Chapter 20
Hadley Dawkins
The porch light was still on when Hadley climbed the steps to Martin Cox’s front door, and she took it as a good sign she’d caught him at home. Out in the fields, he’d have been beyond reach until sometime this morning.
The house had aged another year since she’d last stood here.
The white paint kept up its slow surrender, curling off the wood in long strips that crunched underfoot where they’d fallen.
The green shutters had faded another shade toward gray, and one of them hung a half inch off true, a single screw gone from the top hinge.
Along the foundation, Sarah’s flower beds had been given over entirely to chickweed and crabgrass, though someone had run a mower across the yard not too long ago, and the smell of fresh-cut grass still hung in the cool air.
Hadley doubted the beds would ever grow anything but weeds again, though Martin might yet surprise her.
He had a soft spot for honoring the dead.
The front door opened before she could shift the box in between her forearm and hip to knock.
“I’m not going to ask what you had to do to get that woman to open her ovens before six.” Martin pushed the screen door wide open and took the cardboard tray of coffees from her, careful of the box. He stepped back to let her by. “I’ve been trying thirty years and never once managed it.”
“I can’t go revealing my secrets, Mr. Cox.” Hadley stepped past him into the front hall. Coffee and fried bacon hung heavy in the warm air, a stove-fire smell underneath it. He’d eaten already, most likely, but she doubted he’d turn down something sweet. “I heard you’re a sucker for a bear claw.”
“You heard right.” Martin nudged the door shut with his heel and tipped his head down the hall. “Keep on toward the kitchen. Whatever you’re after, hauling pastries out here at this hour, it must be important.”
The kitchen sat at the rear of the house, a low-ceilinged room worn soft by decades of use.
Yellowed lace curtains framed a window that looked out over the dark shapes of the fields, and the linoleum had gone thin and pale in a track between the stove and the table where a thousand meals had walked it down.
Sarah’s touches were still everywhere.
The embroidered towels over the oven handle, the decorative plates ranked on a wall rack, the suncatchers stuck to the glass. A man could live in a dead woman’s kitchen a long time and not change a thing.
Hadley pulled out a chair set diagonal from the one that had to be his, the seat cushion flattened to the shape of him.
She made herself comfortable. Martin slid the bakery box to the center of the table before he lowered himself down, slow and easy, the way a body moved when the mornings had started costing it something.
He drew a napkin from the holder and laid it in front of her without a word.
Hadley reached past it for the second cup in the tray.
“The dark roast is yours. I didn’t know how you take it, so there’s cream and sugar in the bag.”
“Black’s fine. Always has been.” Martin lifted the lid off the box, and he didn’t waste a second deciding. He went straight for the bear claw, and one bite had his eyes falling shut. “Lord, that’s fresh. Ask me anything.”
“I’m not even sure this is important, Mr. Cox.” Hadley wrapped both hands around the warm sleeve, the heat of it seeping into her palms. “But I expect you’ve heard about the professor who died over at the community college a couple of days back.”
“You mean that Mercer fella.” Martin took another bite, chewed, then washed it down with a swallow of coffee.
He then took his time wiping his mouth. “I heard about it. Tragic thing. That man was obsessed with the Threshing Man, you know. Used to drive out to Whistlerun near every week in the summers, back when he’d come up from that college down in Mississippi.
Before all his trouble down there. Sat right there in my kitchen more than once with a little recorder running on the table. ”
“That’s part of why I’m here.” Hadley shifted in the chair, weighing how he’d take the turn she was about to make. “I was hoping to ask about Sarah. About what she might have shared with Roland Mercer concerning the Threshing Man.”
The deep lines of Martin’s face loosened at his wife’s name.
“My Sarah had a hundred of those old stories.” He took another sip of coffee now that the sugar craving had eased. “Excited as a girl, she was, that Roland wanted to hear them. She’d talk, he’d scribble, and I’d go on about my day and let the two of them at it.”
“There’s one in particular I’m hoping you might remember.
” Hadley chose her words with care, wary of anything that might set tongues moving once she left.
“Roland made a note about a sacrifice, but he never wrote out the rest of it. Not the ordinary kind, either. Something about the Threshing Man becoming a guardian on account of that sacrifice.”
Martin had been eyeing the other half of the bear claw. His hand stopped short of it. He drew it back upon hearing her request. Eventually, he eased against the chairback until the old wood groaned beneath him.
“I recall that one.” Martin continued to study her, but she never wavered in her gaze. “Goes against the usual stories that make the rounds.”
“Mr. Cox, I know I promised to keep Sarah’s journals safe last year. And I know some of them were with Reed the night he…”
Hadley’s throat closed around the rest of her words. Martin reached across the corner of the table and gently patted her forearm, the gesture stiff at the joints and a bit awkward.
“Nobody expected Reed to go out the way he did, dear. Nobody.” Martin drew his hand back to his coffee. “And I got some of those journals home again, the ones he didn’t have on him. That’s plenty. As for the story, do you want it the way Sarah told it, or the tidy version?”
“The way Sarah told it.”
Martin nodded once, the only right answer as far as he was concerned.
