I hurry down the porch steps, past Calla’s garden that smells of green tomatoes and night jasmine, and continue through the grove of elms at the south side of the house, beyond the windmill turning slowly high above, until I can’t see anything but trees and stars. Until the house vanishes from sight behind me.
I stand in a shaft of pale gummy moonlight, looking down at the notebook.
This is another deceit. Another secret I will keep from my wife.
My fucking treacherous heart.
I turn through the pages quickly at first, as if I need to hurry, absorb as much as I can before Calla discovers me in the trees—catches me with a notebook written by the man whose truck I found days earlier.
But as I skim the pages, I find my gaze softening, slowing down, reading every word as if I were starving for them. A story unfolds within the pages, events and roadmaps and snowy mountain roads that led to the night—the moment—the notebook was stashed beneath the mattress. But there are also pages missing, torn free. Lost or discarded.
When I reach the end, I close the book and blink through the trees in the direction of the house. All this time, the house has concealed a secret, held it captive, hidden.
Bee was right: Travis Wren was in our home.
He came looking for a woman named Maggie St. James.
And now, both have disappeared.
BEE
There is a place beyond the pond, in the high meadow, where the ground feels oddly hollow, a cavity in the earth where sound travels easily—a place I often come. I lie down between the blades of grass and clover, and press my ear to the soil.
I listen to the tiny thump inside my stomach—the little burst of life, the delicate, wondrous growing of cells—that Levi doesn’t want.
Tears fall sideways across my cheeks, then spill to the ground and soak in. I am comforted by the earth beneath me—the mass so much larger than my own body, a great revolving orb that I cling to. And then I hear the back door of the farmhouse open, the quick, fettered pace of Theo’s heartbeat emerging into the night, his gate strange, unbalanced—rushed even. He moves away from the house into the grove of elms. He is quiet there, standing, and when I strain my ears I can almost hear the rasp of his breathing. Broken gulps of air. What is he doing?
But then my focus is drawn away, to another sound in the opposite direction.
The ground aches beneath me, twigs snap, leaves fall in slow measure—lazy and truant—followed by the faint preternatural hiss of trees cracking apart, limbs opening up, and disease spilling out.
I snap my head away from the ground.
THEO
“The dogs have been barking,” Parker tells me when I reach the guard hut.
He finishes the last of his coffee then places it on the table. He looks like he got a haircut from one of the women in the community—the sides of his hair trimmed too close to the scalp, an honest but uneven effort. Some of the men in Pastoral call him the kid, and in recent months he’s tried to rid himself of the title by growing a mustache which is now just a few scattered blond wisps.
He stands up from the chair and edges past me to the open doorway, our routine well practiced. “Oh?” I ask. The sun has long set, and I shift the notebook I found the night before under my arm so he won’t see.
“It’s Henry’s dogs,” Parker says. “They won’t shut up.”
“What do you think’s got them worked up?”
He lifts his bony shoulders to his small ears. “Dogs can be stupid,” he says, but I can’t tell if he means it, or if something’s spooked him and he’s trying to shrug it off. “Or maybe they hear the trees splitting open at the border.”
“We lit the sage,” I say, sinking into the chair. “The smoke should push the sickness away.”
Parker makes a sound, turning in the doorway to peer down the road, a peculiar look of doubt cut into his face.
I glance at the notebook wedged between the arm of the chair and my leg, and a thought begins to jab at me—it’s an idea that’s started to gain substance since I discovered the truck and the photograph, and now this notebook that once belonged to Travis Wren. “Have you ever thought it’s strange that we guard the gate at all?” I ask Parker. “Since no one ever comes up the road anymore?”
His frown dips even deeper, showing the ash-blond stubble along his jawline. “We keep Pastoral safe,” he says, as if he repeats this phrase to himself every morning, a reminder of why he sits inside this little hut through the long, arctic cold of January winters, and the drowsy, unbearable heat of summer.