“June.” He said my name with a tenderness that made me bite down hard onto my lip. “June, listen.”
But I was already out the door, down the steps, climbing back into the truck. I started the engine and didn’t look back as I left, not even thinking for a second about where I was headed. I followed the road I’d traveled a thousand times when I felt like I had nowhere else to go.
I pulled into the flower farm a few minutes later, cranking the emergency brake with my gaze fixed on the fields before me. Dahlias and sunflowers bobbed in the wind as far as the eye could see. There were a few hats moving among them, making me think of Mason, and I was so homesick for him that I could cry.
A young Malachi Rhodes was digging a shallow trench a few feet away from the southernmost plot, an irrigation technique we still used on the farm. Esther had been ahead of her time on that practice, but now I wondered how much she’d learned from the future. Had Susanna brought with her the knowledge that Margaret had learned? Had I? Which way had the wisdom traveled?
My feet were heavy as they took me up the porch, but I stopped short when I saw a copy of the Jasper Chronicle on the top step.
I picked it up and unfolded it.
ONE YEAR LATER: STILL NO ANSWERS
It was one of the articles I’d found in the state archives, back when all of this began. But here it was, fresh off the press and sitting on Esther’s porch—the issue that marked the one year anniversary of Nathaniel Rutherford’s death.
Below the headline, Nathaniel’s picture stretched across the page. He was smiling, the church at his back, the edges of his white shirt invisible against it. His fedora-style hat was just a little tilted to one side, following the slope of his mouth.
The town of Jasper remembers the life of Nathaniel Christopher Rutherford, longtime minister at First Presbyterian Church of Jasper. Today marks one year since his death on the eve of June 21, 1950, a tragic mystery that his son, Merrill County Sheriff Caleb Rutherford, has vowed to solve.
Mourners gathered at the church on Saturday evening in remembrance, for a chorus of Nathaniel’s favorite hymns. The songs could be heard all the way down Main Street, only a mile and a half from where Nathaniel’s body was found by Edgar Owens, who was fishing on the river the morning after his death.
Those close to Nathaniel knew that he considered himself a modern-day Job, content to suffer as God saw fit. After the sudden loss of his father when he was a young man, Nathaniel then buried his infant daughter. Only a few years later, he lost his wife, a victim of long-term hysteria. After dedicating his remaining years to the town he loved and cherished, he died at the age of sixty-three. He is survived by his son, Caleb Rutherford, and the congregation that knew him to be a loyal shepherd.
The man that the town remembered was a far cry from the one Esther, Eamon, and Caleb described. He’d been beloved as a spiritual leader and pitied for the suffering he’d endured. Revered for his dedication to the people of this town. Looking at him in that photograph, there was no hint of the crazed, obsessive minister whom Susanna had both loved and feared. It didn’t look like the face of a man who’d wanted to kill his own child or who’d tried to rid his wife of demons.
“Can I help you?”
The voice finds me, sweeping me into a memory as vivid and clear as the world around me. The moment I hear it, I let myself sink. Faster. Deeper.
“Can I help you?”
The colors bubble and bleed until I’m standing before the church, eyes fixed on that narrow steeple from below. The wind whips my hair into my face as I stare up at it. Heavy boots crunch on the rocks, drifting toward me.
“Have you come for prayer?”
I turn around, wringing my hands when I see him. Nathaniel Rutherford, the man who’d been my mother’s end, stands only feet away. He’s my father, a monster that lives in the church beside the river, but I had to see him with my own eyes. I had to look into that face and try to see what it was that had bewitched the woman who’d left me. But I don’t see anything at all. I feel only like a cavern has opened inside of me that will never close.
As if he can hear my thoughts, the warm smile on his face begins to melt, falling by the second. His brow pulls as he studies me.
“I’m sorry, have we met?” His voice suddenly sounds strained.
I blink, wondering if he somehow knows. If there’s some part of him that can sense that I’m his daughter. The one whose body is missing from the cemetery. Would he believe it if I told him?
“I’m visiting my aunt.” My mouth moves around lifeless words. I can hardly hear myself say them, because all I can think is that this man wanted me to die. “Esther Farrow.”
The wind pulls my hair from my shoulders, and his gaze jumps down to my throat. He takes an involuntary step backward when his eyes focus on my birthmark.
I reach up, pressing a hand to my skin as if it’s burning, and his eyes travel up to meet mine again. They’re filled with panic now.
His face blurs, evaporating with the vision, and the church disappears in a matter of seconds.
I was standing on Esther’s porch again, disentangled from the tentacles of the memory.
I let the paper close in my hands, staring at the front door of the house. The women in this family were good at keeping secrets. Margaret, Susanna, even me. And maybe that was true for no one more than Esther Farrow.
Gran had known Susanna’s story, but she’d never shared it with me, always steering me away from digging too deep into my mother’s disappearance. I always thought it was because it hurt too much to revisit the loss of her own daughter, but maybe she’d known long before Susanna was ever born what end she’d meet. In fact, she’d grown up in the wake of it.
But Esther had seen firsthand the darkness in Nathaniel when he asked her to take my life, and she’d been so afraid of Caleb that she’d pulled that gun from the glove box, ready to use it. Her words were branded in my mind.
The only devil in this town was Nathaniel Rutherford.
That kind of thing can get into the blood.
If she believed that, I couldn’t know what she would have done to protect me, Susanna, Margaret, or Annie.
I found her in the kitchen when I came inside. The sleeves of her shirt were rolled up past her elbows as she worked over the butcher block. She barely looked up at me as the knife came down through the carcass of a whole, plucked chicken and onto the wood with a cracking sound.
“Margaret says there was quite a scene at the house today,” she said, prying the blade to one side and breaking a bone.
I felt sick when I heard that sound.
“I hope you got it out of your system.”
“I’m forgetting things,” I said, my voice cutting her off.
The knife stilled, and she finally looked up at me. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been remembering things from my life here since before I arrived. I didn’t know they were memories at first, but they are. Now I’m forgetting things, too.”