29
Out to Pasture

My stomach dropped as soon as the plane’s landing gear rumbled beneath my feet and thudded into position. Vanessa lifted the window shade to watch the plane emerge from clouds. The morning sun sparkled off the fishing boats and sailboats in Boston harbor. “Wow, we’re coming in over the ocean.”

“Several of the runways go out on long jetties.” I checked the security of my seat belt for the tenth time in the last two hours. “One year, a plane slid right off in icy conditions. It was all over the news.”

Vanessa put her hand over mine. “It’s okay, honey. I’m here.”

The plane banked slightly and landed with only a minor bump. An electronic symphony erupted around us as the businessmen fired up their smart phones. The 6:30 flight between Charlotte and Boston allowed them to fly up for a meeting and be home to watch their favorite sitcoms. We were some of the few people who had luggage with them. I stayed in my seat until the suits left, then eased my bag out from beneath the seat. I refused to put it in the overhead compartment; its contents were too valuable to me.

“So how long will it take us to drive up to Hawthorne?” Vanessa asked as we walked through the terminal toward the rental car desks.

“It’s about two hours. I thought we could stop in Portsmouth and get some lunch and go on from there. I thought you might like poking around the outlets in Kittery, Maine tomorrow morning. We don’t have to be back here until late afternoon.”

“Yes, please!” Vanessa squealed. “Oh, can we rent a convertible? It’s such a gorgeous day.”

“Sure, I had forgotten how lovely it is in New England in July. I know, we’ll get off in Seabrook and drive up Route 1 to Portsmouth. I bet we could find some fried clams somewhere. We don’t have to get to Hawthorne at any particular time.”

“Not really.” Vanessa cleared her throat and gave me a guilty look. “We have an appointment at two.”

I stopped in the middle of the terminal and demanded. “What did you do?”

Vanessa pushed me over to the side so we weren’t mowed down by the stream of people heading for baggage claim. “I told you, I am not going to let you confront your stepfather alone. That’s why I came with you, and that’s why I called the police department in Hawthorne and told them we’re coming.”

“He knows I’m coming?” I turned to walk back down the terminal ramp. “If Dale knows I’m coming, I might as well get back on the plane now.” Vanessa grabbed my arm. I shook her off. “I should have let Sebastian come with me.”

“Yeah, right. And bringing a man wouldn’t piss off your stepfather at all.” Vanessa rolled her eyes and hooked my bag over her arm. “He won’t know you’re coming. The lovely woman I spoke to was very understanding. You keep telling me that your stepfather has that town in his back pocket but that was not the impression I got from the police dispatcher. She made it sound like Dale is a bit of a joke these days.”

“Maybe,” I replied. I stepped over to an empty gate area and sat down. My head was spinning. “Frankly, I’m not sure he was ever as powerful as he made himself out to be. That psychologist you bullied me into seeing says I may have inflated his power in my mind over the years.”

Vanessa sat down beside me and put the bag down at my feet. “Are you sure you want to do this? I can call that lady at the police station and tell her we’re not coming. We could spend the day in Boston instead. I’m sure there’s lots of stuff to do here.”

“No,” I said. I grabbed my bag and stood up. “I need to see Dale’s face when I tell him what I’ve done.”

“That lawyer in Alders could do it for you.”

“He could,” I replied. “But according to that psychologist, I need to ‘get closure.’ I need to go back and see that old bedroom. See the farm. Tell Dale off to his face.”

“All right then, let’s go get a car. I want to try fried clams from a place right on the ocean.”

***

Anxiety made my fried clams repeat in my mouth as we passed Jonatt’s Dairy on the outskirts of Hawthorne. Mr. Jonatt’s herd was bunched up along the stone wall waiting to be led back across the street to the barns for the midday milking. The overpowering smell of manure made me wish we had not splurged on the convertible after all.

“I don’t know, Vanessa. Maybe this is a mistake.”

“You need to do this. Do you want to go over what you’re going to say again?” Vanessa’s experience and training had been invaluable over the last few weeks. She and the psychologist at the Women’s Crisis Center helped me focus my anger into words and actions. Once I said the words, “Dale raped me and my mother was complicit” a few hundred times, the actions began to lose their power over me.

