37

Jon faintly remembered making a promise to Edith, but he wasn’t completely sure if he had or not. As he racked his brain to remember, it suddenly came to him. Holy crap. I’m the only one who can get rid of Ian. Just the thought of Ian made him physically sick. The idea of confronting him on any level gave him a burning knot in the pit of his stomach.

Still wrapped up in the memory of his last encounter with Ian, he didn’t even hear Carlie when she walked into the bedroom.

The mornings were turning decidedly cooler, and she wrapped herself in her heaviest robe. “Well, good morning. I thought you might sleep all day. Don’t you have class this morning?”

“Yes, I do. My afternoon class, though, is a lecture by a superior court justice. I’ll be home at lunchtime.”

“I’m going to go into the office this morning. With a little luck, I’ll be able to catch Dexter in. I want to talk to him about this partnership.”

“Have you read his proposal yet?”

“It’s all legal. It’s a typical partnership agreement. I was surprised to find that he’s offering a full and equitable partnership, not just a small percentage and voting rights. Two other partners hold ten-percent equity in the firm. Dexter has the eighty percent. He offered me half of his equity: forty percent. More surprising than that, he didn’t require me to buy in. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before.”

“That’s quite generous.”

“It’s too generous—that’s what concerns me.”

“Dexter including us in his will really bothers me. He doesn’t know us from Adam, so why leave his practice to us?”

“That’s what I’m hoping to find out this morning.”

When Carlie pulled behind the Victorian house that served as their offices, she saw Dexter’s Mercedes parked in the last parking space, directly in front of the employee entrance.

Using her key and the touchpad, she shut off the alarm but reentered the activation code once she was inside. The offices were deathly quiet.

Dexter’s office door was open and his desk light was on. Carlie poked her head inside to see if he was sitting behind his massive mahogany desk. He was leaning back, eyes closed, with his hands behind his head.

“Good morning, Carlie,” he said without even opening his eyes. “I’ve been expecting you. Come on in and have a seat.”

Allowing his chair to rock back, Dexter folded his hands on the desk and stared at her. “I trust you, and that’s enough for me. I hope it’s enough for you.”

“I have one question. Why now?”

“I’m not dying, at least not yet. I’m just retiring. I want to travel, see the world outside of this town. In order to do that, I will need an income commensurate with that lifestyle. I have no immediate family to leave the business to when I pass, and I can’t see anyone else in this firm taking the reins. When I’m gone, this firm might as well go to the person who runs it.”

“Well, is there anything else?”

“Nope, that pretty much covers it.”

Opening his desk drawer, Dexter pulled out a large manila file folder and slid it across the desk to Carlie. “This is yours.”

Across the front, Carlie saw the name “Baxter” in black marker.

With that, Carlie stood and excused herself. When she got to the door, she stopped and turned around. “I’ll have the paperwork signed and returned to you in a day or two.”

“Take your time. No rush.”

Carlie walked to the parking lot with a lot more spring in her step than when she had walked in. She was now confident that this was the right choice. There wasn’t a person on earth who could wipe the smile off her face.

Loretta was sitting at the table with Cecil when Carlie walked through the door. The smile on her face was still as big as when she had walked out of Dexter’s office.

Smiling, Loretta said, “We both know that Dexter offered you a partnership. I assume that’s what the ear-to-ear smile is all about.”

Carlie looked at both of them in amazement. “How did you know? I just found out last night.”

“Sweetie, not much goes on in this town without our knowing. Congratulations!”

“Thank you. I mean it.”

After a celebratory breakfast of pancakes and eggs, Carlie left for home. Loretta planned to be there around 2:00, which left Carlie with almost four hours to read.

She felt invigorated, with a new sense of purpose. She was going to get to the bottom of this haunting—hopefully today.

Carlie had always found Jon’s chair the most comfortable and the easiest place in the house to concentrate. After turning on the radio, she picked up a stack of Edith’s journals and laid them beside Jon’s chair. After brewing a pot of coffee, she returned to the living room, sat down, and picked up the first journal.

With a little stack of Post-it notes at hand, Carlie began to scan the pages, marking any entry that she found to be of significance.

