Chapter 24
Hadley Dawkins
The storm had worn itself down to a thin, steady drizzle by the time Hadley turned up Edgar Gleason’s drive, a strip of packed dirt worn smooth by decades of the same tires rolling over the same ruts.
She’d meant to head straight to Earl Vinton’s place, to finally get permission to walk the east field before the daylight faded toward dusk.
She had several theories going, but she kept circling back to the way Roland had kept a tight lid on the land transfers.
Had he meant to let someone believe the sack of gold and jewelry was still buried on Vinton ground? Or was his death not tied to that old story at all?
Any answers would have to wait, because the late afternoon had other plans.
Her cell had rung the moment she’d stepped out of Donovan’s garage. Edgar swore there’d been a theft on his property, and it fell to her to take the report. She’d keyed dispatch to let them know she was handling it herself.
She parked and cut the engine before popping the umbrella just as the soles of her ankle boots met the gravel. The rain had eased to a drizzle, the drops pattering softly against the black nylon, and she stepped around the puddles gathering in the low spots as she made for the front porch.
Edgar waited for her under the overhang. He turned his head and spat, the brownish wad landing in one of the bushes that lined the wooden steps. He’d chewed tobacco her whole life, and old age wasn’t about to talk him out of one of his few vices.
He was a tall old man gone stringy and spare with his years. The flannel he’d pulled on today was the twin of every other one in his closet, and he wore it without apology. He eyed her umbrella the way a man might eye somebody who’d turned up to a hog roast in a necktie.
“Afternoon, Mr. Gleason. What’s this about a break-in?”
“Break-in’s a strong word.” Edgar worked his jaw side to side, gathering more spit or just gathering his thoughts, she wasn’t quite sure. “Somebody’s been in my shed. The smaller one.”
He tipped his head toward the barn across the yard.
“My squirrel feeder needs fixin’, so I went to collect my tools and found my hammer up and gone. My good screwdriver with it, the one with the yellow handle. Both of ‘em, right out of the spots where I keep them.”
“Just the two?”
“Just the two, and that’s the piece that’s got my hackles up.
” Edgar came down off the steps and into the drizzle without a flicker of concern for it, too old and too ornery to be run indoors by a little weather.
“A fella breaks into a shed, he takes the drill. The circular saw. Something he can turn into money down at the flea market. He does not take one hammer and one screwdriver and leave a whole wall of good tools hanging behind him. It makes no sense.”
Hadley angled the umbrella to bring him under it as they crossed the yard. He suffered the courtesy for about three steps before drifting back out into the rain on his own, and she let him.
The smaller of the two outbuildings hunched at the edge of the lot, a squat clapboard thing a good deal humbler than the barn where Gleason ran the still that every soul in Cane County pretended not to know about.
Its door hung open. She collapsed the umbrella and leaned it against the jamb, then stepped inside, into the smell of sawdust and cold engine oil.
A workbench ran the length of the back wall.
Above it hung a pegboard, each tool set into its own outline in flaking paint, and two of those outlines stood empty.
The single window had been painted shut a decade or more ago, crusted along the sill.
She ran her attention over the door frame and found no gouge, no splinter, no bright scar in the old wood where a bar might have gone in.
“You keep this one locked?”
“Never once have.” Edgar filled the doorway behind her, blocking what gray light the afternoon still had to give.
“The barn, I lock. A man’s got to see to his interests.
But this shed? The back door of my own house?
Never saw the sense in it, and I’m sure not fool enough to start buying padlocks at my age.
Which is exactly why it falls to you to run down the little bastards that did this, and not to me. ”
Hadley crouched at the threshold and studied the plank floor.
No mud dragged in that didn’t match the old man’s own boots, though a full day of rain would have carried off most of what a thief might have left behind.
Two tools gone from a shed crowded with better ones.
Kids did wander onto a man’s property now and again and lift what wasn’t theirs, that much was true, but they took what they could sell or wave around in front of their friends.
Not a hammer.
Not a worn screwdriver with a yellow handle.
“Tell me about this squirrel feeder.” Hadley rose and brushed the grit from her knee. A thought had turned over in the back of her mind, and how she got at the answer might depend on how she played the next few minutes. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Hinge tore clean off the lid.” Edgar turned his head and spat again. “Coons keep prying it up after the seed and running my squirrels off the back porch rail, and I’ll not stand for it another week. I want the thing mended before the first hard freeze.”
He squinted up past the shed roof at the low, dragging clouds.
“Weather’s coming in early this year. You can smell it. I’ve got a whole list of chores I mean to have squared away before the ground sets up hard.”
“What else have you gotten to this week?”
“Oh, this and that. Enough to keep an old man out of the recliner.” Edgar ticked it off on knotted fingers.
“Cleaned the gutters, front and back. Split a cord and got it stacked under the lean-to before this mess blew in. Shored up the soft board on the back step. Reset the mailbox down at the road, too. The post had gone punky at the bottom, and the whole works was leaning out into the lane like a drunk waiting on a ride.”
“Mind if I have a look at the mailbox?” Hadley collected her umbrella from the jamb. “Your handiwork, that is.”
Edgar narrowed his eyes at her, a long suspicious squint that had likely turned more than one solicitor back down this drive with nothing to show for the trip. Whatever he decided he found in her face, he let it go.
“Suit yourself. It’s a mailbox. Not much to see.”
They set off down the drive together through the thinning rain, Edgar setting a pace with no intention of being hurried and no interest in her umbrella.
She carried it over both of them as best he’d allow, which wasn’t much.
The clouds had begun to lift and pale at their edges, the worst of the storm hauling itself off to the east.
“You’ll be down at the festival in a couple of weeks, I’d expect.”
“I expect I will.”
