Reapers (9 page)

"Quinn will be fine." Ellie cleared her throat; the run had worked up some phlegm. "See to your fields while I do some poking around. Once you finish, if you're not satisfied with my results, then take the issue to Sheriff Hobson."

"Why don't I head straight there?"

"Because we're family. I like to keep our business our own."

George nodded slowly. "You have three days. After that, I go to the sheriff."

"Deal." She folded her arms. "Mind if I sleep here tonight? I'd feel safer knowing we were all under the same roof."

"Of course. You can have my room."

That was hardly necessary, but now wasn't the time to argue. Not when George was trying to reassert control of his homestead. Ellie checked in with Dee and Quinn, who were talking softly in his bedroom, then walked back to her house at a rather more leisurely pace than she had left it. She spent most of the walk thinking about the "sheriff." With his goatee and his prissy little bowler. She'd never had a run-in with him, but it troubled her that George took him seriously. That was the other problem with the growing population. Once a place got big enough, people started to believe that it needed a select few to run it. And it was a truism that the people most interested in power and authority were those least qualified to exercise them. If Hobson had his way, he'd probably decree all the residents of the lakelands were henceforth required to wear full-body bathing suits before stepping foot in the waters.

Back home, she fed the chickens, checked their water, grabbed her one-day bag from the front closet, locked the doors, and walked back to the Tolberts'. The western mountains dragged the sun down to their cold lips. Breezes circled through the woods, carrying the brown sugar smell of maple and the promise of cold.

Twilight neared as she returned to her soon-to-be in-laws' farm. Tinkering filtered from the barn. Ellie poked her head inside. George crouched over a tarp spread with tools, his spine curved like a rod that's hooked a four-pound bass, readying the tractor and combine for tomorrow's work.

The house was hot and smelled like woodsmoke. Dee and Quinn curled on the couch in a mess of blankets and arms. Dee was reading aloud and stopped as Ellie stepped into the living room.

"Hey Mom."

"Hey kids. I expect Sam is busy sleeping it off, but if you hear or see anything funny tonight, wake me up first thing, okay?"

Quinn grinned. "You're so
ready
, Ellie. I hope our first son is just like you."

She stared him down. "If you ever say that again, I will render you incapable of having a son."

His smile went saggy. Feeling meanly pleased with herself, Ellie retired to George's room. He had set beeswax candles for her on both nightstands. She checked her pistol—loaded, safety on—and set it on the stand to the right of the bed.

George returned to the house after dark. While he scrubbed the grease from his hands, Ellie started dinner. Quinn lent a hand. They ate and washed the dishes and retired to their rooms; George set up blankets for himself on the couch.

Way back in high school, Ellie had learned that the night before tests, she tended to blip in and out of sleep like a stone skipping over a calm lake. This trait worsened in college—freshman year, many of her essay responses had come back marked with a single red "?"—but she learned to manage it. By the time she entered the DAA, she had turned it to her advantage. Near the front lines of a foreign country, she cat-napped through the night, ready to move at a moment's notice, letting her dreaming mind draw strange connections between the problems she had been sent to solve. More than two or three nights of this reduced her to a buzzing ball of nerves, but a single night was no problem at all.

That night, she woke every thirty to sixty minutes to gaze at the moonlit fields. At the deepest part of the night, her mind relaxed enough to let her sleep the final three hours straight through.

At dawn, engines roared from the barn. George drove the combine while Quinn paralleled him with the tractor. Ellie made sure Dee knew where George's rifle was, then walked home to clean up and see to the chickens. She had dressed, but her hair was still stuck to her neck in dark damp strands when Sheriff Hobson strolled up to her front door.

"Good morning, Ms. Colson." He produced a pocket watch, sprung it open, and examined the hands. "Or should I say good afternoon?"

"Whatever it is, I doubt it's 'good,'" she said. "Or you'd have no reason to be here."

The man grinned. "Very good. So have you likewise deduced the nature of my visit?"

