I drove toward the meeting with Sheriff Keller, the radio off. The only sound was the wind in my ears from the open window, and the pinging of gravel against the bottom of the truck. Dust billowed out behind. On either side of the road, long threads of grass waved me along, or away—I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I drove, turning left or right when the directions told me to. “I give up,” I said to the countryside, not sure whether I meant it for Joshua or myself. I had spent the morning looking over the evidence-form signatures, waiting for someone, Kent probably, to call about the dead man in Chicago. The call hadn’t come, and all the signatures on the forms were blurring together.
At the same time, I knew that I couldn’t actually give up. Give up parenting? Hardly possible. Give up working? Again—not an option. I would have to work the lonelyhearts and maybe the human resources clientele harder. After today, though, I was done with law enforcement. It was too much, too dangerous. The people drew too close. Their life-and-death matters began to matter to me.
I would try the only thing I knew to do. We’d go. Another town, another school for Joshua. Maybe further west, somewhere really new. Montana, Idaho, maybe as far as the West Coast. I wanted trees. I wanted land. I wanted wide space, and no one but the two of us allowed in.
I consulted the directions again. I’d taken the last turn, and now my handwriting gave out. Something—on the right. I scanned the right side of the road ahead and checked the rearview for something I might have missed. Nothing but the waving husks of dry cornfields, all ending at a woods a half a mile or so back from the road. And then I saw it—a glint of steel low in the woods that took shape as the sheriff’s black truck. The truck disappeared behind a crest. A set of indentions in the tall grass, not quite a driveway, appeared. I turned and followed the faint trail. When I rose over the small hill, the sheriff emerged and threw a hand up in greeting. I parked behind him and got out, surveying the lonesome stretch of nothing around us.
“I forgot to tell you to wear some good hiking shoes,” he called.
“I’ll do OK,” I said. “Back there?” I gestured toward the stand of trees.
“Good guess,” he said. “Unless you’ve got some ideas for Bob Banning about his soybeans next year. Ready?”
“Should I have brought a day pack or something? A tent?”
We started off toward the trees, the sheriff leading. He grinned over his shoulder. “You didn’t strike me as the outdoorsy type.”
“I’m not. I’m really”—my foot found a dip under the thick grass, my ankle twisting a little—“really not.”
“Careful,” he said. “The grass hides all sorts of things.”
“One of those things wouldn’t be snakes, would it?”
He stopped and turned, his hand on his gun. “Where?”
I held up my hands in surrender. “You are itching to use one of those bullets.”
He set his jaw, grim, and relaxed his trigger grip.
“I’m kidding, Sheriff. Kidding.”
“I didn’t take you for a kidder, either.” He turned on a boot heel and started off again. He swung a hand out to scatter the tops of the hip-high grass.
“I’m not.” We walked the rest of the way into the woods without speaking, my head down to watch for whatever it was the grass might hide. We followed a grass path through the trees, stepped over a trickle of a rocky creek.
“What is this place?”
“This is the old Werner farm.”
“You’re kidding now, right?” I paused and looked into the trees on either side. On foot, the narrow lane seemed wider. It opened up onto another grassy hill. Ahead, I thought I saw a roofline through the trees.
“The house was back here with the barn. The Bannings farm the land now—you know Bob? No, I guess not. Anyway.” He stopped to let me catch my breath. He didn’t seem winded at all. “The old house got sold and moved into Smith County. But the barn’s still here. You’ll see.”
We walked on, the trees closing in behind us. Maples and walnuts, no pines to speak of. I greeted the trees silently, old friends, as we continued up the low rise. At last the weathered gray barn was revealed. The high roof caved in on itself in one spot, and the big sliding door on the front was off its rails, propped askew against the entrance.
I had been going along with the drive, the hike, the history lesson, thinking that eventually I would know why I was there. Now that I stood in the middle of an abandoned farm, surrounded by nothing, I still had no ideas. The fact that I had gone along with a man I hardly knew to an isolated location without telling anyone where I was—I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I leaned my head back on my shoulders to see the widow’s peak of the barn, where white paint peeled off in slow strips.
“Not up there,” Sheriff Keller said. He went up to the loose door and eased it open a foot. “In here.”
I hesitated.
“That does sound creepy doesn’t it? Look,” he said. He walked back to me, fiddling with his gun holster. “You can hold onto this. You can unload all six bullets on me if you need to.” He took the gun out and offered it to me on his palm.
I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist. “Pretty sure you’re not supposed to give that up. Plus I don’t know how to shoot,” I said. “I’ll have to lick you with my bare hands if you try anything funny.”
Keller’s gaze felt heavy. When I met it, he looked away.
“We’ll fix your gun inexperience some other day, Deputy. How about if I stay out here, and you take a peek inside? You’ll see it, don’t worry.” He walked off a few feet, reholstering his gun and leaving me to the black slash of the barn door.
I tiptoed up to the entrance as though the barn were asleep. I put one hand on the unhinged door, turning sideways to duck my head into the opening. Rays of sunshine cut through cracks between the uneven slats of the high walls. A shaft of light beamed through the hole in the roof.
I saw the writing immediately, but didn’t rush to it. The inside of the barn felt like a church. The air was cool, and the light hazy and silver. I took a slow breath and slid inside.
Ambitious shoots of green inched their way through the cracks in the wall and back out again toward the light. Through the opening up in the rafters, I saw the outstretched limb of a hearty cottonwood. A set of ladder steps led up to a loft that spanned the length of the barn. I smelled hay in the dark corners, wool, mildew, rot. Lingering smoke. Neglect and decay. I stood at the foot of the stairs and peered up into the dark upper floor.
On the long wall of the loft, vandals had been at work. The entire wall was covered with spray paint. I hardly needed to focus to recognize some of it as the work of the boys who were already troubling the school.