“Way back, when this was all Vinton land, the first ground they ever broke was the east fields. First to be cleared, first to be planted. And that first year, the story goes, the corn came up wrong. Withered on the stalk before it was knee-high. Wouldn’t feed a soul.
” Martin’s voice dropped into a comfortable cadence, the words worn smooth from a hundred tellings in this same room.
“Folks were starving by the second winter. And there was an old woman among them, older than anybody could rightly account for, who said the ground had been taken without asking. That the thing living under it wanted paying. Wanted a bride.”
A sliver of cold worked its way up the back of Hadley’s neck. She kept her hands still around the cup, not wanting him to stop.
“So, they sent a girl out into the east field. Young, unmarried. They dressed her fine and put a bag in her hands, coins and rings and every scrap of gold the settlement could scrape together, everything of worth they had between them. A dowry, you’d call it.
” Martin’s gaze had drifted off her to the black window and the fields beyond it.
“They sent her walking into the corn at dusk to be a wife to whatever waited inside. To pay it what it was owed. And come morning, the girl was gone. The bag was gone. But the corn?”
Martin tapped the table once with a thick finger, and his focus came back to Hadley all at once.
“The corn came in golden the next season. Fed the whole county through the winter, and every winter after, long as the Vintons held that ground.”
“Are you saying that was the first story ever told about the Threshing Man?”
“Oldest one I know of.” Martin took another sip of his coffee, as if his throat was dry from talking so long.
“Back then, the Threshing Man wasn’t the thing that called young women out into the corn.
The way Sarah’s people told it, once the town gave him the girl, once the debt was paid, he kept his end.
Guarded the fields. Kept the harvest golden and the county fed, and he only ever took from the ones who broke faith.
Went where they shouldn’t. Owed and didn’t settle. ”
Martin turned the empty cup a slow quarter turn against the table.
“That’s the version that Mercer fella loved best. The Threshing Man as a guardian. Not some evil thing out there to fear.”
“But Sarah still hung the talisman.”
Hadley’s gaze was drawn to the window where a pentacle hung, its slender twigs lashed at each point with string long gone frayed and pale.
Dried corn husks had been woven through the frame, brittle and curling at the edges, and a row of small yellow beads hung from the bottom on separate threads, standing in for kernels of corn.
They swayed a little, though Hadley sensed no draft to move them.
It was the same charm she’d grown up seeing in nearly every window in Whistlerun.
“Sarah clearly didn’t believe that version,” Hadley said, pushing the issue.
“We’re talking at least the eighteen-hundreds, if not further back.
” Martin lifted a shoulder in a small shrug, as if to indicate he was a man who’d given up sorting truth from fiction a long time ago.
“There are a dozen versions of that tale, and near as many ways to bind those charms. Some say husks, some say bones, some say gold. Been told so many ways nobody living knows which part’s true, if any of it is. ”
He stared at her steadily, as if he was searching for his own answers.
“Does it even matter?”
Hadley didn’t respond, because she didn’t have one to give.
Her gaze drifted back to the window and the swaying beads.
Whatever Martin claimed not to know, he hadn’t taken the charm down.
Not in the year since Sarah died, and not in all the years before.
Martin followed her gaze, and when he turned his attention back to her, something uncertain had crossed his features and remained there.
Hadley stood before he could put a question to it.
“I shouldn’t keep you from the fields, Mr. Cox.” Hadley rose with her coffee in hand. She needed something to keep her going for the rest of the morning. “I appreciate your time.”
She had what she’d come for, though she couldn’t yet say what she meant to do with it.
An old story about a girl who walked into the east field to appease a thing in the ground.
A sacrifice wasn’t proof of anything. Yet Roland had basically built a shrine to that same field, and Reed had burned on the road that ran behind it.
Martin led her down the hall, slower than she moved, and at the small table by the front door he stopped and pulled open a drawer. He took something from it and turned it once in his hands before he held it out to her.
A talisman.
An old one, the husks gone brittle and amber, similar to the one in the kitchen window. The binding twine on this one had faded to a near-white.
“I couldn’t help but notice the last time I was in town that you haven’t hung one in the station window yet.” Martin’s voice had gone gruff. “The whole town can see you haven’t, and Sarah would have my hide if I let the new chief go without.”
“Mr. Cox, I can’t take...”
“You can, and you will.” Martin pressed the talisman into her hands and folded her fingers over it with his.
There was no arguing with him. “I got no use for two, and Sarah made a dozen, if not more. They’re tucked in every hidey-hole in this house.
Life’s worth more than any old keepsake, Hadley. You hang that up.”
Martin cleared his throat and stepped back. He then reached for the doorknob before the moment could turn heavy.
“Thank you for the coffee and the bear claw. Best thing to happen to me all week.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Cox. You have a good day.”
Martin held the door, and there was nothing to do but step through it. She descended the porch steps and walked across the gravel toward her Equinox, the talisman heavy and dry in her hand.
Martin’s parting words wouldn’t leave her, though.
Life’s worth more than any old keepsake.
A young woman walked into a cornfield with a bag of gold and other valuables to buy a county its harvest.
Maybe Sarah’s story wasn’t a story at all. Maybe there was some truth to it, and the answers to who had killed Reed Langley had been buried in Vinton’s east field this entire time.