Now the fields were stubbled with still-standing stalks of harvested corn and most of the crabapple trees were gone. Dale knew just enough about farming to know that the remaining stalks meant that whoever was farming this land was using the “plain-tilling” method.
Dale drove slowly down the lane. When his headlights illuminated the dark farmhouse, his first thought was, Jesus, it’s smaller than I remember.
The place was dark, of course, without even the usual farmer’s pole light illuminating the area between the house and the sheds and barn. There was a front door, but Duane and his father had never used it, so Dale pulled around the side of the house and looked at the side door. Sandy Whittaker, the real estate agent, had said that no one could find a key but that it would not be locked and that the power would be turned on by the time Dale arrived.
He left the engine running to keep the headlights on the doorway as he trotted over. Both the screen and the inner doors were unlocked. Dale stepped into the kitchen.
He raised his hand to his face and almost jumped back outside. The place smelled terrible—rotten, musty, decayed, worse. Something had died in there.
He flicked the light switch. Nothing. The place was as dark as an unlighted cave, with only the slightest hint of light through the one kitchen window.
Dale went back out to the truck, grabbed his halogen flashlight, and went back in.
The kitchen looked as if it had been abandoned in mid-meal. There were plates on the counter and more in the sink. The stench grew stronger with each step he took, and Dale covered his mouth and nose with one hand as he crossed into the dining room.
Jesus, the place is full of children’s coffins. Dale froze in place, flicking the light in all directions. Instead of one dining room table, there were six or eight rough benches set on sawhorses, and on each bench was a long, dull-metal box the size and shape of a small coffin. Then he saw the slots for punch cards, rudimentary keyboards, and small windows on the metal boxes.
Learning machines, Dale remembered. Duane’s Old Man—always his friend’s affectionate term for his father—had been an inventor. These were the pre-electronic “learning machines” that the Old Man had always been tinkering with, never completing to his satisfaction, and rarely selling.
Amazing, thought Dale. Duane’s aunt—the Old Man’s sister from Chicago—had lived in this place from 1961 right through to the eve of the millennium and had never moved all this junk. Forty years of living with these things in the dining room.
The smell was stronger in here. Dale panned his flashlight around, found the light switch, and flipped it on. Nothing.
Something had died in here; that was certain. Probably a mouse or rat. Possibly a larger animal. Dale had no intention of moving his stuff in or sleeping in here until he found the corpse, got rid of it, and aired the place out.
He sighed, went back out to his Land Cruiser, shut it off, reclined the passenger seat as far as it would go, cracked all of the windows a bit, pulled an old blanket from the back seat, and tried to go to sleep. Dale was exhausted to the point that when he closed his eyes he saw interstate highway center lines moving in headlights, overpasses flashing above him, exit signs flitting by. He was just dozing off when some fragment of dream or thought startled him awake. Dale reached over and pushed the button that locked all of the doors.
THREE
IT was snowing when Dale awoke to dull morning light.
Where the hell am I?It was an honest question. He was stiff, sore, still exhausted from the long drive, disoriented, cold, and achy. His head hurt. His eyes hurt. His back hurt. He felt as he usually did after the first hard day of a backpacking or horse-packing camping trip with its inevitable restless first night of fitful half-sleeping on the cold ground.
Where am I? The snow was falling in discrete pellets, pounding and bouncing on the hood of the Land Cruiser—not quite hail, not quite snow. Groppel was the word they used in the West. The windshield was iced up. The fields of harvested corn were glazed over. Duane’s house. Illinois. That made no sense. Snow? It was the first day of November. Dale Stewart was used to snow in early autumn in Missoula, even more so at the ranch near Flathead Lake because of the elevation there, but in Illinois? He had lived in Elm Haven for seven years of his childhood and could not remember snow before Thanksgiving in any of those years.
Shit, he thought, rooting through his closest duffel bag for a jacket. Blame it on el niño or la niña. We’ve blamed everything else on them for the past five or six years.
Dale stepped out of the Land Cruiser, tugged on his jacket, shivered, and looked at the house looming over him.
As a writer, Dale had been forced to learn a little bit about basic house types and architecture—writers have to learn a little bit about almost everything, was his opinion—and he recognized the McBride farmhouse as a “National Pyramidal Family Folk Home.” It sounded complicated, but all the term really meant was that it was one of about a million plain, equilaterally hipped-roofed houses in the Midwest, built around the time of the First World War. The McBride place was a two-story pyramidal—tall, with no side gables or interesting windows or details. Flat all around, except for a tiny porch roof over the side door that Dale remembered the McBrides using almost exclusively. Most pyramidal family farmhouses had large front porches, but this front door boasted only a stoop and a bit of skimpy lawn. The side door opened onto the muddy turnaround area between the house and the outbuildings—two tool sheds, a couple of small-garage-size general utility sheds, a chicken coop, and a huge barn where Mr. McBride had kept his farm equipment.
Dale just hoped that the plumbing worked. He had to piss as bad as the proverbial racehorse. Plumbing? he thought. I don’t need no steenking plumbing. He was at an abandoned farmhouse three miles from a dying little Illinois village. Dale glanced once down the long, dreary driveway toward the road and then went around to the east side of the Land Cruiser to pee. The light snow was trying to turn to rain, but his urine melted a small circle on the frosted mud of the McBride’s turnaround.
A car horn bleated not far behind him.
Dale zipped up quickly, guiltily, rubbed his hands against his slacks, and came around the Land Cruiser. A large, dark Buick had pulled up while he was peeing. The woman who got out was probably around Dale’s age, but fifty pounds heavier, matronly, with frizzy hair dyed a totally false blond. She was wearing a long beige-quilted-goose-down coat of the kind that had gone out of fashion about fifteen years earlier.
“Mr. Stewart?” said the woman. “Dale?”
For a second, he was totally at a loss. Then the slow tumblers clicked into place. “Ms. Whittaker?”
The heavy woman began walking carefully over the snow-covered ruts. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she cried, coming too close to him, “call me Sandy.”
Dale had found the McBride house for rent on the Internet. When he had contacted the local real estate company handling the house rental—a place out of Oak Hill—he had spoken to the woman for ten minutes about the details of renting the vacant house before the two realized that they knew each other. She had said her name was Mrs. Sandra Blair, but only after he told her on the phone that he had lived in Elm Haven for a few years as a child did she say that actually she was divorced—she still kept the Blair name for business purposes because her ex-husband had been an important personage in Oak Hill and Peoria—but that her friends called her by her maiden name, Sandy Whittaker.