Chapter 4
The air was still like hot molasses, but the thunder faded as the dry storm moved on across the swaths of struggling farmland, leaving what was left of the night peaceful. Anna reached for her earbuds and was about to plug herself into a true-crime podcast when her bedroom door creaked open.
“Anna?”
Caroline stood in the doorway, her long hair messy down her back from sweaty sleep.
“What do you want?” What now? Why couldn’t people just leave her alone?
“I thought I heard something.” Her little sister hovered where she was, nervous to come in, nervous to stay outside, one bare foot pressing down awkwardly on the other.
“Downstairs.” A few years earlier she would have just run and jumped into Anna’s bed, excited to be in the presence of that rare creature, her sophisticated and wild older sister. Those days were gone.
“I got up for water, that’s all,” Anna said. “Go back to sleep.”
Caroline glanced back over her shoulder into the gloom of the hallway and then over to Anna again. “Are you sure that’s all it was?”
“I’m sure.”
Caroline took a few steps into Anna’s room and leaned against the dresser. Her legs were long, colt-like, and she suddenly looked too old for her Disney nightshirt that now barely covered her panties. She was nearly thirteen, and that was starting to show. Anna didn’t like it. Not one bit.
“Holly says the Farmhand is coming. She says it’s been six years since Lila Clarke was murdered and three years since Bonnie Buchanan. So she says he’ll be coming again now. Been another three years.”
Holly Greenbough was the center of the seventh-grade social circle, from what Anna could make out, and since starting at St. Columbus Elementary and High two weeks ago, a nervous new girl arriving toward the end of the summer semester, Holly was all Caroline could talk about.
“I thought they got the guy who killed those girls. Some traveling farmworker, right? Shot dead holding up a grocery store?” She’d heard bubbles of quiet gossip in the diner about the murdered girls, vague snippets rather than much that was concrete, but she’d been reassured to hear the killer was dead.
“Yeah.” Caroline shrugged. “But Holly says he didn’t do it.
She says even though he had a bunch of sick stuff on his phone, no one really thinks he’s the killer.
She says the Farmhand isn’t a man at all but some kind of monster.
He strangles girls then cuts skin from their backs and eats it.
Keeps him alive for three years at a time.
That’s why he’s returning now. She said that if you say Farmhand in the mirror three times, it’ll be you who dies next. ”
“Holly seems to say a lot.” Anna laughed, glad for so many reasons that she wasn’t that age again, not least because of the popular girls and all their bullshit. She knew what they were like. She’d been one, after all.
“It’s not funny.” Caroline flicked her hair, indignant. “She was daring people to do it, but no one would. I’m glad she didn’t dare me.”
“You know that mirror thing is just every urban legend ever told, right? Candyman? Bloody Mary? If she was making something up to scare you, she could have come out with something better.”
“She didn’t make it up! She believes it too.
” Caroline was so earnest she looked like a child again rather than some half woman.
“When I heard the storm I thought maybe he was coming to get me. Holly said it was a dry storm when the other girls died. She said it didn’t rain all year until they were found.
Then it was like God was crying.” She glanced at the window.
“And now it’s a drought and it’s been another three years. He’s coming, I just know it.”
Anna felt pretty ready to turn Farmhand and strangle Holly Greenbough herself. This was obviously a trick being played on the new girl, and Caroline was so eager to fit in she’d totally fallen for it. Anna hadn’t realized her sister was this gullible.
“Jesus Christ,” she muttered and got up from the bed, going to stand by her sister at the dresser mirror.
The ten-year age gap was too big for them to be friends, and before she’d gone off to college, Anna had enjoyed Caroline’s adoration but also found her clingy, always wanting to know what their dad was like and if he’d loved them, and she’d ended up making shit up, because what the hell did Anna know, really?
He’d left when Caroline was born, and Anna had been a kid herself.
But now Caroline was growing up too—a changeling, a butterfly half-trapped in a childish cocoon.
