Gabe knew this place well since he’d had summer jobs here when Grant’s father owned it. He’d swept up sawdust after everyone from scalers to debarkers to the guys who ran the big frame saw. He was familiar with the huge lumberyard with tall piles of stockpiled timber and stacked pallets of wood out back waiting to be processed after the big trucks hauled their loads in. Ann’s brothers worked here now, three men he was determined more than ever lately would never be his brothers-in-law.
With a screech, screech, screech warning signal, a huge logging forklift started backing up in the parking lot. Gabe gave it a wide berth as he headed into the mill. He thought of Tess mentioning the corn harvester again. She might be right that it was a bad idea for both of them to go charging into Aaron Kurtz’s place to look at the machine. Besides, the guy was a deacon at the community church and had been a solid family man for years. Gabe couldn’t fathom Aaron not reporting seeing something strange in a cornfield, let alone snatching kids.
But then, since more obvious suspects like Dane Thompson, even Sam Jeffers and that taxidermist loner, John Hillman, hadn’t panned out before, maybe it was also time to start looking at long shots, including Kurtz and even Mayor Owens. Was Reese really a nervous wreck each time a kidnap case was investigated by local and state law officers just because of bad PR for the town?
“Yo, Gabe!” Ann’s brother Jonas shouted from his elevated position above the cutting line that fed logs into the debarker. He wore industrial earplugs that looked like earmuffs. A dust mask partly covered his face, but his voice was so loud the mask hardly muted it. “What’s happ’nin’, man?” Jonas shouted over the earsplitting din of the machine.
Gabe just waved and headed up the metal steps toward Grant’s elevated office from which he could keep an eye on the entire floor of conveyor belts and moving parts.
Grant was sitting on his desk, feet in his chair, working on a laptop balanced on his knees, probably so he could look farther down through his office’s glass windows. How things had changed since Grant’s dad used to oversee things with a pencil stuck behind his ear and a scratch pad in his shirt pocket.
Despite his dad’s wishes he stay home and learn the business after college, Grant had gone out to northern California and Oregon, hung out with loggers, taken a job operating a big debarker in the field, not a mill. When Grant took over the business, his father had finally admitted a couple of years of roughing it was the right thing to do. It allowed Grant to mingle easily with everyone from environmentally minded CEOs to senators in D.C. to brush cat loggers in these hills.
Grant looked up as Gabe closed the office door to mute the noise. “Got something I want you to see—to ID,” he told Grant, who put the laptop down and got up to shake his hand.
“Good to see you too,” Grant said, his tone part teasing, part critical. “But I know you’ve been nose to the grindstone over this latest abduction. Anything I can do to help?”
“Help’s exactly what I need,” Gabe said.
In junior high and high school, they’d been so close they’d either finished each other’s sentences or just answered without the other’s question being asked. Though they were both tall, Grant was lanky and blond with blue eyes—the marauding Viking look—whereas Gabe was broader and dark-haired, but they used to feel like twins anyway.
“Could this have been made or sold here at the mill?” Gabe asked, dragging the scarecrow out of the sacks. “This center piece of wood was sold here.”
“Yeah, for sure, that’s our sticker,” Grant said, looking through the plastic. “But it’s obviously old. Dad used to sell those scarecrows years ago, but we don’t carry anything like that now. We do, though, have bins by the door in the spring and winter of those squared-off stakes. People use them for staking up tomatoes, peppers, garden crops like that. In the winter, they string them together with wire to make snow fences. But the intact scarecrow for sale—not since about the time I was in college.
“But, you know,” Grant went on, cocking his head, “this outfit—I have seen that too. I’m thinking my mom used to sew these for decorative scarecrows, other homemade figures with wooden bodies too, like Christmas angels that people could put in their yards, wooden Easter bunnies—her mad money back then, I guess. Some friends from church helped her make the outfits.”
“Like who? Do you remember?”
“Ah, Marva Green, I think. Wanda Kurtz, for sure. Those two among all her friends were always tight. They used to kid about their names rhyming, and both were close to Mom. They did almost all the food at Dad’s and Mom’s funerals.”
“Wanda—Aaron Kurtz’s wife.”
“Yeah, but we’re talking at least twenty years ago. Sorry I can’t help you more. So, what’s the deal with the scarecrow?”
“Tell you later. You’ve been a big help.”
“Don’t tell me the idiots cooking up meth or getting high on bath salts are bootlegging them in old scarecrows.”
“All right, I won’t tell you that. Thanks, bud. See you,” he said, clapping Grant on the shoulder, and made for the door, already stuffing Mr. Mean back into the paper sacks, top and bottom.
“If it’s that important you have to take off,” Grant called after him, “you owe me a beer somewhere!”
Gabe turned back as he opened the door, and the noise from the mill floor hit him again. It was louder than the rotor wash of a helicopter. “I may owe you more than that.”
As he went down the stairs, he saw Ann’s two other brothers staring at him from the catwalk across the big-toothed circular saw as it ripped into a huge log.
* * *
Tess drove directly from the Here Ye compound toward Aaron Kurtz’s farm. She did not see or hear the big reaper in the surrounding fields, though Aaron owned or leased land far and wide, so he might be elsewhere. Perhaps Ann’s pointed suggestion that Tess should sell her land to Aaron wasn’t such a bad idea.
Tess was hoping the big-time farmer had gone home for a late lunch or early dinner. She passed fields he’d harvested, the cornstalks slashed low to the ground, leaving only stubble. As much as she didn’t want to hear or see the big machine near her house, she wished those fields could be cut soon so she could see far out from her windows again, even if that brought Dane Thompson’s pet cemetery into view. The thought of those huge projecting teeth that funneled the rows of corn into the belly of the beast, shooting cobs out into an open truck bed and chaff out the other way, really bothered her. Was she remembering that correctly? Had she somehow memory-merged the reaper’s metal teeth that protruded out the front with Mr. Mean’s toothy grin? Memory merge—it was a term she’d seen skimming through one of the books Miss Etta had left with her.
She drove past the Kurtz driveway, turned around at the next intersection and drove back. Their place had always been so well kept and beautiful. The old white farmhouse sported neat black trim. The big red barn and other back buildings looked freshly painted, and tall twin silos stood like guards over it all. The yard displayed brick-lined flower beds and a spacious stretch of grass before the endless cornfields began. The wide-set property lines were edged by white fences.
Driving slowly, she turned in the paved drive, lined with corn shocks and pumpkins. She did not want to go out to one of those back buildings to see the reaper since they stood so close to the corn. But this had to be done. If Gabe was with her, it would look too official, too fishy. And besides, by asking Aaron if he wanted to buy her land, maybe she could suggest he cut the cornfields surrounding her house soon.
Again, as each time she drove past a farmhouse, even those abandoned and vandalized, lived in by poor people, or palatial like this, she asked herself if she recalled anything about it. The yard, the front of the house, the view—anything. But here, even with all those back buildings, she sensed nothing.