The Farm

That didn't change the fact that someone was in the barn. Unless it, like the house, was haunted.

She went up the stairs to the loft door. It was locked. Had she slipped the latch herself, as she'd exited? She couldn't remember. Below her, Abraham ate the scarecrow's meat with a satisfied chuff.

Katy entered the loft again, determined not to leave until she'd found the owner of the boots, if one existed. The loft wasn't as dark as the space below, but the shadows between the stacked bales had grown deeper. The knife was heavy in her hand and her muscles ached with tension. A charred and pungent odor wended past, and she recognized it as scorched cabbage. She would probably burn the house down. Gordon would be livid. The structure had survived nearly two hundred years of Smiths and Katy would manage to raze it in less than two months.

'Okay, whoever you are,' Katy called out, giving her words force to hide the tremor in her throat. Supermom, that was she. 'My husband's on his way.'

If the trespasser was familiar with Gordon, which was likely, he might not be intimidated by the pudgy professor's wrath. But the jerk might know Gordon's habits, too, and that he rarely arrived home before dark. He would know Katy and Jett were by themselves and the nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away. So Katy added, 'I called the sheriff's office.'

Something thumped, the sound muffled by the piles of hay. A patch of lesser gray shifted against the darkness. Katy swallowed hard.

The boots drummed, or maybe it was Katy's heart.

The shape charged her in a shower of dust and straw.

Katy raised the knife, her scream reverberating off the tin roof ing like stage thunder in a theater.

The goat stopped in front of her, head lifted the oblique eyes gathering the faint light and reflecting it in emerald streaks.

A goat.

A goddamned goat had been walking around up here, scaring the stuffing out of her. It must have smelled the hay, climbed up the stairs, and gotten itself locked in.

But who had locked the door?

Katy was on her way to the stairs again when she heard the moan. A barn owl?

No. It came from inside one of the wooden grain barrels that stood near a feed chute. What sort of animal would she find in there? A wounded possum or a feral cat giving birth?

How could she not look?

Jett was curled inside, arms folded over her face.

'Jett, honey,' Katy said. She sniffed for dope but it could have been something taken internally. Jett's eyes were bloodshot but, even in the weak light, her pupils appeared normal. 'Honey, what happened?'

The girl's mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, her face like a ghost's in the blackness of the barrel. She blinked and looked around as if she'd fallen asleep on a car trip. 'Where am I?'

'The barn.'

'Where am I?'

Drugs. Katy thought they'd left all that behind and that drugs would be impossible for Jett to find in the rural mountains.

'You're in the barn, Jett.' She would save the mother-daughter talk for later, maybe bring Gordon into the act. Gordon wasn't yet a potent father figure, but he knew how to lecture. Right now, she wanted to get Jett in the house so she could check her pulse.

'There was a man...' Jett said.

'No, there's nobody up here. Just a goat. I looked. How did you get in the barrel?'

'I don't remember.'

The nanny goat, its belly swollen with pregnancy, came over and watched as Katy pulled Jett from the barrel and helped her down the stairs.

Chapter Five

Mouse doodie.

Sarah Jeffers ran her broom along the baseboard of the counter. The counter stood by the front door of Solom General Store and was dark maple, the top scarred by two million transactions. Most of the lights were turned off for closing time, and the dolls, tools, mountain crafts, and just plain junk that hung from the ceiling beams threw long shadows against the walls. After all her years as proprietor, the aroma of tobacco, woodstove smoke, Dr Pepper, and shoe polish had seeped into her skin like balm.

The store had been built during the town's heyday just before World War I, when the timber industry made its assault on the local hardwoods. The train station had been a bustling place, bringing Sarah's grandparents to the mountains from Pennsylvania. The Jeffers, who had once gone by the family name of Jaffe, built the store from the ground up, collecting the creek stones for the foun dation, trading and bartering for stock, even breeding their own workforce. They were Jewish but no one paid that any mind, because they kept closed services in their living room and the store remained open on both Saturdays and Sundays.

When the forest slopes were nothing but stumps and the timber cutters moved on, the sawmill shut down. After that, it was like the hands ran backward on the clock. The earthen dam slowly eroded on Blackburn River, and the little housing settlement that sprang up around the mill began succumbing to the gray and ceaseless weight of gravity. Though the first Fords had made occasional visits over the dusty mountain roads, mostly driven by lumber barons who wanted to check on their investments, the town's slow exodus was almost entirely via horse-and-wagon. By the Great Depression, Solom was little more than a whistle stop on the Virginia Creeper railroad line. Then came the great 1940 flood, sweeping away the station and a third of the remaining houses, killing a dozen people in the process.

Sarah's grandparents died within weeks of one another, and the three children fought over who had to stay and run the store. The short straw belonged to Sarah's father, Elisha, who promptly took on a Primitive Baptist wife, Laurel Lee, because she knew addition and subtraction and silence. Through it all the general store stood on its little rise above the river, the stock changing with the times. Chesterfield tobacco pouches and Bugler papers gave way to Marlboro tailor-mades, horehound stick candy disappeared from the shelves in favor of Baby Ruths. A Sears & Roebuck catalog by the register once allowed a mountain family to order practically anything a New York city slicker could buy, but that had been re placed by a computer during the Clinton era. Sarah didn't trust it, had even named it 'Slick Willy' and suspected it of swallowing a dollar once in a while, and the screen stayed black unless Gretta, the thick-ankled college student who worked part-time, was on the clock.

The computer was one of the few modern touches, besides the sheer volume of cheap imported crafts designed to look folksy. The wall adornments—rusty advertising signs, farm implements, and shelves of old ripple glass bottles—furthered the illusion that the general store was lost in time, a nostalgic reminder of more carefree days. Sarah didn't buy the illusion, but she sold it. Times were better raking in leisure dollars than dunning the local folks for nickels.

Sarah had grown up in the store, dusting the shelves and tally ing pickled eggs in her plain cotton shift. She remembered when the store's first indoor toilet was installed, and though as a four- year-old she'd had a great fear of the roaring flush of water, shed had an even greater fear of hanging her bare bottom over that stinky black hole in the outhouse. Even back then, she'd pushed a broom, and had asked her mother about the numerous little black needles amid the stray hair, spilled sugar, dried grass, and dirt.

'Mouse doodie,' Laurel Lee had said. 'A mouse goes to heaven in a country store.'

Sarah had always thought of those mice as happy, blessed creatures, scurrying under the floorboards, worrying their way through sacks of feed grain, chewing into the corners of cornflake boxes. But after nearly seventy years of sweeping up their damned doodie, she was about ready to wish them to a Baptist hell.

But at least the mice gave her something to blame when strange sounds echoed through the aisles. She didn't like being in the store alone, but she could barely afford her two part-time helpers. So she'd spent the past