Reapers (Breakers, Book 4)

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Mom?" Dee called from the kitchen.

  Ellie rolled her eyes and pitched the shovel off the porch with a clang. "Did you come over with Quinn?"

  Dee padded out to the living room, shaking her head. "I just got back from town. Quinn has me getting fitted for the most ridiculous dress you've ever seen."

  Ellie laughed until she cried.

  She figured Dee was just back to do laundry and grab a bath in the cover-heated tub, but to her surprise, her daughter was back for the harvest. Ellie hadn't intended to begin for another couple days, but she wasn't about to turn down free labor. Dee donned gloves and helped her rig the combine mount to the tractor. Ellie pinched in her ear plugs and settled a surgical mask over her mouth and drove into the fields.

  The engine roared across the sky. The header scythed into the golden stalks, spewing dust and pulverized fiber behind the trundling machine. Despite the late start, Ellie cleared the whole field that day, returning once so Dee could empty the grain from the shoe while Ellie went in for a drink of water and a short rest. After she got back from the second trip, she saw Dee had swept the barn, too. One of these days, the machines would go dark for the last time and they'd have to take the fields by hand, but for the moment, it was incredible that a day's labor from two people was sufficient to bring in enough grain to keep them in bread and pasta for the rest of the year.

  Not that the work was entirely done. Ellie had very particular ways of tubbing the grain to keep it free from rot and mice and she didn't like leaving all that straw out where it could light up like Las Vegas the first time lightning struck or a passing bum dumped his pipe embers in the field. Cleanup was hard, sweaty, limb-deadening work. Along with the storage process, it chewed up four more days.

  It was a good thing Dee had come home when she did. The night they finished, as Ellie sat on the back porch with a hot mug of instant coffee, she smelled frost in the air.

  "You know why I went to college?" Ellie said, tipping some rum into her drink. "So I'd never have to work this hard."

  Dee laughed. "Too bad about the aliens. What did you do, anyway? Before?"

  "You know that."

  "I know you worked for the government. Shady spy sh—stuff."

  "I wasn't a spy."

  "Whatever," Dee said. "What did you call it? 'The nerd CIA'?"

  Ellie had forgotten that. Funny what kids remembered. "My job was to travel to the most exotic lands in the world and make sense of the most boring numbers they had available."

  "If you were just poring over numbers, why'd you have to travel at all?"

  "We always wondered why the bosses never reached that same conclusion."

  "I wish I'd grown up in that world instead of this one."

  Ellie nodded, then stared at Dee. Ironically, it was moments like this when she missed Chip the most. He was the one who knew how to comfort people. For all her talent at plucking wisdom from inscrutable spreadsheets, or her new life running a post-industrial farm, situations like this tripped her on her face. She recognized the emotions that needed to be expressed, but somehow she could never search out the words that could make them manifest.

  "He saved your life, you know."

  Steam wafted from Dee's mug. "I know."

  "I wish we'd had a life together," Ellie tried. "But I'm glad you got to know him for the years you did."

  "Me too." Dee pulled her blanket so high around her shoulders Ellie could barely see her hair sticking out the top.

  That morning, she woke to frost.

  When Dee got up, she accepted the eggs Ellie had brought in from the coop an hour before, then let Ellie know she was going back to Quinn's. Ellie didn't complain. To her surprise, it had turned out she enjoyed parenting, but she still appreciated time to herself.

  She watched Dee pack, waved as the girl walked down the trail around the lake, then proceeded to do nothing the rest of the day. The following afternoon, she was still doing nothing—in the specific form of sitting on the back porch reading Philip K. Dick and thinking about working up the motivation to throw a bobber into the water—when a voice called from out front.

  "Ellie?" Quinn called. "Mrs. Colson?"

  She wiggled into her sandals and headed around the house. "How's your harvest?"

  Quinn started, windmilling his arms to keep from toppling off the porch. "It's all right. Thanks to you."

  "It was nothing." Crickets chirped from the mown fields. "Dee need some clean socks?"

  He worked his mouth, then nodded. "Yeah, come to think of it."

  Ellie nodded. "You better not have come here to tell me I'm a grandma."

  "It's not that bad," Quinn laughed nervously. "I hope."

