,” I said, which was a coward’s correction, and we both heard it.
“From the contest your sister entered you into. The contest that’s going to save the barn? That contest?”
“I didn’t know all of it when I got in the truck.”
“And now?”
And there it was. Behind Elizabeth the kitchen window framed a square of yellow lamplight, and behind me Iris Starling rocked with the patience of geology, and in front of me stood a short, furious, exhausted woman holding a clipboard like a shield over a heart she’d run herself into the ground to protect, and I thought about a question on a dance floor that I still couldn’t answer, and how the only thing worse than not knowing what you want is finding out in a way you can’t take back.
“Now I know,” I said.
Elizabeth’s jaw set. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the start of one.” I stood up and put my hat back on, backward, the way it had been.
I caught the exact moment she noticed it.
Her eyes went to it and snapped back down to the clipboard, fast, like she’d touched a stove, and a little color came up under the freckles that hadn’t been there a second before, and she scowled harder at the contestant list as though it had done something.
I filed that. I filed it carefully. “I’m not withdrawing. ”
The porch held still. Somewhere out in the maze a crow said something rude. Her grandma’s rocking chair creaked, once, the sound of a woman not gloating with tremendous effort.
“Good,” Elizabeth said finally, in a voice that hadn’t decided yet whether I’d done something decent or something annoying. She looked down at her clipboard like it might rule on it for her. “Great. Wonderful. Then you’ll need a liaison.”
“A what?”
“Every contestant gets an official festival liaison. Schedules, rounds, costume fittings, the whole circus. Somebody to make sure you show up and don’t humiliate the entire institution.
” She flipped a page, all business now, the fury folding itself away into a clipboard the way I file a feeling into a half-second.
“Dale has Carol. Brody Cassidy’s got Beau, who is twelve, which they’ll both regret.
Simon’s running his own, because Simon Holloway does not accept supervision from anybody, and frankly the man’s so organized he should be liaising the rest of us.
Tristan didn’t request anyone and didn’t answer when I asked; he just looked at me until I moved on, which is apparently his whole personality.
And Jude requested Harper, and Harper said, and I’m quoting, absolutely not. So…”
“So?” I said.
“So, you’ve got—” Elizabeth started, scanning the list, and Iris, from the rocking chair, not opening her eyes, with the serene finality of a judge entering a verdict that had been decided before the trial, said—
“Elizabeth will take you.”
I kept my face where it was. Inside, something took note, the way you note a car that’s been behind you three turns—not alarm exactly, just a heightened awareness that the situation had changed, and I’d be tracking it now.
Elizabeth Starling. Weeks of her. The one person on that clipboard I’d have to report to, sit beside, show up on time for.
I told myself it was an inconvenience and left it there, because the alternative was asking why an inconvenience had made my pulse pick up, and I was not going to do that on this porch.
The clipboard came down. “Grandma.”
“She knows the festival better than anyone. She’s running the whole thing this year; it’s her turn.
It only makes sense.” She took a slow sip of her tea, eyes still closed, the very picture of a frail convalescent who absolutely could not be argued with on doctor’s orders.
“Unless you’d rather I got up and did it myself? ”
It was masterful. I’d have applauded if I weren’t the one in the trap with her.
Elizabeth opened her mouth, looked at her grandmother—small in her coat, quilt over her knees, having just had a heart event—and closed it again, because there is no version of no you can say to that, and Iris Starling knew it, and had known it before any of us walked onto the porch, possibly before she ever climbed into the car to go to the hospital, I wouldn’t put it past her.
Elizabeth looked at me. I looked at Elizabeth.
The whole thing had the symmetry of two people realizing they’d been seated next to each other at a wedding by a relative with an agenda, which was more or less exactly what had happened, just spread across two families, one farm, and a whole season of festive fall activities.
“Fine,” Elizabeth huffed. “You’ll get a schedule. Wear something you don’t mind getting pie on. First round’s the kickoff.”
“Understood,” I said.
“He understands,” Iris agreed, to the porch in general, and rocked. “He sure does.”
I went down the steps and back along the lane between the pumpkins, and I got most of the way to the truck before I let myself notice that the thing sitting in my chest, where the exit plan used to be, was not dread. I checked it twice, the way you double-check a lock. It held. It wasn’t dread.