“We’ve come this far,” Vanessa said. “You had that lawyer draw up all those papers for you. Come on; let’s see this thing through. Goodness, look how green it is here.”

“It’s all white in the winter. Cold and white.”

The library and the Congregational church looked the same when I drove through the center of town. I pulled up in front of the municipal complex, which housed the police and fire departments as well as the tax collector. A tall deputy with a military crew cut greeted us in the parking lot. “Larissa! Welcome home!”

I got out of the car and shook his hand. “It’s Lara Blaine now. Thank you Deputy—”

“Sanborn.”

“Dickie Sanborn?” I stepped back and tried to imagine the imposing man standing in front of me as a gawky kid with a bad haircut. “You look so different.”

“A decade and two tours in Afghanistan change a guy.” Deputy Sanborn smiled. I now saw the boy who sat behind me in trigonometry. “Hawthorne and Whiteneck share my time.”

“You’re the half officer of Hawthorne’s one and a half person police force?”

“Yup. Wow, you don’t look that different than you did in high school. Still as skinny as ever.”

“We just did a triathlon,” Vanessa interjected.

“I’m sorry,” I said pulling Vanessa into the conversation. “Dickie Sanborn, this is my friend Vanessa Klaitner.”

“You spoke to Evelyn on the phone,” Dickie said. “She said you requested an escort out to Dale’s place?” Deputy Sanborn and Vanessa spoke for a few minutes about the logistics of the afternoon while I looked at the center of town. It was shockingly the same as when I left. The Congregational church needed to be painted, the convenience store had changed names but still had a sign advertising homemade doughnuts, and the funeral home’s window boxes were clogged with weeds.

“Lara,” Vanessa said touching me on the shoulder. I jumped a foot. “Are you all right? You need to go inside and fill out some paperwork.”

I followed Vanessa and Deputy Sanborn inside. As soon as I walked through the door, a plump woman with an awful wig scurried out of a back room. “Larissa Scott. As I live and breathe. We never thought we’d see you again. Becky Patterson is going to be sick that she’s missing you!”

“Miss Patterson? Is she still at the library?”

“Yeah, but she and John, oh, you wouldn’t know John—they got married after you, well, left. They’re visiting Colton at UCLA.”

“Her son is in college?”

“He’s a history professor. Becky is so proud of him. But she talks about you as much as she does him. She was so glad to hear you were doing so well in North Carolina.”

“You all know I live in North Carolina?”

“Well,” Dickie said. “for years Old Dale’s been telling everyone down at the Rusty Bucket that you’re an ungrateful thief of a daughter.” I opened my mouth to protest. “Oh, no one listens to him anymore. But when he mentioned to Nate Jewitt that you changed your name to Lara Blaine, Nate googled you. Congratulations on the new job.”

“So much for hiding,” Vanessa whispered in my ear. “You can be googled.”

“What brings you back to Hawthorne after all this time?” Evelyn asked. “Did you come back to sort through your mother’s things? There can’t be much left after the fire.”

“Fire?” I asked. “What fire?”

Dickie and Evelyn exchanged meaningful looks. “I told you, Dick,” Evelyn said. “That Dale is full of shit.” She turned back to me. “There was a fire at the farm the same weekend you borrowed Dale’s truck. Your mother said she was doing some sewing and dropped a lit cigarette in a pile of old papers, but Dale claimed you tried to burn down the house.”

“I never—”

“Nobody believed you did,” Dickie said. “You would have burned the whole place down if you did it at all.”

“I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but your mother’s story never did make sense. Why would Dale store old papers in an upstairs bedroom? Everyone knew that roof leaked like a sieve.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. He kept all sorts of weird things up there.”

I felt faint. Upstairs bedroom? Mama’s note finally made sense. She said she fixed it so Dale wouldn’t know I took his money. I thought she meant she had lied to him about where the money had gone or replaced it.

It hit me. I’d been looking over my shoulder for eleven years while no one had been looking for me. Mama had been covering my tracks all this time.

