Chapter 25
Hadley Dawkins
Hadley pulled off the back road and onto the bare patch of ground beneath the old hickory, the same tree half the teenagers in Whistlerun had been sneaking out to since before she’d left town.
The dirt turnaround was littered with the proof of it, crushed beer cans gone soft and colorless in the weather, a scatter of cigarette butts, the black scar of an old bonfire nobody had been supposed to build.
The field had been planted around this one bald acre for as long as anyone could remember, the corn giving it a wide berth, so the hickory stood alone at the edge of all that green, the one thing in sight taller than the corn.
She put the Equinox in park and left the engine running a moment.
The east field spread out past her windshield, and it was a big one.
A half mile of it, easy, running north to south, the rows so tall and close this late in the season that a grown woman would lose herself three steps in.
The corn stood better than eight feet, tasseled out at the top and gone the dry gold-brown of late September, every stalk leaning the same way in the wind.
It read less as a field than as a barrier, a dense, whispering mass that started ten feet off her bumper and ran clear to the far tree line she could just make out, low and dark, on the other side.
Somewhere over there, past all that corn, ran the back road to Donovan Huber’s place and on past Garber’s. The same road where they’d found Reed’s truck burning with him inside it.
Nick’s voice came out of the door speakers, and there was no denying the man was a little put out.
“I wish you’d waited for me on this, Hadley.”
“You’d have had me waiting until next week.
” Hadley kept her gaze on the corn. The hickory sat on the west edge, right at her bumper.
Donovan’s road ran the far side to the east, and less than a mile on that same road was the black patch of shoulder where Reed’s truck had burned.
She traced the line between the two points, the tree and the shoulder, and it ran dead straight through the field.
A half mile of stalks and nothing else between where she sat and where Reed had died.
Her thumb went still against the wheel. “You’ve got an entire county to run, Nick, and four of those towns don’t have a chief of their own. I can walk a field by myself.”
She traced the points again just to be certain.
Reed had died almost directly across from where she was parked. Straight through the corn, a half mile east, near enough to a line she could have drawn it with a ruler.
“I don’t like you out there alone,” Nick said.
“I’m not going to arm-wrestle a cornstalk.
” Hadley rested her forearm along the sill of the half-open window.
“The second I turn up anything worth mentioning, I’ll call for backup.
I’ll even sit on my hands until they get here, if that’ll make you feel better.
This is just the scut work. Somebody’s got to do it, and it may as well be the one of us who isn’t due in front of the ATF again. ”
A long pause filled the line, and she could all but hear him deciding not to fight her on it.
“What turned up with the USB drive?” Hadley asked before he could circle back around. “Anything at the parents’ place?”
“Nothing. Carl Mercer let two of my deputies go through his entire house, room by room, attic to crawlspace. If Roland hid that drive there, he hid it well enough that grief-stricken parents and two seasoned deputies couldn’t turn it up.
” Nick’s exhale carried through the speaker.
“And if he was half as paranoid as everybody keeps saying, we may never find the thing or know what was ever on it.”
“I think what was on it was his theory on the land.” Hadley followed the wind as it skimmed a long ripple down the field, one row bowing into the next.
“I truly believe Roland viewed the Threshing Man as a guardian. He found the land transfers, the chain of title, and somewhere in all of it, he finally worked out the spot. The spot. Where that girl went into the ground at the very beginning, her and an entire settlement’s worth of gold with her. ”
“That’s a hell of a leap from a few notes in a file, Hadley.”
“It is.” Hadley couldn’t argue the point.
“But this case went cold a year ago, and it stayed that way until this week. Sometimes the only way to move a dead thing is to pick a theory and walk it all the way to the end and see what it’s standing on.
Add in a murdered professor, teenagers still spotting a dark figure in the fields, and somebody trespassing on Vinton’s land, and I’d say the theory’s got legs. ”
“And Vinton’s fine with you canvassing his field?”
“Earl had a doctor’s thing over in Emberwood this afternoon. I spoke with Matt Rutledge. He knows I’m out here.”
“Just wrap it up before dark.” Nick’s voice was a bit clipped, and Edgar’s opinion of Cane County’s sheriff had her curling the corner of her lips. “I mean it, Hadley. You’re off that field before dusk, and you call me the second you’re back in the truck. Not dispatch. Me.”
Hadley’s grin faded, and she bit down on the urge to ask whether he laid the same rule on his deputies before he turned them loose on a scene.
He wouldn’t hear it the way she meant it, either.
Or worse, he’d hear it exactly the way she meant it, and she’d already decided she didn’t want to go crossing that line.
“I’ll radio dispatch when I’m clear,” Hadley replied instead, meeting him halfway. “Go home, Nick. Have a good evening.”