Things were apparently going well. Maybe well is too strong a term, but things were definitely going better on the farm. Andrew had more or less taken charge. Every morning during breakfast, he would lay out the work schedule for Daniel and Ian. Originally, this didn’t set very well with Ian, but Andrew showed incredible patience. He would sit quietly and wait for Ian to revise what he had proposed. Over the first week or so, Ian would change everything around out of spite, but they would always go back to Andrew’s schedule sometime during the day. Ian would be mad, but he would finally concede that Andrew had been right. In time, he finally gave his seal of approval without question to Andrew’s work schedules.

Over the next six months, with Andrew’s help, they put the farm back in working order and finally had a cash crop ready for harvest. Ian’s acceptance of Andrew’s new role—and how easily Andrew performed it—amazed and impressed Edith. Andrew had turned into a first-rate manager.

Carlie had been reading for nearly three hours straight. Her eyes were beginning to dry out and burn. Laying the journal in her lap, Carlie folded her hands on top of it and closed her eyes. In a matter of minutes, she was sound asleep.

For the first time in her life, Carlie had a pair of work gloves of her very own. The bales of hay were heavy at the end of the rope, but the course hemp rope no longer caused oozing blisters and deep stinging burns in the palms of her hands.

Looking out over the hay load opening at the top of the barn, Carlie could see Daniel on the ground below, wrestling the bales off the wagon and onto the ground. Carlie was comfortable that she had distributed the workload evenly between her and Daniel, but you would never believe it by listening to him. He always made it sound as if he were stuck unloading the bales, carrying each heavy bale up the ladder, and restacking them all in the barn by himself, while Carlie simply watched.

Carlie had seen Ian discreetly watching them, silently hoping that Daniel’s complaints had merit. Unfortunately, what he did see was Daniel stomp off, leaving Carlie to unload the rest of the wagon herself, carrying every bale into the barn and wrestling each one up the ladder into the loft.

Ian must have found Daniel and tore into him, because when Carlie was restacking the bales, Daniel’s head appeared over the edge. Making sure Carlie wouldn’t knock him off the ladder with a swinging bale of hay, he finished climbing up and grabbed a hay hook anchored into the beam above his head.

“Listen up, you,” Daniel began. “I don’t like you. I never have and I never will. I’ll work next to you only because it’s the right thing to do. Don’t try to ingratiate yourself with Ian or me. Next year at this time, you will be nothing more than a distant memory. This farm will never be yours, so you might want to quit that nonsensical talk before Ian shows you the bottom of his boot and the road out of town.”

Baler with Daniel (at right), circa 1880s.

Carlie felt betrayed that her private conversation with Edith had become public; worse yet, she was being mocked and ridiculed over it. If Daniel knew, surely Ian knew too, and Carlie understood that he would never let her comments go without some kind of retaliation. All she could think was what a sniveling wimp Edith was. Carlie quickly rescinded her offer to allow Edith to stay on the farm. Edith could walk the pavement with her husband for all she cared.

Looking into Daniel’s eyes, Carlie let out a deep guttural laugh. “Listen to me, you miserable asshole,” she began. “I can’t stand the sight of any of you. I don’t need your or anyone’s help to run this farm. So when the day comes I show you the bottom of my boot, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Carlie was not a fighter, but she recognized the move when Daniel shifted all his weight to his left leg. He intended to swing at her.

Carlie, unfortunately, found herself backed up against the bales of hay.

The look in Daniel’s eyes showed that he was completely aware of Carlie’s awkward position. He smiled a Cheshire grin as he tightened his grip on the hay hook in his right hand.

The thought of Daniel skewering her with a hay hook had not occurred to Carlie. That was something Patrick would do. She had seriously underestimated the depths of Daniel’s hatred.

Moving forward as fast as a snake strike, Daniel leveled the business end of the hook directly at the side of Carlie’s head.

Carlie closed her eyes and countered Daniel’s swing with the hook in her own right hand. She expected to feel excruciating pain—but she didn’t. Her arm moved freely through the air until the hook buried itself to the hilt into something soft and pliable.

Opening her eyes, she saw the hook in Daniel’s hand fly by her head and drop to the floor. It was less than three inches from her face when he released it.