After some more chitchat, I signed an official request for a police escort and Deputy Sanborn followed us out to the farm in his cruiser. This part of town had changed. Strip malls lined the road between the center of town and Dale’s farm.

“This doesn’t look right,” I said. I slowed down as we got to the beginning of Dale’s property. There weren’t any cows in the front fields. Judging from the amount of clover growing in the grass, there hadn’t been any cows in those fields for several years. I’d planned to leave the rental car at the gate in the stone wall and walk up the long driveway, but the gate was open. Buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace were growing though the rusted, broken pipes that made up the cattle stop in the ground. I turned in and slowly drove up the rutted, muddy driveway.

“Something’s definitely wrong,” I said. “When I lived here, Dale had fresh gravel spread on this driveway every year. And where are the cows? They should have been milked and in these front fields by now.”

“You said the land was in foreclosure,” Vanessa said. “Would you graze cattle on land you’re losing to the bank?”

“Bill Longley said that according to the State of New Hampshire, Dale supposedly still has 500 head of dairy cows. That’s obviously a made up number but I thought there’d still be a hundred or so out here.” As we got closer to the house, we finally saw a few cows in the nursery field, although none had calves or obvious mastitis. They looked old and dry.

Dickie pulled around us and stopped in the circular driveway. He got out and signaled for Vanessa and me to stay in the car. He walked up a worn path in the weedy lawn and peeked in the window along the front porch. He returned and said, “He’s passed out in the chair if you want to look around. I’ll stay here and keep an eye on him.”

The house looked different than in my memories—a simple farmhouse with a narrow porch, old twelve-paned windows, and blistered white paint. It was neither as prosperous or ghastly as I remembered. The patch of grass in front of the porch needed mowing and the lilac bush at the eastern corner was covered with blight. I got out and walked around to the back of the house. The addition was gone. Grass had slowly reclaimed the glass and rubble-filled foundation hole. Vanessa came up beside me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Is this where the fire was?”

“My bedroom was right here. It’s just a hole in the ground now.” I pointed to where tar paper and particle board covered the opening to where the addition had once stood. “Look, he never even fixed where the door was.”

“This happened eleven years ago?” Vanessa asked. “Isn’t that going to leak without siding?”

“Dale’s not big on patching leaks. The roof always leaked in this section. I’m surprised it burned at all.” Mama must have used gasoline or something.

I walked further on to the close barn and pulled on the heavy door. The rusted wheels resisted at first but rolled when I gave the door a shove. The leather thong attached to the bare bulb still hung from the ceiling. The doors at the far end stood open to the backfields. The barn was bright and completely empty. When I was a teenager there had been hundreds of cows in the barn. The cows were gone. The milking machines were gone. The bales of hay were gone. Even the rats were gone.

A thick layer of dust coated my hands and knees as I climbed up the old metal ladder to the hayloft. It didn’t appear that anyone had been up there since I left. Beneath the southern window, my yellow leatherette beanbag chair was still there with an old tattered copy of The Handmaid’s Tale still on the edge. A family of mice had moved in at some point and spread tiny foam pellets in a swath across the wide planked floor.

Vanessa poked her head through the hole in the floor. “You okay up there?”

“Yeah, it’s just as I left it.”

Vanessa stood on the ladder and looked around. “It’s like an old western up here.”

“More like a bad horror movie,” I replied. “Come on, let’s go over to the house. I want to find out what happened to the cows.”

“Did you have a horse?”

“There were horses, but I never rode them. They lived in the barn in the far pasture. There was an old white one that used to get drunk eating the rotten apples that dropped from the trees in the orchard over there.”

“No way,” Vanessa said. We walked around the side of the house laughing only to find Dale pointing a shotgun at Dickie Sanborn’s chest. Dale was wearing the same plaid flannel shirt he’d worn when he came to North Carolina over sweat pants with holes in the knees and old man slippers.

“Put the gun down, Dale,” Dickie said.

“Get off my land, Sanborn,” Dale shouted.

Dickie had his hand on his service revolver. “Put the gun down, Dale. I’m here on official police business.”