“You going to leave them be? The ones who take the dare.” Edgar cut a sideways look at her.
“A boy sneaks onto Old Man Gleason’s land, dares his own knees to carry him past the crazy man’s barn, walks off with a story he’ll be telling his grandkids in fifty years.
You think I don’t know that’s what they call me?
Hell, I’ve been the crazy old man out here going on thirty years now. ”
He rubbed the stubble along his chin.
“I don’t mind it. Turned into a tradition somewhere along the way, and Reed understood that, rest his soul.
” Edgar grunted low in his chest. “That sheriff of yours, though. Not so much. That man’s got a fence post shoved so far up his backside I’m surprised he can even sit in a chair.
He’d have the whole pack of those teens in cuffs before my jars quit sloshing. ”
Hadley bit the inside of her lip and fixed her attention on the mailbox down the lane.
She bit down until the urge to laugh had passed through her.
Nick would not have cared for the assessment.
Edgar wasn’t wrong in it, either, and that was the trouble with Nick.
He’d come up policing a different sort of place, one where the lines society drew stayed where they were put.
He hadn’t learned yet that Cane County ran on a hundred small mercies that never once made it into a report.
Well, he’d started to learn last fall.
It just hadn’t stopped him from trying to redraw the lines his own way.
“Sheriff Turner means well, Mr. Gleason.” Hadley doubted a word of her statement would land, but she said it anyway. “He does.”
“Most fools do.”
Again, she had to force her laugh back down. There was no bite under his words at all, only a plain acceptance.
“Can I ask you something, Mr. Gleason? You were born and raised in Whistlerun. You ever come across the version where the Threshing Man isn’t the one doing the taking?
Where a long time back, the town gave him something first. A girl.
Maybe a bag of gold and jewelry. And after that he was more a guardian over the fields than anything somebody needed to fear. ”
“The bride and her dowry.” Edgar had his answer ready before she finished. “Sure, I know it. My grandmother told it the old way plenty of times. The Threshing Man kept the corn coming up gold, year on year, long as the county kept faith and paid what it owed.”
He flapped a spotted hand toward the fields.
“But there’s not a soul alive who believes that version anymore, and you’d be hard put to blame them. Too many folks walked into that corn over the years and never walked back out. Guardians don’t empty a county of its young, now do they?”
“Young girls, you mean.”
“Wasn’t always so.” Edgar stepped wide around a puddle spreading across a low rut.
“The old-timers will tell you it took what it took, back in the deep of it. Man or woman, child or graybeard, made no difference to the thing. Then somewhere along about the middle of the last century it turned choosy. Only young girls from then on.”
His lips pulled thin and hard.
“Which is right about when the elder Telfort got to his business, of course. So, you tell me where the story leaves off, and a wicked family hiding behind it takes up. That whole bloodline had a rot bred down through it. You sort out which is which after all this time, you’re a finer chief than the county’s paying for. ”
“But do you think any of the old part is true? The bargain.”
“I think it hardly matters a lick what an old moonshiner believes.” Edgar drew up short a good twenty feet from the mailbox.
“But I’ll tell you what not a soul around here will say out loud.
Nobody went missing last year. First harvest in longer than I can rightly recall that came and went and didn’t take a living soul out of this county. ”
Edgar set off again, slower now, as they came up on the mailbox.
“And you know all about that, don’t you?
You’re the one who brought Missy Claymont back home last fall, after that Telfort boy had kept her a whole year.
” Edgar drew to a stop beside the post. “Girl walked into that festival two years back and didn’t walk out, and half of three counties had already made their peace with never seeing her again.
Then you went and found her breathing. The whole business ran backward for once.
You want to sit up nights chewing on what’s true and what ain’t, you go on and chew on that one. ”
Hadley had no answer ready, so she turned her attention to the mailbox.
It stood straight and sure on its fresh-tamped post, the dirt around its base still dark and mounded from the old man’s work.
And there in the tuft of tall grass grown up beside it, half drowned in the wet blades, lay a hammer and a screwdriver with a yellow handle.
Edgar followed her gaze. He stared at the tools, then at the mailbox, then back at the tools, and a deep flush climbed up out of his flannel collar and spread over his entire face.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
He bent with a grunt and gathered them out of the grass, and when he straightened, he leveled the screwdriver at her, yellow handle wrapped in his fist and the worn tip aimed square at the middle of her chest.
“You breathe one word of this to a living soul. One word about Old Man Gleason losing what marbles he’s got left, and I will look you dead in the eye and deny every last syllable of it.”
This time, Hadley let the laugh come out naturally.
“Mr. Gleason, I don’t believe there’s a person in this whole county who’d take my word over yours.”
That drew something close to a smile out of the old man’s weathered face.
He carried both tools in his right hand as they turned back up the drive together.
The rain had gone to the finest mist, hardly worth the umbrella she still held over her head, and off to the west a seam of paler sky had begun to work open under the clouds.
She ought to have been turning her mind toward Earl Vinton, toward the east field and the miles of late afternoon still ahead of her. Instead, Edgar’s words kept turning over in her thoughts.
Nobody went missing last year.
He had it right, and she’d never once looked at it from that side of the fence. The whole while she’d been home, she’d been counting the taken. She’d never stopped to count the year that broke the line. The harvest that came, and went, and kept every last soul it had.
Except Reed.
And Reed’s death seemed to be more tangled up with the Threshing Man by the hour, but not in the way the missing had been all those years. Reed hadn’t walked into the corn and vanished. Reed had been put on a road and set on fire, and that was a different kind of taking, if it was a taking at all.
Hadley walked the rest of the way up the drive at Edgar’s side, wondering for the first time whether Cane County had at last paid its debt in full.
Or whether the debt had finally been refused.