Chapter Two
“This is private property! You’re trespassing!” Helen yelled, her voice like a forgotten vinyl record, scratchy in places
where it used to be bold and clear.
Gripping the gun with both hands, she stepped cautiously away from the open door and onto the front porch. The old farmhouse
sat in the middle of a large clearing, a one-story relic dwarfed by the trees that surrounded it like patient invaders. The
moon cast an eerie glow against the peeling paint on the house’s siding, the yard’s overgrown weeds, the rusty wheelbarrow.
Helen’s next shout was louder, braver, and it echoed through the trees. “I have a gun!”
She paused and listened. Silence layered upon silence. Yet somehow, even after the echo of her shout faded away, it felt like
the last word remained there in the air. Gun.
She squinted against the darkness as she descended the two wooden steps into the front yard.
Opposite the house, her vegetable garden made strange shapes against the night.
Next to it, Wade’s storage shed sat with its door open.
It was too dark to clearly see inside, but she now felt certain the noise she’d heard was the sound of that door thudding open.
Someone must be in the shed.
For the briefest moment, Helen had the urge to empty all of the bullets into the open shed. But no, of course she couldn’t
do that. Not every intruder came with the intention to kill, even if her experience with home invasions told her they did.
Instead, she yelled, “You’re trespassing, and you need to leave!”
She slowly crossed the yard to the shed, pausing every so often to listen, her stocking feet sinking occasionally into a spot
of soft earth. The ground was still somewhat firm from the dry summer, but the increasing rains were starting to form spongy
patches throughout the yard. If she had to run, she could easily slip in one of those spots.
She looked back at the open farmhouse door, suddenly seized with the idea that while her focus had been on the shed, someone
could have snuck behind her into the house.
Wade was asleep inside, weaponless.
In the side yard out of her view, Wade’s old ax would be wedged into a stump, and chopped wood would be neatly stacked against
the house. Normally she never gave that old ax a second thought, but now she realized that it could be taken and used against
them.
The idea flooded her blood with electric fear. She took off in a run, and when she rounded the side of the house, she half
expected to find the stump bereft of its ax, but it was there, sharp blade stuck into the wood.
Holding the gun in her right hand, she worked at the ax with her left, but it wouldn’t pull free. She looked around uneasily
and was met with only the quiet night, so she set the gun in the grass and grabbed the ax handle with both hands. She yanked
hard, stumbling back a half step when it came free.
She quickly transferred the ax to her left hand and picked up the gun with her right.
Ready.
After Tyler was killed, Helen had taken shooting lessons at the gun range. She’d gone again and again until she was confident and accurate. She always shot best when she held a gun with two hands, though.
This particular gun, Wade’s revolver, had a heavy trigger on it. To keep her aim steady, she needed to use both her right
and left index fingers when she fired it.
“Never cock the gun,” Wade had told her.
Helen cocked the gun. Now it was a hair trigger, and she could easily shoot it one-handed.
Gripping the ax with her left hand, she pointed the gun with her right and walked cautiously back toward the shed. She kept
her index finger resting along the gun’s frame.
“I’m approaching with a gun! Step out slowly. Show your hands!”
A howl sounded in the distance. The coyotes were starting up again.
As she got closer, she heard a rustle inside the shed and tightened her grip on the ax. There was no way she could effectively
swing an ax one-handed though, especially with her left. Helen wasn’t a wisp of a woman, but she’d never impressed anyone
with her strength either. She was average height, slim but fit from working the property. She could chop wood herself but
preferred to let Wade do it because axes felt unwieldy.
Helen stopped several feet from the shed, not wanting to give her would-be assassin the opportunity to spring from the shadows
and grab the ax before she could fire the gun.
“Hello?” she called out tentatively, her nerve fading.
She should have woken Wade.
Suddenly, near the ground at the shed’s entrance, two pinpricks of light began to glow. Eyes. Yellow.
Helen’s finger moved to the trigger as a small creature scrambled out of the shed. The yellow eyes gleamed at her from its
shrunken face, and she realized it was just a raccoon.
It stopped and stared at her, and she had the strangest sensation that it felt sorry for her. They both waited to see what the other’s move would be until, finally, Helen stomped her foot, and the raccoon bared its teeth and skittered away.
From the entrance, Helen could see only the vague shape of Wade’s supplies piled on the shelves and leaning against the walls,
but somehow she knew the shed was empty. No one was there after all. The latch on the door had simply come undone.
She tossed the ax onto the grass and closed the door to the shed, gingerly handling the rough wood. That stupid door had given
her more than a few splinters. Then she picked up the ax and turned back toward the house.
In the early days with Wade, this place had held a hopeful kind of charm. If a stranger were to venture all the way down their
long dirt driveway and not notice Wade’s ’60s Ford pickup truck parked under the red alder tree, the stranger would think
he’d stumbled upon a snapshot from a hundred years ago, with Helen and Wade presenting as a couple from the early 1900s.
Every day, Helen wore one of the dresses she’d sewn herself, different fabrics but only slight variations of the same pattern,
the only pattern she’d been able to master. It had taken her seven months to get it right. Before that, her dresses had looked
like gunnysacks, and she’d cinched them at the waist with fabric belts. But she’d kept at it. She certainly had the time to
practice, and now the dresses were pretty. Fitted in the bodice, loose skirt.
Wade’s attire was less remarkable: work pants, shirt, boots, jacket in muted colors. Men’s utilitarian clothing was timeless
in many ways. Only hats had noticeably changed over the years. Wade normally didn’t wear one, but when he did it was either
a flat cap or a narrow-brimmed felt cowboy hat. When they had first dated in the city, he had worn a baseball cap to dinner
once and he’d looked good in it, boyish almost, which was unusual for a man who awoke with a five o’clock shadow. The outdated
hats he wore now made him look like an actor at the dinner theater. But who was she to judge? She was spending her days dressed
like Virginia Woolf.
Helen hadn’t been to a salon either since disappearing into the woods.
No more subtle highlights and long layers fashionably cut into her hair.
Now it hung halfway down her back in waves, a soft brown.
Sometimes she braided it. Sometimes she wrapped it into a bun.
Sometimes she twisted it into a coil and wrapped it around her neck just to imagine what a noose might feel like.
Helen rounded the corner of the house to find the side yard empty still. She set the gun in the grass and gripped the ax handle
with both hands, set her feet, and gave it a good swing. The blade landed squarely in the middle of the stump just like she’d
found it.
As she retrieved the gun from the grass, a chilling feeling crept back over her. She spun in a circle, listening, looking,
but seeing nothing. She continued cautiously around the house until she was standing at the back of it, peering out at the
dark, thick trees beyond the open meadow. Nothing there either. Just the silhouette of branches, gnarled like monster arms.
And yet, she sensed a presence.
The longer she stood there, the more she realized it didn’t feel menacing.
In moments like this, her heart always expanded a little, opened up in hopes that it was Tyler finally visiting her. He was
a man who had loved her so much in this world, every one of her little weird eccentricities. He used to gaze at her like she
grew flowers from her eyes and diamonds from her smile, and if there was a way for him to reach back to this time and place,
she knew he would. And so, always, she was waiting.
“Tyler?” she whispered. Just in case.
The only answer she heard was the murmur of wind through the trees. Then a gentle breeze lifted a strand of hair across her
face, like a caress.
She closed her eyes, and that’s when she heard the footsteps.
Helen turned back just as a dark figure stepped around the corner of the house.