Scarlet shook her head. “I just assumed. It was about fifteen minutes before I looked out and realized she still hadn’t come in. Then I—I thought I’d better look, and I saw the corn…”
She fell silent. Zoe had seen the way the corn looked from the outside, a broken horizon, jagged shapes where there should have been a smooth line. A broken pattern. Obvious enough to any farmer who knew the state of their crop.
“What about you, Danny?” Shelley pressed gently, directing a quiet voice toward the patriarch. He stirred vaguely, then shook his head, a fast and sharp gesture at odds with his dreamlike state.
Zoe shifted restlessly. There were no answers here. A house full of people who hadn’t even noticed a thing. Maybe arrogance wasn’t really arrogance when you were right about how good you were.
“Where was Ivy before she came home?” Shelley asked. “Does she work outside of the farm?”
“No, we all help out here,” Marlene said. Her hands, folded on her lap, were creased and darkened from long hours of manual work in the sun, Zoe noted. “She was out at a doctor’s appointment, I think.”
“Are you aware of your daughter knowing someone named Michelle Young?” Shelley asked, looking across a row of blank faces for confirmation. “Lorna Troye? No?”
“Do you have any outside help?” Zoe asked, hitting on an idea. “Farmhands, or the like?”
Marlene shook her head, but to Zoe’s surprise, it was Danny who answered. “Not since last harvest season. Couldn’t afford them. Last year’s yield was low. Ivy helped us this year. Took on a lot more work. She was a good gir—” His voice broke, splintering away abruptly into nothingness, and his wife grabbed hold of his knee and squeezed it.
Zoe knew private grief when she saw it. It was a thing that had always been inaccessible to her, a closed-off garden, an island surrounded by deep waters. She couldn’t understand it, had never been through it, had no points of reference to reach them with. There was nothing she could do here.
Shelley seemed to feel the same way, or at least to feel that the time for questions was over. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been very helpful. I’m going to leave my card on the table here—I want you to get in touch with me if you think of anything, absolutely anything, that might help. No matter how small.”
They left behind a broken shell of a family, with an empty space that would never be filled again. Zoe stalked back to the car in silence, then sat inside with a sigh of frustration.
“What now?” Shelley asked. “We don’t exactly have many leads.”
“We wait for the sheriff’s boys to report back on the tracks I sent them following,” Zoe said. She squinted up at the sky, by now already darkening. “And we go and find a room for the night.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Zoe stood just outside the motel’s office, looking up at the sky. It was clear enough, even here, that she could see the stars, glittering against pure darkness. It had been a long time since she lived anywhere but a major city. Being in this open space, with only the two stories of the motel blocking out the view behind her, felt strange. Almost surreal.
Maybe that wasn’t it at all, because she had taken on plenty of cases that were in out-of-the-way corners of the country. Some of them had been quick jobs that took barely any time to solve, and others required more in-depth concentration, more nights spent in motels like this one. No, maybe it was the fact that she was so close to the place where she had grown up. Her formative years had been under this sky, and even though it might theoretically have been the same sky that one could see from anywhere in the world, there was something about it that just kept on sending a shiver down her spine.
“Come on,” Shelley said, leaving the motel office with a weary look. Her shoulders were slumped, echoing Zoe’s own posture: the exhaustion of a long day after a very short night, coupled with utter frustration at the lack of leads they had.
The sheriff had called them as they drove over to the motel they’d found online, letting them know that his deputies had followed the footprints back to a local by-road, as she had suspected. But there was no mark on the soil there to suggest a parked car, and thus no tire tracks they could use to get an imprint. He had been clever. Walked down the road from further away, perhaps, or left the car running on the tarmac so as to not leave any sign.
Not clever enough to avoid leaving footprints, though. Zoe took some small comfort in that.
They dragged their overnight bags from the trunk of the car and into their motel rooms, going through the usual ritual of testing the fittings, bouncing a hand on the bed to assess the quality of the mattress, pulling a face at the scratchiness of the sheets. Zoe poked her head into the bathroom and noted a couple of missing tiles revealing bare walls. It reminded her in a funny way of her uncle, a man she hadn’t seen in over fifteen years, and the broken tile down near the toilet in his house where he had accidentally kicked it once while drunk.
Zoe passed a hand over her eyes. There were too many ghosts in this town. The biggest of them all was the elephant in the room, the one she dared not turn and address. If she did, she would have to face a whole can of memories opened up like worms, and there wasn’t room for that in a murder investigation.
Shelley opened her door without knocking and sat down on the edge of Zoe’s bed, her nails scrabbling against wood as she dug out a few takeout menus from the drawer beside it. “We should get some dinner,” she said. “Do you want to go out, or get something delivered?”
The thought of going out to a diner and running into someone she used to know made Zoe shudder. “Delivery would be best,” she said, though truth be told, she was barely even hungry.
She sat down on the other side of the bed and smoothed her hand across the threadbare covers. They bore a rustic pattern, quite old-fashioned, but not out of place here in this rural settlement. Not unlike, actually, the sheets her mother had kept for the spare room in case of guests—
Ah. And there it was.
The spare room. Zoe had hated it mercilessly. When it was prim and undisturbed, her mother would punish her liberally, making her kneel and pray, forcing her to stop seeing the numbers—or, in fact, to stop talking about them, because she had only recently learned any modicum of control. Then when guests came they had to be on their best behavior, which was at least a relief but also a minefield; and when the guests were gone, Zoe knew, whatever mindless infractions she had committed would be meted out on her over and over again until her mother was satisfied.
Not that she was ever satisfied.
“What do you think, Zoe?”
Zoe looked up and saw that Shelley was watching her with an eyebrow raised, a slight aura of impatience. “Sorry, what?”
“You weren’t listening? I just read out all of the options.” Shelley sighed. “What’s going on with you today? Is it being this close to home?”
Zoe had already made her decision. It had just taken her this long to accept that. She stood, getting her coat from the back of the chair where she had draped it, and dropped her cell phone into the pocket. “I’m going out,” she said. “Have dinner without me. I’ll eat while I’m out.”