He carried a cane and wore a wool suit well-tailored to his elfin frame. He had just begun the particular male transition from middle age to senior citizen and his hair remained mostly brown but the skin of his neck and under his eyes had a shiny, slack paleness to it, like egg whites brushed over dough. He was mostly harmless, but that was exactly what bothered her.

"Sure," she said. "I forgot to file a permit for my new shed, didn't I?"

Hobson chuckled and tucked his cane under his armpit like a lost safari guide. "If only it were that quotidian. I'm afraid there's been a complaint."

"About the shots? That was nothing."

He shook his head, face gone grave. "From Sam Chase."

That looped her. "What's
his
beef?"

"He is unappreciative of Quinn Tolbert's ongoing campaign of harassment."

"Is he? Then maybe he should stop skulking around the Tolberts' farm and leering at my daughter."

"Charges he denies. Lacking physical evidence, I can't say one way or the other. But I did bear witness to the letter Quinn left at the Chase household. It was...incendiary."

Ellie glared across the lake. "This is ridiculous."

"Nevertheless, if it continues, there will be consequences."

"Such as?"

"Consequential actions." Hobson took on a look of pained patience. "I have talked young Sam out of pursuing charges. I believe it's in the interests of both parties to keep their respective distances. Wouldn't you agree?"

"Completely. Thanks for letting me know how things stand, sheriff."

He tipped his cap, checked his pocket watch, and strode down the trail, impaling stray leaves with his cane. As soon as he was gone, Ellie got in the canoe and paddled across the lake to the muddy beach just down the shore from the Chases.

Sam's dad answered the door, gray hair awhirl around his ears. "He's in bed."

"Hangover's that bad? He'll want to talk to me."

"See about that."

The man closed the door in her face. Two minutes later, Sam opened it back up. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair stuck up from the side of his head. As always, he was shirtless.

"The hell do you want?"

"What was in the letter Quinn sent you?" Ellie said.

Sam flushed. "Bunch of horseshit, that's what."

"Did he tell you to stay away from Dee?"

"Like I told him, I was never there. The way you crows keep circling, I'm starting to think she's got a thing for
me
."

Ellie examined him a long moment. Those who found themselves at the center of a perpetual storm tended to think of themselves as the victim, the target of malicious persecution—that was how they justified striking back, which they always did—but she didn't see it in Sam's face. Maybe it was the hangover, but he looked tired. Ready to be done with it.

"I'll keep Quinn away," she said. "If you have a problem, you come to me. And for god's sake, put a shirt on first."

She walked down the shore to her canoe, shoes squelching in the mud. Back toward the Tolberts', motors droned. Good thing they'd finally got to work. The day was overcast, gray. Might rain later.

"I don't think we'll have any more trouble with Sam Chase," she announced when the men came back in from the harvest.

Quinn crossed his arms. "I'll believe that when I see it."

"Then no more letters."

Dee blinked. "Letters?"

"It's nothing," Quinn said through the redness of his face. "I'm just looking out for my family."

Ellie didn't press. What she'd already said seemed to do the trick. Quinn and George went on with the harvest. Dee cleaned the spent straw from the fields. Lacking better purpose, Ellie joined her, and once the men finished with the grain, they pitched in on cleanup too. Ellie neither saw nor heard from Sam Chase. George cursed the boy a couple times, but didn't pursue it with the sheriff. Maybe he was too busy with work, but Ellie suspected he'd got wind that Sam had gone to Sheriff Hobson for himself, and had no desire to stir the pot further.

The rain held off until the day they expected to finish raking up the straw. That morning, it fell steadily and froze when it landed, cementing the leaves to the ground. It thawed by midday, but the straw was sodden and heavy. With no chance of fire, George decided to leave it until it dried.

Lost in the rhythm of work, Ellie's anxiety relaxed its hold on her chest. But it never left completely. If Sam Chase
were
guilty, that meant her daughter was staying just down the shore from a man who stabbed dogs and left them in the woods to die.

And if it weren't Sam, that meant she had no suspect or motive at all.

