Reapers (6 page)

"You two still making wedding plans?" she said.

"Oh yeah. I never knew how much work it was."

"So where are you building the Taj Mahal?"

"Taj Ma-what?"

"Nevermind."

"But yeah, it's going really well," he forged ahead. "Yesterday Dee went into town to get measured for her dress."

"Wonderful." Ellie unlocked the barn, batting at the cobwebs that materialized each morning. Rays of late morning light beamed through the chinks in the walls, blazing on the dust motes like heatless yellow flame. She pulled aside a dirty tarp, revealing a red AGCO with uncompromising tires that reached above her waist. "Do you ever wonder if simpler might be better?"

Quinn tried on a thoughtful look. "You think?"

She wadded up the tarp, raising her voice over the crinkling plastic. "Weddings used to cost more than most wars and require more coordination than a North Korean halftime show. Does $20,000 in bills sound like a good way to start a marriage?"

He blinked, wary, and she was reminded that despite the fullness of his body, his brain was still a teen's. More importantly, a teen who wanted to impress his girlfriend's mom. It was possible some dogs were more pathetic, eager to please, and easy to cow than a young man in his situation, but if so, she hadn't met one.

She laughed and shelved the tarp. "Do what you want, Quinn. It's your wedding. I certainly hope it's your only one."

"Well yeah," he said. He frowned, then spit it out. "That's why I want it to be perfect. Isn't that what she wants?"

"Have you asked her?"

"What girl doesn't want a perfect wedding?"

Ellie leapt into the seat, suspension bouncing. "I've only known Dee since she was thirteen. It could be she has a hidden reservoir of girliness waiting to be tapped by a deep-drilling event like a wedding. But in my observation, she would choose blood red over pink ten times out of ten."

She turned the key and the blattering engine drowned out whatever Quinn said next. She let it idle until she was satisfied it was in fine shape. Not that she was overly concerned about handing it over in less than tip-top condition. She just wanted to gauge where it was at so if George returned it worse for wear she could nail his ass to the wall.

The tang of burnt ethanol filled the barn; years back, she'd tried producing biodiesel for a different tractor, but that was wizardry compared to ethanol fermentation. This was an age of simplicity. The first generation to remember how to manufacture cars could worry about homebrewing their own diesel.

She shut off the engine and lobbed the keys at Quinn. He was so deep in thought they bounced off his face. He jerked back, staggering in the dirt and old straw.

"Sorry," he said, as if it were
his
fault, and stooped to search out the keys.

Ellie regarded him for several seconds. "Last night, there was a stranger in your fields."

Quinn glanced up. "What do you mean?"

"I mean a man was outside watching your house."

"What? Who?"

"I don't know," Ellie said with evaporating patience. "He was strange to me."

"That's weird." A sly look crossed his face. "What were
you
doing there?"

"I was out for a walk."

He smiled at the ground. "Were you trying to watch
us
?"

"If I want to watch you, I can just pull up the security camera in your room." She walked across the grit and plucked up the keys and handed them to him.

Confusion rippled over his eyes and mouth. Eventually, deciding she must be kidding, if only because they had no electricity, he pulled back his shoulders and put on a face like a new recruit.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Colson, that was an inappropriate joke. While Dee's under my roof, it's my responsibility to see that everyone's safe. I'll put the dogs out at night and let my dad know to keep sharp."

She tipped back her head, giving him a second look. "Call me Ellie."

He climbed into the tractor and started it up and drove out of the barn. Back at the house, the door hung halfway open. Ellie's blood froze. She grabbed the shovel by the porch and knifed inside.

"Mom?" Dee called from the kitchen.

Ellie rolled her eyes and pitched the shovel off the porch with a clang. "Did you come over with Quinn?"

Dee padded out to the living room, shaking her head. "I just got back from town. Quinn has me getting fitted for the most ridiculous dress you've ever seen."

Ellie laughed until she cried.

She figured Dee was just back to do laundry and grab a bath in the cover-heated tub, but to her surprise, her daughter was back for the harvest. Ellie hadn't intended to begin for another couple days, but she wasn't about to turn down free labor. Dee donned gloves and helped her rig the combine mount to the tractor. Ellie pinched in her ear plugs and settled a surgical mask over her mouth and drove into the fields.

