The car’s engine rattled with every bounce, but it endured. Clare thought it might actually take them all the way to Beth’s and back as long as they could feed it enough fuel.
A dark shape appeared on the side of the road. Clare craned her neck to see it. Dorran’s expression darkened, and he took some of the power off the accelerator. “Ah. We’re passing it, after all.”
“Passing it?”
“My family’s caravan. This is the road we take to reach the Gould estate.”
“Oh.” Clare had been so wrapped up in her worries about Marnie’s property that she hadn’t even considered the significance it might have for Dorran. She pressed a hand over her mouth.
“I had wondered how far they might have gotten before—well. This is the answer.”
“Did you want to stop?”
“No. There is nothing for me here.”
The car slowed to a crawl as they neared the procession. At the front were six luxury cars. They were older models but maintained well. Even after the snow and rain, their black paint still seemed to glimmer. Behind it were two private busses and horse floats. The staff’s transport. The cars all had open doors. Madeline Morthorne had told Clare about the change. She’d said the air burned. They must have opened the doors to try to escape it. Except, there had been no escape for any of them. A streak of blood ran across one of the bus windows. A child’s boot lay on the ground outside the second of the family’s cars.
His nieces and nephews. He spent years trying to protect them. And now… they’re just gone.
“Dorran—”
“I am fine.” His voice was a monotone. A flash of emotion passed over his eyes, bright and desperate. Then he blinked, and it was gone again. “It is in the past now. Regret is not beneficial.”
“I won’t push.” Clare watched him closely. “But… you know you can talk to me. If it would help.”
He pressed on the accelerator, and the engine rattled threateningly. But as the abandoned procession faded into the distance, he slowly relaxed. The hardness vanished from around his eyes as he gave her a thin smile. “Thank you.”
They followed the slowly curving road. Clare knew what to expect up ahead: the wood fence posts and their strings of barbed wire. Then the disused field that bordered Marnie’s property. The hill with two straggly birch trees. The rock formations. The smooth driveway leading towards the farmstead.
Marnie had once worked the area with her husband. They’d grown stone fruit and raised goats. They had been two of the most hardworking people Clare had ever known. When her husband passed away a decade before, some of the neighbours wondered whether Marnie might sell the farm and move into town for a quieter life, since she was in her late forties and on the plumper side. A lot of people wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d taken the opportunity to retire.
Clare had asked Beth about it, and Beth had laughed. “If there are two things Marnie hates, it’s raisins in her cakes and doing nothing. She’ll keep the farm.”
And she had. She’d restricted what she’d done on it; their flock of sixty goats was gradually whittled down to her four favourites. The fields no longer carried huge stretches of produce. Instead, she’d built up the area around her house, installing a chicken coop and a garden patch. She must have had money saved up, because she never sold any of her land and lived on what her garden grew.
Clare loved her aunt. When Marnie gossiped, it was only about positive, uplifting news. The barn cats that were supposed to keep the farm free from mice were moved indoors and turned into lazy lap cats one by one. Clare sometimes thought Marnie had the biggest heart out of anyone she knew.
As the farm came into view, Clare squeezed her hands in her lap. It was physically painful to look at the buildings, knowing what had most likely happened to their occupant.
“It’s the shed up ahead, closest to the house,” Clare said. A vegetable garden separated the two buildings. The chicken coop’s door hung open, like it always had during the day, to allow the birds to roam through the grass and pick bugs. They would have been eaten. As would the cats and the goats. As the car crept along the gravel driveway towards the shed, Clare scanned the fields for any kind of life and found none.
“Would you like to stay in the car?” Dorran asked.
She didn’t think she could speak coherently, so she shook her head instead. He turned the engine off but left the key in the ignition as he opened the door. They stood beside the car for a moment, watching the area and waiting.
The house was uncharacteristically calm and neglected. Clare had never seen it without lights glowing through its curtains and the smell of stews or the sound of music coming from it. Trying to separate her mind from her memories, she searched for any shadowed areas that could be hiding hollows.
The barns were dark, but their doors were closed and bolted. There were trees scattered about the yard, but none dense enough to create coverage.
Then she looked at the ground. The field, saturated, had turned to mud. She scanned it but couldn’t see any disturbance caused by humans or animals. If hollows were in the area, they hadn’t visited the farm recently.
“Okay,” she whispered.
Dorran opened the car’s back door. He gave Clare the crowbar and took the hatchet for himself. After being inside the car for so long, Clare felt like she might suffocate if she tried to constrict herself any further, and she shook her head when Dorran offered her a mask. They left the car doors open as they stepped towards the barn.
Thirty seconds. Grab the fuel and get out.
The barn’s large entrance was designed to allow tractors in and out. A simple latch door had been set into its corner. Marnie, being more trusting than the world probably deserved, never locked it. Clare undid the bolt, nudged the door inwards, then stopped to let her eyes adjust.
The space was nearly empty since the larger farm had been closed. Marnie still kept her hobby garden equipment arranged neatly on the tables and shelves closest to the door, though. Shovels and spades, a hoe, gloves, endless varieties of fertiliser, and chicken feed were arranged in neat order.
Dorran stopped beside a basket. He reached towards it, hesitated, then pulled his hand back. Clare approached and saw he was looking at packets of seeds.
“I wasn’t sure if it would be… disrespectful.” He cleared his throat. “She has some varieties our own garden doesn’t. But if you would prefer to leave her property the way it is—”
“No, it’s okay. Let’s… let’s take them. It will be like carrying a little part of her back to Winterbourne.”
He gently scooped up the packets. Clare felt a swell of affection for him. His life had been a ghastly example of what family should be, but that didn’t stop him from respecting—even caring for—Clare’s own. He was kind, and a lifetime in a madhouse hadn’t been enough to change that.
Clare found the red containers of fuel stacked on wooden shelves, half hidden behind cartons of feed for the goats. Marnie had eight of them. She usually stocked up in bulk and waited until they were almost empty before driving to the nearest service station and filling them again. Clare lifted the jugs, testing their weight. Five were empty, but three were still full of sloshing liquid. Enough to get them to Beth’s and home.