“You here to serve me more tax liens or more papers from the bank?”

“Not today,” Dickie said. He signaled for us to get back. “I’m here with Miss Blaine.”

Dale seemed to notice me for the first time. He pointed the gun at the ground but kept it in his hand. “You finally sign those papers?”

Dickie moved quickly to wrestle the shotgun from Dale’s hand. It seemed remarkably easy to do. He nodded for me to move forward. I took my time climbing the three flagstone steps. Up close I saw Dale’s eyes were bloodshot and his hands shook. I waved a large envelope in front of his face. “I do have papers for you.” A smirk spread across Dale’s sunken mouth making his gray stubble sparkle in the slanted afternoon sun.

Deputy Sanborn stepped to one side, staying close at hand.

“They’re not the papers you think they are, though. That very nice lawyer down in Alders helped me with them.” I took a step closer to Dale. He edged back toward the open door. “You really shouldn’t have been such an asshole to him. He was very motivated to help me.”

“I deserve that property in North Carolina!” Dale shouted.

“Don’t yell at me, old man!” I stepped to the side and looked through the door into the kitchen. Plates filled the sink and covered the counter. “Anyway, your little visit to Bill Longley got us both thinking about property and rights of survivorship.”

“She was my wife. I supported that bitch for fifteen years. I should get what’s coming to me.”

“Hell yeah, you deserve what’s coming to you!” Vanessa yelled from beside the car. The sunset was the same color as her hair.

Dickie Sanborn looked back at her. “Get in the car. I can’t keep an eye on Dale and you at the same time.”

“Sorry Deputy,” Vanessa said. “But this guy is a real ass.” She got in the car.

“Anyway,” I said as I took another step closer to Dale. His Brut cologne made my heart race. “Bill did a little search for any property that was in Mama’s name that I might have claim to.”

Dale spoke to Dickie when he said, “I was her husband! I should get anything that she had coming to her.”

“Shut up, I’m talking!” Dale backed up into the porch post. “Dickie, you’ll want to hear this. My lawyer finally got around to doing a search on this property, and low and behold, along with the second and third mortgages, you don’t even own it anymore. The bank does.”

“Damn banks. I’ll show them.” Dale wiped his face with his palm. He was sweating like a pig. “Once I get those properties in North Carolina, I can stop them from bleeding me dry.”

Dickie Sanborn turned to me with a grin. I could see the gears working in his head. “Larissa, why are you here?”

“I wanted to see his face when I told him I’ve bought and sold his precious farm out from under him.”

“To who?”

“A wind power operation.”

“You can’t do that!” Dale shouted. “I still own the house and the north forty acres.”

“Yes, you do. For some bizarre reason you never mortgaged that land.”

“It won’t perk,” Dickie said. “It isn’t worth anything.”

“Great, you can sit right here on this porch and watch the big blades go round and round over your personal swamp.”

“Tell him the other stuff,” Vanessa yelled from the car. “Tell him what you came to say.” I turned to look at Vanessa. Her cheeks were flushed with anger and she was heaving breaths through flared nostrils. Her passion both fueled and quenched mine.

I spun back to Dale, ready to blast him with my prepared statement, and saw a feeble old man imprisoned on his hardscrabble farm. “You know what, I had a whole speech prepared, but I don’t need to tell you to go to hell anymore. You’re already there.” I took a step back and looked out at the weed-ridden fields. “Look at this place. Look at you. You’re an old, used up pathetic wreck. Nobody loves you. Your money is gone. Your power is gone. You’re all alone.”

“Ooh, listen to the big shot! Does it make you feel good to yell at an old man?”

I thought about it for a second. A sense of calm resolve washed over me. “Yup. It does. I do feel better.” I turned around and patted Deputy Sanborn on the arm. “Thanks, Dickie. I appreciate you coming out here with us. We can go now. The lawyers can take care of the details of the sale. I’ll settle up the back taxes with the town once we close.”

I walked to the rental car and climbed in. I didn’t look back. I told Vanessa to drive to Portsmouth where we’d find a hotel. I didn’t want to spend another minute in Hawthorne.