The engine roared across the sky. The header scythed into the golden stalks, spewing dust and pulverized fiber behind the trundling machine. Despite the late start, Ellie cleared the whole field that day, returning once so Dee could empty the grain from the shoe while Ellie went in for a drink of water and a short rest. After she got back from the second trip, she saw Dee had swept the barn, too. One of these days, the machines would go dark for the last time and they'd have to take the fields by hand, but for the moment, it was incredible that a day's labor from two people was sufficient to bring in enough grain to keep them in bread and pasta for the rest of the year.

Not that the work was entirely done. Ellie had very particular ways of tubbing the grain to keep it free from rot and mice and she didn't like leaving all that straw out where it could light up like Las Vegas the first time lightning struck or a passing bum dumped his pipe embers in the field. Cleanup was hard, sweaty, limb-deadening work. Along with the storage process, it chewed up four more days.

It was a good thing Dee had come home when she did. The night they finished, as Ellie sat on the back porch with a hot mug of instant coffee, she smelled frost in the air.

"You know why I went to college?" Ellie said, tipping some rum into her drink. "So I'd never have to work this hard."

Dee laughed. "Too bad about the aliens. What did you do, anyway? Before?"

"You know that."

"I know you worked for the government. Shady spy sh—stuff."

"I wasn't a spy."

"Whatever," Dee said. "What did you call it? 'The nerd CIA'?"

Ellie had forgotten that. Funny what kids remembered. "My job was to travel to the most exotic lands in the world and make sense of the most boring numbers they had available."

"If you were just poring over numbers, why'd you have to travel at all?"

"We always wondered why the bosses never reached that same conclusion."

"I wish I'd grown up in that world instead of this one."

Ellie nodded, then stared at Dee. Ironically, it was moments like this when she missed Chip the most. He was the one who knew how to comfort people. For all her talent at plucking wisdom from inscrutable spreadsheets, or her new life running a post-industrial farm, situations like this tripped her on her face. She recognized the emotions that needed to be expressed, but somehow she could never search out the words that could make them manifest.

"He saved your life, you know."

Steam wafted from Dee's mug. "I know."

"I wish we'd had a life together," Ellie tried. "But I'm glad you got to know him for the years you did."

"Me too." Dee pulled her blanket so high around her shoulders Ellie could barely see her hair sticking out the top.

That morning, she woke to frost.

When Dee got up, she accepted the eggs Ellie had brought in from the coop an hour before, then let Ellie know she was going back to Quinn's. Ellie didn't complain. To her surprise, it had turned out she enjoyed parenting, but she still appreciated time to herself.

She watched Dee pack, waved as the girl walked down the trail around the lake, then proceeded to do nothing the rest of the day. The following afternoon, she was still doing nothing—in the specific form of sitting on the back porch reading Philip K. Dick and thinking about working up the motivation to throw a bobber into the water—when a voice called from out front.

"Ellie?" Quinn called. "Mrs. Colson?"

She wiggled into her sandals and headed around the house. "How's your harvest?"

Quinn started, windmilling his arms to keep from toppling off the porch. "It's all right. Thanks to you."

"It was nothing." Crickets chirped from the mown fields. "Dee need some clean socks?"

He worked his mouth, then nodded. "Yeah, come to think of it."

Ellie nodded. "You better not have come here to tell me I'm a grandma."

"It's not that bad," Quinn laughed nervously. "I hope."

"Well?"

"This morning, I was out for a walk. I like to take one as soon as I get up. Helps me wake up. And when I was out in the woods, I found Ringer. My dog." His brown face paled. "He was stabbed."

Ellie glanced across the shimmering lake. "Have you told your dad?"

"I didn't want to scare him."

"Maybe he ought to be scared." She sighed through her teeth. "Better let me take a look."

She went inside for her pistol and proper shoes and a jacket and binoculars and latex gloves. She walked beside Quinn in silence. She could tell the quiet made him uncomfortable, but at the moment, she didn't care. She had thinking to do.

