Page 4 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

“Right there, Josh.”

She turned her head from him slowly, the way she had as a child when peering down the upstairs hallway in the dark. Josh’s gaze finally followed hers. He, too, made a small sound. The same one she had made earlier, to be exact.

The figure was still there.

He had not moved.

“Drive,” Katie breathed, afraid that anything louder would bring the dark silhouette closer. “Drive!”

Josh didn’t answer. He was already scrambling over the console, his head knocking the rearview mirror sideways, his knee catching on the gearshift before he half-fell into the driver’s seat. Katie wasn’t staying in the back seat alone. She climbed after him, half over the console herself, and dropped into the passenger seat right as he turned the key.

“The windows,” Katie called out, louder now, the whisper gone from her voice. A kind of frantic certainty had taken its place. “Josh, the windows. Roll up the windows.”

“I am, I am!”

The windows rose slowly, inch by agonizing inch. Slower than she could stand. The glass continued to climb until she was terrified their time had run out. The dark figure had moved closer to them than before.

“Drive, Josh! Drive! Drive!”

The car finally lurched forward, and Katie was too afraid to keep her eyes open. She closed them tight, and an image of her mother’s talisman appeared as if she were holding it. The same one her mother had braided the husks on that morning.

The older folks still hung their talismans every September and October. They had known the truth. Her parents, her grandparents, her grandparents’ parents.

The Threshing Man was real.

He had always been real.

2

Hadley Dawkins

September 2026

Monday – 8:44 am

Hadley had read somewhere that caffeine was the most widely used drug in the world, and she had taken the news as a kind of personal validation. She certainly wouldn’t be giving it up anytime soon.

She pulled the mug from the new coffeemaker on the kitchen island and took the first sip standing where the morning light came through the window over the sink. She closed her eyes in satisfaction. September was a transition month, and it wouldn’t be long before the sun couldn’t even keep the days warm.

The random thought had Hadley thinking of her time in Whistlerun. It had been eleven months since she’d resigned from her position at the state police and taken over as police chief. Eleven months since she’d left Troop H, traded in her detective badge for the one pinned to her blazer, and moved back to the town she had spent over twenty years running from. It had been the small things that had made all the difference.

Take, for instance, the hinges on the back door of the old Victorian house that served as both the police station and her new home. The metal plates had been oiled so that not a sound was made whether she was coming or going. She’d done the same to the front door, too. As for the hideous wallpaper in the dining room, she’d stripped it down to drywall and painted the walls a soft white after clearing all the junk out. She’d also kept the light grey paint on the cabinets after they’d been fully installed, and the hardwood floors in the hallway had been completely refinished.

If she were honest with herself, the renovations were the only thing about the place she had finished. Now that she was done with them, she was already on the hunt for another project to keep her mind from spinning at a thousand miles per hour.

She crossed from the kitchen into what had once been the formal living room of the old Victorian, back when the house had been a house and not a station. The room was by far the biggest on the main floor. It held two desks, one of them hers. The far wall contained a bulletin board crowded with town notices and bail-jumper mug shots, along with a window that overlooked Main Street between two columns of original oak trim. The dining room across the hall was where she kept the whiteboards, the supply cabinet, and the boxes of forms she had stopped using as much as the former police chief had during his short tenure. The basement was for storage, and she resided on the second floor, which had basically been converted into an apartment.

The second desk that she couldn’t seem to clean out or move down to the basement belonged to former Police Chief Reed Langley. He had been the chief of Whistlerun before someone had put a bullet in his chest and burned his truck with his body still inside on a back road last October.

The case was now hers, the way the badge belonged to her.

Neither one had been her idea.

Hadley averted her gaze to her own desk as she rounded the edge. She set her coffee down on the corner before removing her dark brown blazer. She loved the color and material, mostly because they never showed the coffee stains she inadvertently got on the fabric whenever she wore it.

She fully expected the morning would have its usual shape, the one it had taken since she’d accepted the position. She would read through the overnight dispatch, check whatever Sheriff Nick Turner had sent her about the county at large, walk down to Maisy’s for a refill at ten, and at eleven do whatever paperwork the day required.

Maisy’s convenience store stop wasn’t for the coffee, though. In a town the size of Whistlerun, the gas station was the one place to learn anything worth knowing. And Hadley was wise enough to use that to her advantage.