Chapter 28
Hadley Dawkins
The access road had turned into a red-and-blue haze, and every twirl of the bright hues fed the throbbing in Hadley’s temples.
She smothered a groan and leaned against the passenger side of Nick’s cruiser, observing one of the two ambulances pull away from the scene, bound for the hospital in Emberwood.
She’d kept Knox alive until the EMTs arrived, her hands pressed to the wound while Whitney came apart beside her, certain he was dying.
Blood loss might have made good on that fear, but the wound itself hadn’t been the kind to kill a man.
The angle of the shot had put the round in through his side and out his back, clipping past his shoulder blade, a through-and-through that had cost him a great deal of blood and missed his lung by the grace of probably an inch.
He would live to sit at a defense table, and she would be there to witness him sentenced.
“Kill those damn lights.” Nick’s voice carried across the scene to one of his deputies.
The red and blue died all at once. It hardly mattered, though.
The headlights of the vehicles lining the access road cut all the way back to the county road, throwing more than enough light across the churned ground, and it wouldn’t be long before the state police rolled in with their floodlights and their questions.
And make no mistake, it would be the state police, not the sheriff’s department.
Her weapon was already bagged. She’d surrendered it without being asked, because that was how this went when a chief fired her sidearm.
There would be an investigation, and the men and women she’d once called colleagues at Troop H would spend the coming weeks deciding whether she’d done the thing she knew in her bones she’d had no choice but to do.
Nick came toward her with a blanket in his hands.
He’d beaten every one of his own deputies to the scene, first here by a margin she didn’t want explained, and she pushed down the thought of how hard he’d run the needle on these black back roads to manage it. He was lucky a twelve-pointer hadn’t stepped into his headlights and ended them both.
The blanket was an old one, pilled and thin, the kind that had probably lived in the trunk of a cruiser for the past decade.
She wasn’t about to turn down the heat. By the time he reached her, he’d shaken it open.
He swung it up around her shoulders, and she leaned off the door far enough to let the material settle before she sagged back against the cold metal.
Nick turned and took the space beside her, his back to the passenger door, close enough that their arms nearly touched.
She braced for one of two things. A lecture, all the ways tonight could have gone wrong, all the reasons she should have waited on backup.
Or the other kind, the ‘well done’ and the ‘it’s finally over’, which she wanted even less.
Since she couldn’t read which way he’d tip, she spoke first.
“I’ll take a ride to my truck when you can spare it.
I left it on the east side of the field.
” Hadley’s voice came out steadier than she expected, for which she was very grateful.
“I want to clean up before driving to the hospital. And somebody’s going to have to walk the prosecuting attorney through all of it.
That’s a long night, whether we start it now or in an hour. ”
“I’ll call Julian, have him meet us at the hospital.” Nick kept his attention on the scene and his people. “The state boys own this the second they get here, but the charges aren’t going anywhere. You know that. So, take your minute, Hadley.”
She hadn’t realized she’d been staring at Nora.
She sat on the back bumper of the second ambulance, her hands turned palms up in her lap with an EMT bent over them, working grit out of the scrapes she’d earned when Knox threw her down. She appeared small under the lights and hollowed out, but she was alive.
Nora lifted her head, some animal sense of being observed drawing her gaze up, finding Hadley across the churned dirt. Her lips curved, the barest turn of gratitude. Hadley couldn’t take that right now, so she pushed off the cruiser and turned to face Nick.
“Like I said. It’s going to be a long night.” Hadley pulled the blanket tighter across her shoulders. “We should head out.”
Nick didn’t move. He crossed his arms and settled into place. He made it clear that he would step aside exactly when he was good and ready, and not one second sooner.
“Why are you so angry, Hadley?” Nick asked quietly, without a scrap of irritation at her mood.
“Nora’s safe. Knox and Whitney are going to prison for the rest of their lives.
Reed and Roland got the justice they deserved.
You get to close two files tonight. You did what you set out to do, so why won’t you take the win? ”
Hadley brought the blanket up over her face and pressed the rough fabric hard against her cheeks.
It took everything she had in her not to scream into it.
One of the EMTs had scrubbed most of Knox’s blood off her hands, but the wool dragged over the places he’d missed, and it was still there.
The slickness had gone somewhat tacky. She held the blanket to her face until the worst of the urge had passed through her, then lowered her hands.
“You don’t get it.” Hadley kept her voice low, so it wouldn’t carry to Nora.
“Reed and Mercer are dead, and for what? For gold that may or may not be buried somewhere in Cane County. For a bag of coins some starving settlement supposedly put in the ground a hundred and ninety years ago, that nobody living has ever laid eyes on, that Roland Mercer spent his entire life chasing and never found.”
“Hadley—”
“And the worst of it is the location never mattered.” The words came faster now, spilling over one another.
“Roland wanted the truth. But there is no truth. There never was, because the Threshing Man isn’t one thing.