On the trail, the leaves fell in earnest, yellow and red pages spinning to the forest floor. Ellie expected they had at least a couple clear weeks ahead of them, but the first snows could come at any time.

The walk to the house took a full hour. Quinn veered deeper into the woods, keeping a thick screen of trees between them and his father's home. At a rocky upthrust northeast of the property, he stopped to glance at the stands of maples and pines and the boulders mapped with red and gray-green lichen. He beckoned her to a small fold in the land.

A dog lay at the bottom. Its fur was black and white and blue-gray and the hair on its side was matted with blood.

"Did you move him?" Ellie said.

"I found him right here. I touched him and petted him. Did I mess things up?"

"It's fine." She climbed down the embankment, one arm out for balance, and knelt beside the body. Its eyes were open and blank. She tugged on her latex gloves and brushed back its fur. There was a lot of blood and it took her a minute to find the first wound, a narrow, inch-long puncture between its ribs. Two more were spaced higher up its brisket. She squatted on her heels and stared into the trees. "When was the last time you saw him?"

"Last night," Quinn said thickly. "I been setting them out every night since you saw the stranger."

"Does your dad have any enemies, Quinn?"

"Enemies?"

"You've been here four years. Has he made anyone mad?"

The boy wrinkled his brow, blinking at the moisture in his eyes. "He and Bill Noesi in Lake Placid have never got along. Not since Dad bought that cow from him that died the next month. But I don't think they've seen each other since last year."

Ellie edged around the dog and brushed a wide brown maple leaf from a depression in the soil. "Anyone else?"

"He and Mr. Franklin ain't big fans of each other, but I wouldn't say they're mortal foes." He shook his head. "Who would kill a
dog
?"

"What about you? Pissed anyone off?"

"Me?" Quinn looked surprised to the point of affront, then his eyebrows banged together. "Sam Chase. He always had a thing for Dee."

"Who just announced her intention to get married." Ellie placed her foot beside the print next to the dog. Her shoe was a little shorter. "Let me see your foot."

He gave her a puzzled look, lining his shoe up next to the print. It was identical in size. His face cracked. "I'm real sorry. I went and mucked up your scene, didn't I?"

She shook her head. "It wasn't cold enough to frost last night, but the ground was moist. It's dried since. Print's shrunk. What size do you wear?"

"Nine? Nine and a half."

She petted the dog's thick fur, moving her hand to its back legs and giving a little tug. They were so stiff the whole body moved with them. "Was he this stiff when you found him?"

"Yeah. I knew the second I touched him."

"Okay." She rose, still sore from gathering up the last of the wheat straw the day before. "Well, let's find some shovels."

They trudged across George's fields. The wheat stood tall under the brittle sunlight. Unharvested. She was about to comment when she saw the potent green combine parked beside the barn.

"Is that new?"

"Dad picked it up in town," Quinn said.

"How'd he swing that?"

"Think he promised part of the crop."

"For a new combine? Let me know that guy's name. Maybe he'll trade me a jet for the peanuts in my cellar."

"Dad's gonna owe for a lot more than one year. But he didn't have much choice."

Quinn creaked open the tool shed and grabbed shovels and two pairs of leather gloves. They returned to the dog and buried him in the woods, sweating in the weak autumn sun. After, Quinn crouched and patted the coffee-colored soil.

"Should have played more fetch with you, Ringer, but you never wanted to quit and after a while I got mad. But I guess that was just your way of saying you wanted to spend time with me. I'm—"

He sobbed, tears dripping to the grave. Ellie bent down and put a hand on his shoulder.

They walked back to the house. Ellie tapped the rivets on the back of her jeans. "Maybe you should keep the dogs in at night. I'll ask around town. Don't tell your dad yet."

"Why not?"

"Why did you come to me and not him?"

Quinn tipped his head to the side, examining that question for the first time. Ellie waved and walked along the cool shore toward the Chases, who lived just down the lake. They'd moved in two years ago, much to Ellie's resentment. For the most part, the Lower Saranac was unpopulated, but a few dozen people trickled into Lake Placid each year. Sooner or later, they'd start spilling west. And in the meantime, she was just getting older. Another ten or fifteen years, and she'd start slowing down just as she most need to be on her guard.