“Hadley—”
She ended the call and killed the engine, and the sounds of the evening came in through the half-open window all at once.
The dry rasp of the corn with its endless papery hush of husk against husk.
The last of the day’s insects trying to get one more word in edgewise before nightfall.
A mourning dove somewhere off in the tree line, calling for its mate.
Hadley palmed her keys and pushed open the door.
She stepped down onto ground the storm had softened, her boots sinking a good half-inch into it.
She stood a moment at the edge of the corn and did nothing but listen.
What rain the field still held let go one drop at a time, sliding from husk to husk down the length of a stalk before it fell without a sound to the dirt.
The storm had dragged a chill in behind it, and the damp of the evening had her grateful she still wore her blazer.
The quiet struck her as two things at once. Eerie and peaceful, and she couldn’t have said where the one gave way to the other.
She glanced down the first row, a long, dim corridor of stalks that swallowed the gray light six feet in and gave nothing back. She inhaled deeply and stepped into it, the corn closing around her, and the road and the Equinox ceased to exist behind her.
If somebody had been out here with a shovel, chasing the same story Roland had chased most of his life, the earth would tell on them. She worked her way down the rows with her focus on the dirt. Turned soil sat differently from packed soil, especially after a good rain.
Roland had led someone down the wrong path.
She was near sure of it now. He’d salted his notebooks with Vinton’s name and Vinton’s field, let a citation and a trespassing charge point everyone to this land, at Earl’s corn, while the real answer sat a mile east under Donovan Huber’s lawn where nobody would think to dig.
Would Roland ever have published the book he was writing?
She wasn’t so sure. Roland’s personality had her leaning one way, because he was the type of man who had needed praise…
acceptance. On the other hand, publishing it would have meant setting the truth down in ink for anyone to read, and she got the sense that Roland had come to feel that was a betrayal of the very thing he’d spent his life protecting.
He’d gone out of his way to keep the answer buried, which meant whoever had been watching him had been left digging in the wrong place.
It took her the better part of a half hour to find the first spot.
She’d almost walked right past it. The turned soil sat between two rows where the stalks thinned, a patch of ground maybe three feet by five, and the only reason it had caught her eye at all was the weeds.
All down the row, the ground wore the same low green fuzz of pigweed and foxtail that had come up between the stalks.
This stretch was bare, the soil darker and finer than the packed dirt on either side of it, raked over and pressed back down but not yet grown back in.
Hadley crouched and pushed her fingers into it. The dirt gave, loose to the depth of her knuckles, where the soil a foot away was packed down hard and unyielding. Somebody had dug deep here and then tamped the soil back down behind them.
She worked her phone out of her back pocket, made sure the flash was on, and snapped a few pictures.
She found the next spot forty feet up the row, and another after that, working roughly south to north through the field.
None of them large, though the repacking made it nearly impossible to tell how deep any of them ran.
Test holes.
Somebody had moved through the corn a patch at a time, opening the ground, finding nothing, moving on. Searching. She straightened at the edge of the last one and made herself go back to the beginning of the theory, the way she always did when the pieces started coming at her too fast.
Katie Rutledge and her boyfriend had seen a figure standing in these rows.
Whoever it was hadn’t wanted the kids here, and neither Katie nor Josh had seen another vehicle anywhere near the hickory.
Whoever had been coming out to dig was patient and careful, raking the ground smooth behind them every time.
The road on the far side ran past Donovan Huber’s place, and no one would chance parking a vehicle on the same stretch where the former chief of police had burned to death in his truck.
So, the digger hadn’t left a vehicle on either road.
How were they getting into the field?
The answer came to her almost immediately.
A field this size wasn’t a sealed box. It had a way in for the equipment, a gap in the rows wide enough to run a tractor and a combine through at planting and harvest, packed down hard by decades of tires.
On a field laid out east to west like this one, that access cut would sit at one of the short ends.
North or south.
Hadley turned her head, getting her bearings among the identical rows.
She’d been working up field the entire time without marking it, but the north end was closer now, no more than a couple hundred feet through the corn.
A person could leave a vehicle at that access cut, screened by the rows, and carry a shovel in and out in the dark without anyone the wiser.
She headed north.
The rows had darkened while she worked, the gray overhead sliding toward the blue-black of a coming dusk, the stalks ahead of her running together into a single dim mass.
The breeze had died, and the husks had gone still with it.
Even the mourning dove had given it up for the night.
The silence that came in to replace all of it held a weight to it, a thickness, the kind that made a woman aware of her own pulse.
Hadley was maybe fifty feet from the north end when a scream tore through the field.
High, and close, and unmistakably human.