Page 111 of Call Off the Dark

She looked at Wade again and noticed the shaving nick on his jawline. He was always cutting himself.

Helen turned back to Isaac, taking in the stubble on his face.

“Your facial hair,” she said. “It’s been the same length the entire time you’ve been here.”

“I like to keep it the same,” Isaac said.

“How? We only have razors here.”

Abruptly, Wade dropped his fork and it clanged on his plate. “I don’t feel so good. I think I need to lie down.”

“You look like you could use a hand, Brother.” Isaac stood and put an arm around Wade to help him from the room.

“Isaac, do you feel okay?” Helen asked.

His plate was almost empty too, but he seemed unaffected by the meds.

“Yeah, fine.”

As Helen watched Isaac give Wade a rare dose of brotherly love, a stunning realization came over her. Isaac wasn’t sick from the meds, and he didn’t have a black eye. Two nights ago, Wade had punched him in the face, and there wasn’t a bruise on him. There’d never been a bruise. How had she not noticed?

The men disappeared around the corner.

Alarmed, she rose from her seat and tipped over her water glass in the process. She snatched it and set it upright, but not before a puddle of water spread across the wood. Her mind had bent in so many directions since Isaac had shown up. First Wade was losing his mind. Then he was lying to her. Then she was losing hers. She’d been so quick to place the blame on Wade, in part because it hadn’t been until Wade had claimed Isaac was a ghost that Helen had started to have her own disturbing visions. Wade’s claims—lies?—had triggered something in her. They had pulled her down to a dark place that scared her, and she’d been desperate to stop it.

Helen tossed her place mat on top of the puddle of water, then went to the kitchen sink with her empty water glass. She filled the glass with water and turned from the sink, surveying the room. The empty kitchen table looked so lonely. And that’s when she suddenly recognized her error in memory. These past several days, she’d been thinking the dark visions had started after Wade had claimed Isaac was dead, but that wasn’t quite right. The first one had happened right there, at the kitchen table. Isaac’s first meal with them. The woman—her, essentially—in the dirtied nightgown. She had seen that before Wade had made any claims about Isaac being dead.

Something inside her shifted as she remembered the events that occurred before Isaac’s arrival. The way she’d screamed at the sky, demanding a response from the universe, quite literally wanting to shoot a hole through it. If she couldn’t have Tyler, she wanted something, and she’d felt the thunder ripple through her soul.

And then Isaac had shown up.

Prior to that, Helen had been sad, deeply so, but she had never questioned the fabric of reality in the days since moving to the farmhouse. She’d left that all behind in the city. It wasn’t until Isaac’s arrival that her mind started to unravel.

Helen’s throat felt dry.

As she brought the water glass to her lips, something caught her eye. Beneath the side table, she saw a manila envelope.

It was the envelope Agnes had brought her! There it was, still in her kitchen.

Today, Helen had been so trapped inside her spiderweb of theories that she hadn’t wanted to listen to Agnes and hadn’t wanted to look at the envelope, the very thing that might hold a concrete answer. Had she really questioned only hours earlier if Agnes was a real person? Of course Agnes was real, and she’d left the envelope for Helen.

She set aside her glass and crossed the room, sensing she was crossing a bridge over this canyon of confusion into a land that might make sense. She knelt and reached beneath the side table, feeling a nervous spark in her chest as her hand closed around the envelope.

Helen brought it to the kitchen table and opened it. Inside were several sheets of paper folded in half.

She took a deep breath and unfolded them, revealing internet articles printed from a computer. She spread them on the table, and as she read the headlines of each one, she felt a terrible sensation move through her:

CAPICHON MAN, ISAAC FARRIS, KILLED IN FARMING ACCIDENT

CORONER YET TO RULE IN FARMER ISAAC FARRIS’S DEATH

WADE FARRIS IS CLEARED BY POLICE AS HIS BROTHER’S DEATH IS RULED AN ACCIDENT

Smiling photographs of Isaac and Wade at different ages accompanied the text.

Helen’s eyes devoured the articles one after another. They all said versions of the same thing: Isaac Farris had died in a farming accident, and Wade Farris had been driving the tractor that had run over his brother. The community was shocked by the tragedy, and the Farris farm was put up for sale after five generations of family ownership. In lieu of sending flowers, Wade Farris was requesting that donations be sent to the Oregon Farmers Emergency Relief Fund.

Isaac Farris’s body was buried in the Capichon Hillside Cemetery.