Page 17 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

“No more speeding, ma’am.” Matt was beginning to realize that he might just drive away from here without needing to come clean to his parents. “I promise.”

“One more thing, Matt.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“If you see anything in those cornfields, any tracks, any people, anything at all, you are going to call me about it. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go have some lunch.”

Matt didn’t waste any time. He shifted the truck into drive, and then he pulled off the shoulder slowly with his blinker on. She didn’t doubt that both his hands were on the wheel while driving at thirty-five miles per hour.

At least, for today.

Hadley waved at Mrs. Latham as the older woman drove past. Matt’s luck had run out. Mrs. Latham was friends with the Rutledges, and they would almost certainly be getting a call any minute.

Once Hadley was settled behind the wheel, she tore the citation off the pad and crumpled it slowly in her right hand. She dropped the balled-up paper into the door’s side compartment, set the pad on the passenger seat, and reached into the center console for her ChapStick. She uncapped it with her thumb and ran what was left of the soothing wax across her lower lip while sorting through the information Matt had just given her.

Coincidence?

Someone had been walking through Earl Vinton’s east cornfield.

Roland Mercer had been caught in that same field the previous October.

If Mercer was truly writing a book on the Threshing Man, why had he chosen Vinton’s property? Why not the Cox property, where most of the disappearances over the decades had occurred? The majority of the abductions had been credited to the Telforts, but there were still other missing persons investigations that had remained unsolved over the years.

What exactly had Mercer uncovered about the legend that no one else had?

6

Hadley Dawkins

September 2026

Monday – 11:37 am

Hadley turned off the side road onto a rutted track that ran past the leaning Vinton mailbox, and the cornfields seemed to swallow her whole on both sides. Not before she spotted the hand-painted sign, though, reading NO HUNTING NO TRESPASSING NO EXCEPTIONS on a wooden post that had been driven straight into the ground.

The stalks were tall here, the rows set back by what had to be a quarter mile of standing corn, and they were close enough that the dangling leaves brushed the side mirrors as she drove. She left a trail of dust in her wake, regardless of the fact that the speedometer barely grazed the ten miles per hour mark.

The farmhouse came into view at the end of the drive in a clearing. It was a two-story home with a wraparound porch, the wooden swing hanging crooked on its rusted chain. The pickup truck Earl had been driving for as long as Hadley had been alive was parked at an angle off to the side in front of an old barn.

A tabby cat sized her up from the top of a hay bale, lean enough to indicate he hunted for a living. Earl didn’t spoil him, and she got the sense the feline had chosen his owner rather than the other way around, but the arrangement suited them both. The tabby didn’t move as Hadley exited her vehicle, but he also didn’t avert his gaze.

She adjusted her portable radio, which she’d attached to her left side so that she had unfettered access to her service weapon holstered on her right. The area was quiet, a little too quiet, but she chalked it up to the location. The modest home was hemmed in by fields, the rows of corn running closer to the house than any farmer would have planted them in the original layout.

Hadley figured money had been a factor at some point, the kind of season that came along once or twice in a farmer’s life and made him reconsider what he was willing to give up in trade for keeping the rest of the operation running.

The west side of the property hadn’t been used for planting until the last few years. Whatever pressure had driven Earl’s decision had clearly outlasted that year alone, because none of the ground had been reclaimed for anything that wasn’t corn.

She ignored the unease she began experiencing as she walked up the porch steps, each one giving up a different small note. Inside the house, behind the screen door, a radio was playing low, giving what sounded like the noon news report.

She knocked twice on the doorframe.

The sound of chair legs scuffing the floor made itself known.

She caught sight of Earl walking down the hallway, and he didn’t seem too happy about her presence, either. He was a tall man, a little stooped at the shoulders now, with a weathered face that had spent sixty-some years in the sun. His thin hair was the color of pewter, cropped close. A folded paper napkin was in one hand, and he used the other to open the screen door.