Page 13 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

Janet moved off in the direction of what was to be the bake stand, but not before stepping into Hadley’s path and pulling her in for a warm embrace. Warren observed the two of them without reacting to their public display of affection. Hadley had been the one to give Janet answers after almost fifty years of asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. The loyalty Hadley had earned from the older woman was not one money could buy, and it bothered him immensely. He’d spent years ensuring his pieces stayed where he’d set them on the board, and Hadley’s alliance with one of the unspoken leaders was a piece he’d continue to monitor closely.

“Chief Dawkins,” Warren greeted her after clearing his throat. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Warren.” Hadley had stopped about three feet short of him, which was usually the distance one kept when one did not intend to be friendly. He wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve her ire this morning, but he was clearly about to find out. “I need a few minutes of your time.”

“You have many of them, dear.” Given her demeanor, Warren suspected the topic was rather delicate. “There is a table at the far end of the lot that nobody is using yet. Shall we?”

Hadley gave a curt nod of agreement, so he walked her down the slope to the last folding table in the row that sat in the shade of an old crabapple about thirty feet from the nearest volunteer. He thought about pulling out the two chairs tucked underneath, but he didn’t believe that Hadley would want this discussion to last longer than necessary.

“What can I do for you, Chief Dawkins?”

“Why did you tell Reed to drop the trespassing charges against Roland Mercer?”

Warren generally did not allow himself to be caught off guard by anything in a public setting. Yet he was unable to prevent his jaw from tightening at her insinuation that he’d overstepped his position. The Mercer business was over a year in his rearview, and frankly, he’d not thought about the man in all that time.

“Now, where in the world did you come across that name?” Warren asked, more to himself than to her. He needed to get the grounding back under his feet before he answered any of her questions. “Last year, you say?”

“It’s my job to investigate Reed’s death, Warren.”

She delivered the line without inflection. Warren took it for what it was—a refusal to give him her source, and he respected it. That didn’t mean he had to like the evasion.

“All right.” Warren folded his arms as he came to a decision. Honesty was the best policy in this situation. “I will tell you what I told Reed last year, which is that the citation was not worth the cost of writing it down. Waste of paper.”

“Earl Vinton wanted to press charges.”

“Earl Vinton wants to press charges about everyone and everything that moves on his land after dark. He wanted to press charges last spring against the Beecham boy for cutting through to get to the creek. I swear, that man would round up the local wildlife if he could. Earl is a fine farmer, but he’s also the kind of man who would have a fence around his airspace if the law would let him. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, Chief Dawkins.”

“Roland Mercer was trespassing on Earl’s property after eleven o’clock at night, Warren. You’re lucky that he didn’t grab his shotgun and take care of business himself.”

Hadley had positioned herself to monitor the volunteers and vendors setting up the tables and chairs. Warren noticed that her gaze had strayed to Pastor Wayne Beeler a few times.

Did she know about the pastor’s history of borrowing from the church’s funds?

She certainly seemed to know everything else that happened in this town. That was her job, of course, but she hadn’t yet learned how to move gracefully through the political arena.

“Warren, let’s cut to the chase. You’re the only one who could have convinced Reed not to press charges, and we both know that. I want to know why.”

“Timing, dear,” Warren replied truthfully. Again, he didn’t see the harm in explaining his reasons for such an odd request. “You were here last year. The press had descended on this town for the year-anniversary coverage of Missy Claymont’s disappearance. A swarm of locusts is what they were...are, though I’m hoping this year is different.”

“On that, we agree,” Hadley muttered in disgust. “That still doesn’t⁠—”

“Every reporter from Little Rock to Tulsa was in Cane County. They were looking for one thing and one thing only, which was a fresh Threshing Man angle. The last thing this town needed was a criminal report against a stranger who had been trespassing in a cornfield in the dark, showing up on the police blotter. We had enough issues back then to add another act to that circus, don’t you agree?”

“So, you made a political call.”

“I made a political call.”

He had no regrets about how everything went down last year. A mayor who could not make a political call when his town was about to be overrun by reporters was a mayor who deserved to be voted out. Hadley would come to view it his way once she stopped fixating on Langley’s murder. Warren wanted the man’s death solved, too, but not at the expense of this town’s reputation.

He couldn’t always read her expressions, which was one of the things he had quietly admired about her since hiring her. It was also one of the things that got under his skin. He decided to save both of them the trouble of dragging this conversation out.

“Hadley,” Warren said gently as he reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder. “Roland Mercer had nothing to do with Reed’s death. His being in town back then was nothing but a coincidence.”

“Why would Mercer be out in those cornfields, Warren? Explain it to me.”

“Roland?” Warren shook his head in dismissal. He dropped his hand as he filled in the blanks that she so obviously needed to be complete. “He’s a folklore professor at the community college in Emberwood. He grew up in Holloway, though. He’s one of us. The Mercer family has been in Holloway for three generations. He taught at a university down in Mississippi a long time ago, but he lost the position three or four years back when the dean caught him passing off another scholar’s work as his own. He was trying to get tenured or something like that. Anyway, he came home, took up adjunct work at the community college, and continued doing his research on the Threshing Man.”

Hadley’s mouth tightened at the corner. Warren understood her reaction, but he quickly set out to reassure her that she had nothing to be concerned about.