Page 60 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

She glanced down the first row, a long, dim corridor of stalks that swallowed the gray light six feet in and gave nothing back. She inhaled deeply and stepped into it, the corn closing around her, and the road and the Equinox ceased to exist behind her.

If somebody had been out here with a shovel, chasing the same story Roland had chased most of his life, the earth would tell on them. She worked her way down the rows with her focus on the dirt. Turned soil sat differently from packed soil, especially after a good rain.

Roland had led someone down the wrong path. She was near sure of it now. He’d salted his notebooks with Vinton’s name and Vinton’s field, let a citation and a trespassing charge point everyone to this land, at Earl’s corn, while the real answer sat a mile east under Donovan Huber’s lawn where nobody would think to dig.

Would Roland ever have published the book he was writing?

She wasn’t so sure. Roland’s personality had her leaning one way, because he was the type of man who had needed praise…acceptance. On the other hand, publishing it would have meant setting the truth down in ink for anyone to read, and she got the sense that Roland had come to feel that was a betrayal of the very thing he’d spent his life protecting. He’d gone out of his way to keep the answer buried, which meant whoever had been watching him had been left digging in the wrong place.

It took her the better part of a half hour to find the first spot.

She’d almost walked right past it. The turned soil sat between two rows where the stalks thinned, a patch of ground maybe three feet by five, and the only reason it had caught her eye at all was the weeds. All down the row, the ground wore the same low green fuzz of pigweed and foxtail that had come up between the stalks. This stretch was bare, the soil darker and finer than the packed dirt on either side of it, raked over and pressed back down but not yet grown back in.

Hadley crouched and pushed her fingers into it. The dirt gave, loose to the depth of her knuckles, where the soil a foot away was packed down hard and unyielding. Somebody had dug deep here and then tamped the soil back down behind them.

She worked her phone out of her back pocket, made sure the flash was on, and snapped a few pictures. She found the next spot forty feet up the row, and another after that, working roughly south to north through the field. None of them large, though the repacking made it nearly impossible to tell how deep any of them ran.

Test holes.

Somebody had moved through the corn a patch at a time, opening the ground, finding nothing, moving on. Searching. She straightened at the edge of the last one and made herself go back to the beginning of the theory, the way she always did when the pieces started coming at her too fast.

Katie Rutledge and her boyfriend had seen a figure standing in these rows. Whoever it was hadn’t wanted the kids here, and neither Katie nor Josh had seen another vehicle anywhere near the hickory. Whoever had been coming out to dig was patient and careful, raking the ground smooth behind them every time. The road on the far side ran past Donovan Huber’s place, and no one would chance parking a vehicle on the same stretch where the former chief of police had burned to death in his truck. So, the digger hadn’t left a vehicle on either road.

How were they getting into the field?

The answer came to her almost immediately.

A field this size wasn’t a sealed box. It had a way in for the equipment, a gap in the rows wide enough to run a tractor and a combine through at planting and harvest, packed down hard by decades of tires. On a field laid out east to west like this one, that access cut would sit at one of the short ends.

North or south.

Hadley turned her head, getting her bearings among the identical rows. She’d been working up field the entire time without marking it, but the north end was closer now, no more than a couple hundred feet through the corn. A person could leave a vehicle at that access cut, screened by the rows, and carry a shovel in and out in the dark without anyone the wiser.

She headed north.

The rows had darkened while she worked, the gray overhead sliding toward the blue-black of a coming dusk, the stalks ahead of her running together into a single dim mass. The breeze had died, and the husks had gone still with it. Even the mourning dove had given it up for the night. The silence that came in to replace all of it held a weight to it, a thickness, the kind that made a woman aware of her own pulse.

Hadley was maybe fifty feet from the north end when a scream tore through the field.

High, and close, and unmistakably human.

26

Hadley Dawkins

September 2026

Thursday – 6:51 pm

Hadley drew her weapon before the scream had finished fading in the field. She didn’t run toward it. While every instinct pulled her forward, her training won out. Running blind into a situation she couldn’t see was how people got killed, so she held where she was and got her bearings.

A voice.

Low and fast and coming from the north end of the field, from the direction of the access cut. Hadley tilted her head to catch it, but the stalks swallowed the words before they reached her, leaving her nothing but the echo of someone talking.

She didn’t ease out of her stance. That scream had come from someone in pain or in terror, and a person couldn’t fake either one to that extent. She started forward through the stalks.

North meant cutting across the rows, shouldering through one wall of corn and into the narrow gap before the next. She worked toward it one row at a time, slow and deliberate, closing the distance. For a while the words remained a muddled tone without making any sense. The nearer she came, the more they broke apart into pieces.