  "Well?"

  "This morning, I was out for a walk. I like to take one as soon as I get up. Helps me wake up. And when I was out in the woods, I found Ringer. My dog." His brown face paled. "He was stabbed."

  Ellie glanced across the shimmering lake. "Have you told your dad?"

  "I didn't want to scare him."

  "Maybe he ought to be scared." She sighed through her teeth. "Better let me take a look."

  She went inside for her pistol and proper shoes and a jacket and binoculars and latex gloves. She walked beside Quinn in silence. She could tell the quiet made him uncomfortable, but at the moment, she didn't care. She had thinking to do.

  On the trail, the leaves fell in earnest, yellow and red pages spinning to the forest floor. Ellie expected they had at least a couple clear weeks ahead of them, but the first snows could come at any time.

  The walk to the house took a full hour. Quinn veered deeper into the woods, keeping a thick screen of trees between them and his father's home. At a rocky upthrust northeast of the property, he stopped to glance at the stands of maples and pines and the boulders mapped with red and gray-green lichen. He beckoned her to a small fold in the land.

  A dog lay at the bottom. Its fur was black and white and blue-gray and the hair on its side was matted with blood.

  "Did you move him?" Ellie said.

  "I found him right here. I touched him and petted him. Did I mess things up?"

  "It's fine." She climbed down the embankment, one arm out for balance, and knelt beside the body. Its eyes were open and blank. She tugged on her latex gloves and brushed back its fur. There was a lot of blood and it took her a minute to find the first wound, a narrow, inch-long puncture between its ribs. Two more were spaced higher up its brisket. She squatted on her heels and stared into the trees. "When was the last time you saw him?"

  "Last night," Quinn said thickly. "I been setting them out every night since you saw the stranger."

  "Does your dad have any enemies, Quinn?"

  "Enemies?"

  "You've been here four years. Has he made anyone mad?"

  The boy wrinkled his brow, blinking at the moisture in his eyes. "He and Bill Noesi in Lake Placid have never got along. Not since Dad bought that cow from him that died the next month. But I don't think they've seen each other since last year."

  Ellie edged around the dog and brushed a wide brown maple leaf from a depression in the soil. "Anyone else?"

  "He and Mr. Franklin ain't big fans of each other, but I wouldn't say they're mortal foes." He shook his head. "Who would kill a dog?"

  "What about you? Pissed anyone off?"

  "Me?" Quinn looked surprised to the point of affront, then his eyebrows banged together. "Sam Chase. He always had a thing for Dee."

  "Who just announced her intention to get married." Ellie placed her foot beside the print next to the dog. Her shoe was a little shorter. "Let me see your foot."

  He gave her a puzzled look, lining his shoe up next to the print. It was identical in size. His face cracked. "I'm real sorry. I went and mucked up your scene, didn't I?"

  She shook her head. "It wasn't cold enough to frost last night, but the ground was moist. It's dried since. Print's shrunk. What size do you wear?"

  "Nine? Nine and a half."

  She petted
the dog's thick fur, moving her hand to its back legs and giving a little tug. They were so stiff the whole body moved with them. "Was he this stiff when you found him?"

  "Yeah. I knew the second I touched him."

  "Okay." She rose, still sore from gathering up the last of the wheat straw the day before. "Well, let's find some shovels."

  They trudged across George's fields. The wheat stood tall under the brittle sunlight. Unharvested. She was about to comment when she saw the potent green combine parked beside the barn.

  "Is that new?"

  "Dad picked it up in town," Quinn said.

  "How'd he swing that?"

  "Think he promised part of the crop."

  "For a new combine? Let me know that guy's name. Maybe he'll trade me a jet for the peanuts in my cellar."

  "Dad's gonna owe for a lot more than one year. But he didn't have much choice."

  Quinn creaked open the tool shed and grabbed shovels and two pairs of leather gloves. They returned to the dog and buried him in the woods, sweating in the weak autumn sun. After, Quinn crouched and patted the coffee-colored soil.

  "Should have played more fetch with you, Ringer, but you never wanted to quit and after a while I got mad. But I guess that was just your way of saying you wanted to spend time with me. I'm—"

  He sobbed, tears dripping to the grave. Ellie bent down and put a hand on his shoulder.