But each day the threat felt that much further away. And Ellie had work of her own to do. Dragging in wood and splitting it for the winter. Cleaning the machines and getting them locked up until next spring. Checking the windows and walls and attics for chinks that would bleed heat. She hadn't done so the first winter and soon discovered the house shed warmth like a sick dog. She'd underestimated the amount of wood they'd needed, too. February and March had been miserable: slogging through the snow for cracked branches and fallen logs, dragging them back to the garage to dry them out as best she could. She and Dee had been reduced to sleeping in the same bed bundled in coats and three pairs of socks.

She put together sacks of grain and loaves of bread and hitched the trailer to her bike. In Lake Placid, she bartered for supplies she hadn't learned to make or grow for herself—soap, candles, black pepper and sea salt for the fish they'd catch throughout the winter. A northern wind chilled the streets and the handful of vendors set up around the downtown plaza wore mittens.

She enjoyed bartering. There was some game theory behind it and some psychology, too, which varied depending on who was doing the selling. Timothy Yao, the former chemist who now made soaps and toothpaste, liked to yammer on about the special processes involved in compounding each of his goods. The experiments that had failed before he perfected each batch.

It was a way of displaying his expertise, without which Ellie would be scrubbing herself with water and sand. She nodded along and matched him with talk of the composted fertilizer she'd fiddled with this summer. The homebrewed pesticide that saved her from an unexpected grasshopper hatch. Not to mention the new yeast she'd found to give her latest batches that tangy, sour taste. Timothy smiled slyly and allowed that there might be more to farming and baking than he knew.

Mrs. Stoltz, on the other hand, was no-nonsense. She got salt and rarer seasonings shipped in from the coast and wasn't shy about letting Ellie know precisely what she'd paid and how much she needed in return to make it worth her while. Ellie counted with a hand-drawn spreadsheet of her estimated harvest minus what she and Dee would eat over the year and thus the (conservatively estimated) surplus she had leftover for "minor niceties" like salt.

Mrs. Stoltz leaned over the figures and muttered and eyeballed her own ledgers. She made quick calculations on her abacus, beads clacking, then arrived at a figure, take it or leave it. Ellie took it.

If she wanted, she might find a wagon and borrow a horse and drive it to Ottawa or Syracuse to scavenge instead of dealing with all this trade. She had no doubts the cities would yield
something
interesting. After six years of being picked over by other scavengers, however, there were no guarantees she'd find the specific something she was looking for. Guns and ammunition, for instance. These days firearms outnumbered living people a hundred to one, but good luck finding them. Most had been hoarded, first during the plague, then again during the invasion. If you tracked down some prepper's secret compound, you might be set for life, but in the meantime, it was usually easier to trade with someone who had a spare.

It was the same with everything. Much had been lost to hoarders who were now dead. More had been destroyed by fires and looting. Most had simply spoiled or rusted. In practice, scavenging was a crapshoot.

Add in the time and hassle of travel, not to mention the danger in picking around a foreign city, and for Ellie's money, it was easier to stay at home, grow and hunt your own food, and figure out how to make things for yourself—or learn how to go without. She wasn't alone in this thinking. She didn't have an exact head count, but at least two hundred people had gathered in and around Lake Placid, pursuing their crafts and trading the excess for anything they couldn't produce on their own.

To date, they'd lived in relative peace. A few fights, no murders. Low-key enough that either the sheriff or the people themselves had been able to settle disputes. But Ellie had the feeling the dog-killer was about to push them into territory they weren't ready to explore. Trials. Punishment. Retribution.

By the time she emptied her trailer of wheat and bread and refilled it with candles and knit socks and fresh blankets and her one splurge item, a bow and arrow set she'd always intended to learn how to use, the daylight was spent as well. As she rode the last leg of trail to her house, candles flickered in the windows. Maybe Dee would have dinner waiting for her.

Dee was inside, but the only smell in the front room was fear.

"Where have you
been
?" Dee said.

Ellie set down an armload of blankets. "In town. What's the matter with you?"

"It's not me, it's George," Dee said. "Half his grain's been stolen."

7

The men galloped onto the pier, shouting, firing short bursts from their assault rifles. Dock workers yelped and scattered. One dropped in a skid of blood, clutching his guts. Men dived off the docks into the cold, gray-green waters.