Every family in this county carries a different version of him.
Some of them think he’s a guardian that keeps the corn gold.
Some think he’s a monster that takes their daughters.
Martin Cox hangs his dead wife’s husks in the window to pay a debt.
The Telforts used the story to cover forty years of murder.
Those aren’t legends, Nick. That’s a town telling itself whatever it needs to hear to get through another harvest. And people keep dying over which version is true. It’s all just so…”
Nick let her wind all the way down without a word. He waited a moment past her last one, making sure she was finished, before he said anything at all.
“It sounds to me,” Nick said quietly, “like you’re not really talking about the Threshing Man.”
She parted her lips to argue, but he went on before she could, and maybe that was for the best, because her adrenaline was fading fast and she didn’t trust herself to hold steady much longer.
“You’ve got a story this town has handed down for generations.
A thing it doesn’t understand and can’t agree on.
Everybody’s certain, and everybody’s got a different version, much the same as they do about your brother.
” Nick held her gaze, almost daring her to argue.
“You want the whole town to see Mason through your eyes. That isn’t how any of it works, but you already know that.
Whatever they’ve decided he is, nothing you say or do is going to change the past for them. ”
Hadley blinked against the sting of tears she refused to let fall, her body and mind coming down off a year of chasing answers. It made her angrier still that her hands had started to tremble, and she tightened her grip on the blanket to stop them.
“I’m afraid, Nick.” Hadley toed the dirt, wishing she could aim the recoil at herself. She wasn’t one for handing her feelings to anyone, but Nick had been wearing that down, one patient inch at a time. “I’m afraid I made a mistake coming back home.”
“If you hadn’t come back, Reed’s killers walk free the rest of their lives.
” Nick’s voice stayed even, and more than that, certain.
“Nora’s dead in a ditch tonight, most likely, for the crime of being close to the wrong woman.
And God knows who else down the road, because it was plain out here that those two didn’t care one bit who they went through to reach that gold.
You didn’t make a mistake, Hadley. You saved lives tonight, and you gave two families an answer for the men they lost.”
Nick waited until she brought her gaze up to his.
“But those aren’t the reasons it wasn’t a mistake.”
“No?”
“You just called Cane County home.” The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. “A person who regretted coming back to where they were raised doesn’t call it home. Not if it means nothing to them.”
And only then did Nick turn, stepping forward to pull the passenger door of the cruiser open.
He’d said his peace and seemed content to leave it where it lay.
Hadley kept one hand on the frame and turned his words over.
He was right. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing it, not tonight, not with her hands still smelling of copper and dirt and her emotions running high.
But he was right.
Somewhere in the last eleven months, Cane County had gone back to being home.
Tomorrow, she would drive out to Emberwood and pay Colleen a visit.
There were ways to lose a page in a plat book that no one would ever question.
A misfiling. A records request that came back incomplete.
No living soul needed to know that the oldest ground in the county, the first parcel the Vintons ever broke, now sat under Donovan Huber’s name.
Whatever was in the ground there, if anything was there at all, could stay buried with the girl who’d been paying this county’s debt since before it had a name.
Reed would have done whatever it took to keep this town and its people safe. That job was hers now, and she wasn’t going to let him down. She shifted to settle into the seat, and Nick’s warm hand covered hers where it still held the frame.
“For what it’s worth,” Nick said, his thumb slowly tracing across the back of her fingers, “I’m glad you came home, Hadley Dawkins.”
~ The End ~
In Cane County, the quiet ones are the easiest to lose, and the easiest to forget.
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After more than a year of wearing a badge she never wanted, Hadley Dawkins has finally started to believe she might belong in the town that raised her. Professionally, she's found her footing. It's the rest of her life that refuses to settle, though sorting that out will have to wait.
Word reaches her that Archie Keller hasn't come into town in over a week. Retired and widowed, living alone past the edge of town, Archie is the kind of man who can go a while without being missed. Concerned, Hadley drives out to do a welfare check.
Only the house is empty. His truck sits in the drive under a week of snow, his wallet and phone are on the counter, and a half-eaten meal waits on the kitchen table.
It's as though he stepped outside for a moment and never came back.
There's no sign of a struggle, and no reason a man would walk away from his entire life in the dead of winter.
The town has an explanation ready, the way it always does.
This is Cane County, after all, where people have gone into the fields and never come out since before anyone can remember.
But Hadley has never had the stomach for the easy answer, and a story about a harvest spirit does her no good with the corn long cut and the ground frozen hard as iron.
Someone took Archie Keller, someone who understands how easily a disappearance out here gets buried under a hundred years of folklore.
What they didn't count on is a chief who refuses to let the fields have the last word.
“They say the Threshing Man sleeps through the winter, when the fields lie bare and the ground goes hard. But the fields don't sleep, and they don't forget. They merely wait for the thaw, and for him to collect.”