The Unmaking of June Farrow(76)

Another truck drove past, and the man behind the wheel lifted a hand into the air, waving. It was Percy Lyle, the pig farmer who’d come to find Eamon at the Faire last year to tell him Callie had gotten out.

The thought came instantly.

I waved back, hand dropping to my side as I played the evening over again in my head. The dance with Eamon, the conversation with Caleb, the eerie sight of Mimi Granger. That look in her eyes wasn’t from too many glasses of ale or an imagined story. It had been on her face that day I came through the door, when she saw me from her porch.

She’d known something. She’d seen something.

I looked up the road, where it vanished over the hill. Beyond it, the turn onto the river road was only a mile or so from that old farmhouse with the mailbox that read GRANGER.

In the distance, Eamon was out of sight in the fields again. I knew what he’d say if I told him what I was thinking. He and Esther both would think I was insane. But if neither of them was going to tell me what really happened that night, I had to find out for myself.

I opened the driver’s side door of Esther’s truck and snatched the keys up from the seat. Before I could think better of it, I shoved them into the ignition. I was up the road before I saw anyone come out onto the porch, and I figured I had maybe ten minutes before Margaret got far enough out into the field to find Eamon and tell him what I’d done.

I turned off of Hayward Gap, eyes drifting to the rearview mirror. I was half afraid that I’d see the red flashing light of Caleb’s police car there, but the road was clear.

The Granger farm was the only one in at least a three-mile stretch, the driveway one long track between two fields. At its end, the house sat behind a tall golden green sea of alfalfa. I turned onto the drive, taking the turn so fast that the tires slid in the dirt when I hit the brakes.

There was a flash of a shadow in the front window of the house when I came to a stop. I got out of the truck and climbed the steps, pounding a fist on the door. I could hear the clatter of a dish inside. Footsteps.

The wind rippled through the field, an expanse that stretched all the way to the tree line, where the river narrowed after it flowed past the flower farm. I tried to picture a woman running, a child in her arms. I tried to trace her path to the road, but there was nothing.

I knocked again. This time, harder.

“Mrs. Granger! Please, I just want to talk to you.”

It was a few seconds before the door swung open, and behind it, Mimi stood with a stricken look. She changed her mind almost as soon as she saw me, and she scrambled for the door again, as if changing her mind. I shoved my boot in front of it, keeping it open.

Her rasping breath was on the verge of a cough, her pallid skin colorless as she peered up at me. “Leave! Or I’ll call the sheriff!”

“I only want to ask you a question.” I put my hands up in front of me, trying to calm her. “And then I’ll go. I swear.”

She still looked like a wild animal with those yellowed, owlish eyes, but her thin lips pursed, like she was waiting.

I lowered my hands, glancing over my shoulder to the field on the west side of her property. “I just want you to tell me what you saw that night.”

“What?” she croaked.

“The night you told Sheriff Rutherford about. When you saw me running through that field.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What is this?”

“I just need to know exactly what you saw.”

“I told him what you did. I told him exactly what you did.”

“I don’t remember!” The words crashed into one another, making Mimi flinch.

I knew it was the wrong thing to say, a dangerous thing to admit. She could go straight back to Caleb and tell him everything. But there was something about the way she was looking at me that made the words spill from my mouth. Like if she could somehow see how lost I was, she would help me. She would tell me the truth.

Mimi’s hand fell from the doorknob as she stared up at me. She was quiet for a long moment before she came outside. The shawl around her shoulders was pulled tight now, her crooked brow relaxing.

“Please,” I said again, my voice tired.

She let the screen door close, turning toward the west field. Her hand lifted, and she pointed one knobby finger at the rocking chair that sat at the corner of the porch. “I sit out here at night just after the sun goes down, when it cools off and the mosquitoes clear out. I was sittin’ in that rocking chair there when I saw you.”

“What was I doing?”

She shrugged. “Runnin’.” The way she said it unleashed a dread within me. This woman wasn’t lying.

“Where, exactly?”

That same finger traced a path from the tree line in the distance to the fence that lined the road. “You were comin’ from the river.”

The river. That’s where Nathaniel had been murdered, but his body was found far downstream from here, closer to the falls.

“You were wearin’ a white dress and it had red splotches all over it, on your chest and legs. It was on your arms, too. In your hair.”

My stomach lurched.

“You had that little girl. You were carryin’ her in your arms, and when you made it to the road, you just disappeared. So, I called down to the sheriff’s office and told them they needed to send someone over to check on things.”

“I didn’t say anything?”