Pulling her right arm back, Carlie was prepared to block Daniel’s next attack, but her arm wouldn’t budge. Instead, Daniel let out the scream of a wounded animal, a scream so loud it reverberated throughout the entire barn.

Daniel staggered backward. As he moved backward, Carlie pulled forward, causing Daniel to scream even louder. She was still completely unaware that she was the cause of Daniel’s suffering.

Daniel reached down and grabbed hold of her hand. Pushing down, his bloody hand slid off, driving the hook deeper inside of him.

Holding Daniel at arm’s length, Carlie stopped pulling to figure out why he was screaming and what was preventing her from retrieving her hook.

She looked down and saw her hand covered in blood. Daniel’s dark blue-checkered shirt was now black down the entire left side—the same side where she had buried the hook up to the handle.

Daniel’s eyes were starting to lose focus and he stopped screaming; his sounds were now more like wounded whimpers. He looked so pitiful standing in front of her, whimpering like a lost puppy.

The longer she stared at him, the madder she got. “How dare you, you miserable piece of shit. I expected this from Patrick or Ian, but never from you. You disgust me.”

Taking one step forward, she loosened the biting grip the hook had between his ribs and unceremoniously yanked it out. In one swift move, Carlie kicked out, hitting Daniel in the center of the chest.

Daniel staggered backward along the edge of the loft.

Flailing his arms to catch his balance, he backed off the edge. There was a soft thud and then a moan. Carlie looked over the edge, expecting to find him lying on his back in the dirt. But he wasn’t. He was sprawled over the top of the metal tines of the baler.

Climbing down the ladder, Carlie stopped to check on Daniel before she went to wash off her hands and the hay hook and go looking for help.

Daniel was breathing, but his breaths were shallow and he was making a gurgling sound. His eyes were alert again, and they followed Carlie as she walked around him, but he couldn’t manage to speak.

Pumping the handle of the well that filled the horse trough, Carlie allowed the cool water to pour over her hand and arm, rinsing away every trace of Daniel’s blood. She took the corner of her shirt out of her pants and dried off the hay hook. Walking to where Daniel was lying, she took his right hand and placed the hook inside it. She wrapped his fingers tight around the handle and patted the top of his hand.

“Someone should be out here before long to find you, at least by suppertime, so don’t give up hope. I have a lot of work to do, so thank you for offering to finish stacking the hay. Sorry you fell off the edge of the loft. You should have been more careful.”

Carlie’s eyes never left those of Daniel’s. She watched as he listened to her. The expression in his eyes changed from contempt, to recognition of his situation, to surrender.

Carlie’s eyes snapped open; she was disoriented and breathing hard.

Someone was knocking loudly on the kitchen door.

Setting the journal on the chair, she walked slowly into the kitchen. Loretta was smiling and waving at her from outside the door. As Carlie unlocked it, Loretta burst in, all in a fluster. “Are you all right? I’ve been pounding on your door for almost half an hour. I was scared something had happened to you.”

“I’m fine, Loretta. I just dozed off for a bit. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m just relieved to see that you’re okay.”

Jon walked in about an hour later, apologizing profusely for being so late. Someone had decided to have a staff meeting, and the dean of student services had cornered him.

When Jon walked in, Carlie and Loretta were already sitting at the table with a stack of journals in front of each of them. Carlie looked up at him and gave him a smile. “Well, I’m glad you made it, even if you are late.”

“How did everything go with Dexter this morning?”

“Everything went fine. I’ll tell you about it later.”

Picking up a stack of journals from the floor, Carlie set them on the table, turned to Jon, and pointed at the books. “Sit down and get busy. We’re looking for Edith’s entry where Daniel got hurt.”

“Is it important?”

“It’s important.”

Pulling out his chair, Jon sat down and opened the first book on his stack. “Anybody want to share why we’re looking for this one incident?”

Over the next hour, Carlie related her dream.

Jon laid down his book and looked at her. “So you’re telling me Andrew killed him?”

“I don’t know what happened to him. I woke up before I found out. I will tell you this: Andrew couldn’t have cared less if Daniel died or not. He did absolutely nothing to help him—in fact, he set it up to look like an accident and then just left him there.”

“Damn,” Jon said as he picked up his book and started scanning the pages again.

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