Page 57 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

“Just the two?”

“Just the two, and that’s the piece that’s got my hackles up.” Edgar came down off the steps and into the drizzle without a flicker of concern for it, too old and too ornery to be run indoors by a little weather. “A fella breaks into a shed, he takes the drill. The circular saw. Something he can turn into money down at the flea market. He does not take one hammer and one screwdriver and leave a whole wall of good tools hanging behind him. It makes no sense.”

Hadley angled the umbrella to bring him under it as they crossed the yard. He suffered the courtesy for about three steps before drifting back out into the rain on his own, and she let him.

The smaller of the two outbuildings hunched at the edge of the lot, a squat clapboard thing a good deal humbler than the barn where Gleason ran the still that every soul in Cane County pretended not to know about. Its door hung open. She collapsed the umbrella and leaned it against the jamb, then stepped inside, into the smell of sawdust and cold engine oil.

A workbench ran the length of the back wall.

Above it hung a pegboard, each tool set into its own outline in flaking paint, and two of those outlines stood empty. The single window had been painted shut a decade or more ago, crusted along the sill. She ran her attention over the door frame and found no gouge, no splinter, no bright scar in the old wood where a bar might have gone in.

“You keep this one locked?”

“Never once have.” Edgar filled the doorway behind her, blocking what gray light the afternoon still had to give. “The barn, I lock. A man’s got to see to his interests. But this shed? The back door of my own house? Never saw the sense in it, and I’m sure not fool enough to start buying padlocks at my age. Which is exactly why it falls to you to run down the little bastards that did this, and not to me.”

Hadley crouched at the threshold and studied the plank floor. No mud dragged in that didn’t match the old man’s own boots, though a full day of rain would have carried off most of what a thief might have left behind. Two tools gone from a shed crowded with better ones. Kids did wander onto a man’s property now and again and lift what wasn’t theirs, that much was true, but they took what they could sell or wave around in front of their friends.

Not a hammer.

Not a worn screwdriver with a yellow handle.

“Tell me about this squirrel feeder.” Hadley rose and brushed the grit from her knee. A thought had turned over in the back of her mind, and how she got at the answer might depend on how she played the next few minutes. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Hinge tore clean off the lid.” Edgar turned his head and spat again. “Coons keep prying it up after the seed and running my squirrels off the back porch rail, and I’ll not stand for it another week. I want the thing mended before the first hard freeze.”

He squinted up past the shed roof at the low, dragging clouds.

“Weather’s coming in early this year. You can smell it. I’ve got a whole list of chores I mean to have squared away before the ground sets up hard.”

“What else have you gotten to this week?”

“Oh, this and that. Enough to keep an old man out of the recliner.” Edgar ticked it off on knotted fingers. “Cleaned the gutters, front and back. Split a cord and got it stacked under the lean-to before this mess blew in. Shored up the soft board on the back step. Reset the mailbox down at the road, too. The post had gone punky at the bottom, and the whole works was leaning out into the lane like a drunk waiting on a ride.”

“Mind if I have a look at the mailbox?” Hadley collected her umbrella from the jamb. “Your handiwork, that is.”

Edgar narrowed his eyes at her, a long suspicious squint that had likely turned more than one solicitor back down this drive with nothing to show for the trip. Whatever he decided he found in her face, he let it go.

“Suit yourself. It’s a mailbox. Not much to see.”

They set off down the drive together through the thinning rain, Edgar setting a pace with no intention of being hurried and no interest in her umbrella. She carried it over both of them as best he’d allow, which wasn’t much. The clouds had begun to lift and pale at their edges, the worst of the storm hauling itself off to the east.

“You’ll be down at the festival in a couple of weeks, I’d expect.”

“I expect I will.”

“You going to leave them be? The ones who take the dare.” Edgar cut a sideways look at her. “A boy sneaks onto Old Man Gleason’s land, dares his own knees to carry him past the crazy man’s barn, walks off with a story he’ll be telling his grandkids in fifty years. You think I don’t know that’s what they call me? Hell, I’ve been the crazy old man out here going on thirty years now.”

He rubbed the stubble along his chin.

“I don’t mind it. Turned into a tradition somewhere along the way, and Reed understood that, rest his soul.” Edgar grunted low in his chest. “That sheriff of yours, though. Not so much. That man’s got a fence post shoved so far up his backside I’m surprised he can even sit in a chair. He’d have the whole pack of those teens in cuffs before my jars quit sloshing.”

Hadley bit the inside of her lip and fixed her attention on the mailbox down the lane. She bit down until the urge to laugh had passed through her. Nick would not have cared for the assessment. Edgar wasn’t wrong in it, either, and that was the trouble with Nick. He’d come up policing a different sort of place, one where the lines society drew stayed where they were put. He hadn’t learned yet that Cane County ran on a hundred small mercies that never once made it into a report.

Well, he’d started to learn last fall.

It just hadn’t stopped him from trying to redraw the lines his own way.

“Sheriff Turner means well, Mr. Gleason.” Hadley doubted a word of her statement would land, but she said it anyway. “He does.”