“There are no such thing as monsters, Callie. And urban legends are bullshit. Look.” She turned to face the mirror. “Farmhand…” She dropped her voice low as if summoning a devil.
“No, don’t, Anna!” Caroline grabbed her arm. “It’s not funny.”
“Farmhand,” she said again, ignoring her sister’s panicked protest, and then, more loudly, she said it for the third time. “Farmhand.”
Caroline gasped. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Well, if he’s going to come for anyone now, it will be me.
” Anna turned back toward her bed. “But he won’t because this is just childish bullshit.
It’s not even original childish bullshit.
Okay? I mean, come on. Maybe they buy into all that out here in the sticks, but you’re a Boston kid. You know better, right?”
Caroline nodded, and although she didn’t look entirely convinced, her trust in Anna was such that she was more reassured. “Maybe it’s this house,” she said quietly. “I like my new school. I like my new friends. But this house scares me.”
Anna couldn’t argue with that. She felt it too, even if she refused to be cowed by the creaks and shadows and sense of emptiness the walls housed.
“I wish Mom didn’t have to do these night shifts.
” Caroline’s face was tired and furrowed.
“I like it better when she’s on days.” Callie had always been the one to have nightmares, and she hadn’t been sleeping well here.
When she was small, their mother would let her in bed with her, a joy she’d never allowed Anna when their dad was around.
But then their mother had poured all her love into her second child.
Maybe it was to make up for Caroline never knowing their dad, but to Anna it always felt like she was left out in the cold.
That Caroline was the special girl, the golden child.
That maybe if she’d been the first, their father would never have vanished.
“Mom’ll be home soon enough,” Anna said. “Now go back to bed, I want to listen to a podcast.”
“You’re not going to sleep yet?” Caroline looked hopeful. “Really?” Her eyes glanced at Anna’s bed.
“You can’t sleep in here with me.” Anna cut off her question before she’d had a chance to ask it. “It’s too hot.” Caroline’s shoulders slumped. She looked small and dejected, and for a moment, Anna’s heart softened.
“Okay, I won’t listen to anything,” she said, relenting slightly and putting her earbuds on the side table. “Just in case of any noises. Not that there’ll be any. And if the Farmhand comes, I’ll deal with him. Explain why he should get out of this shithole town and go haunt girls someplace else.”
“This place isn’t so bad.” Caroline gave her a shy smile.
“Then I’ll tell him he can have the spare room. As long as he fixes the plumbing. And looks after Grandma. Maybe I’ll tell him he has to share her room. We’ll see who’s scared then.”
That was the Anna Caroline knew and loved. Irreverent Anna. Devil-may-care Anna. Not moody, sullen Anna, who dropped out of college in shame. Still, like the title of that old Stones song, you can’t always get what you want. Moody, closed-off Anna was pretty much all that was left.
“You promise you’ll listen out?” Caroline said.
“I promise.” Anna winked at her sister. “Now shoo.”
Caroline darted over and kissed her cheek. Anna barely had time to feel the brush of her silky hair on her skin and then she was gone, just footfalls in the corridor as she ran back to her own bed.
Anna lay there for a moment in the silence before turning out her bedside light and reaching for her earbuds.
She scanned through various podcasts, focusing on those where the perpetrator got caught, but couldn’t find one to suit her mood, instead clicking through to the New York Times web page and staring at the competition for the zillionth time since she’d seen it.
The challenge was to write a longform piece about where you live in America that evoked place as well as showed investigative and emotive skills.
Anna hadn’t written anything since what happened in college, and she hadn’t done much there.
She chewed her bottom lip. There were still six weeks until the deadline, but what would she write about anyway?
Serving breakfasts in a small-town diner?
She closed it down and opted for music rather than a podcast, Nine Inch Nails loud and angry in her ears.
So what if she’d promised Caroline she’d listen out for anything strange?
Caroline needed to learn that people weren’t reliable.
They didn’t keep promises and they never kept you safe. People were shit.
She turned the music up loud enough to hurt her ears and drown out any attempt at thinking her mind might do and closed her eyes, her headache finally gone.