  They walked back to the house. Ellie tapped the rivets on the back of her jeans. "Maybe you should keep the dogs in at night. I'll ask around town. Don't tell your dad yet."

  "Why not?"

  "Why did you come to me and not him?"

  Quinn tipped his head to the side, examining that question for the first time. Ellie waved and walked along the cool shore toward the Chases, who lived just down the lake. They'd moved in two years ago, much to Ellie's resentment. For the most part, the Lower Saranac was unpopulated, but a few dozen people trickled into Lake Placid each year. Sooner or later, they'd start spilling west. And in the meantime, she was just getting older. Another ten or fifteen years, and she'd start slowing down just as she most need to be on her guard.

  The Chases had moved into a vacation home built to look like a log cabin. The moss over the front stoop might even have been real. A manual saw rasped from the back, but in the interest of politeness, she knocked on the front door. When there was no answer, she walked to the back yard. A shirtless twenty-year-old man bent over a post, sawing through one end.

  "Sam?" she said. "I'm Ellie Colson. Dee's mom."

  Sweat trickled down his thick shoulders. "I know who you are."

  "Last night, Quinn Tolbert thought he saw someone outside his place. Where were you?"

  "In bed. The sun knows best. No sense being up when you can't see what you're doing."

  "What about last Wednesday night?"

  "Ask my pillow."

  She walked halfway around the sawhorse. "What size shoe do you wear, Sam?"

  "Whatever fits."

  "Have you ever seen George Tolbert's dogs around?"

  He set down the saw and turned to face her, not bothering to hide the annoyance in his brown eyes. "Sure. Mutts are always diggin' around our yard. Somebody ought to paste their fuzzy asses with some rock salt."

  "Curious," she said. "Last night, someone stabbed Ringer. Australian shepherd. That wasn't you, was it, Sam?"

  He snorted and brushed at the sawdust clinging to the damp hairs on his forearm. "What kind of man stabs a dog?"

  "A man who's just heard that the woman he wants is engaged to someone else."

  "You think I'm hot for Dee?" He laughed and bent back to his saw. "Not hardly, ma'am. Her tits aren't big enough."

  A cold tingle flowed through Ellie's hands. Her pistol was in her waistband and she could feel its steel weight against her back. "If I see you around their place, you'll wake up in a box."

  His saw rasped. She walked away before her temper got the best of her. She followed the dirt lane up to Forest Home Road and walked so briskly to the dead town of Saranac Lake that she had to strip off her jacket from the sweat. There, she swerved off the highway to grab a bike from the makeshift depository the locals had set up in the parking lot of the Blue Moon, then pedaled to Lake Placid. The trip smelled of cold mountain air and leaves that have fallen but have yet to decay.

  Confusingly, the town of Lake Placid was situated on the south shores of several interconnected lakes, one of which shared the same name as the town. She biked to the general store Millie Perkins had set up inside the old resort on Mirror Lake, meaning to ask after Bill Noesi. Millie tucked her hands in her apron, quirked her mouth, and told her Noesi lived in the house at McLenathan Bay a couple miles north.

  After two miles of a whole lot of nothing, she reached a Cape Cod cottage at the wrong address, backtracked to another wrong address, this one too far the other way, then crept back toward the Cape Cod, scowling into the trees. A cow lowed to the north. She stopped the bike and stared. Bill Noesi had dragged brush and brambles across the turnoff to his house.

  "Mr. Noesi?" she called. "Bill?"

  She tried again and got no answer. She found a branch and knotted the arm of her jacket around its tip. As she walked through the woods to the house, she held the branch over her head, the lining of her jacket bright white. She wasn't certain how this custom had sprung up, but generally speaking, the locals understood the person thus approaching their house was a fellow lake-dweller who didn't need to be shot.

  Generally speaking.

  She deliberately crunched through the leaves on the trail to his front door. He had painted his house a dull green to match the trees. Deer antlers littered the yard. As she climbed up the front steps, a bearded man materialized from the side of the house.

  With the branch in her right hand, Ellie went for her gun with her left. "Mr. Noesi?"

  "Who asks?" the man rumbled.

  She lowered the branch and took her hand from the pistol. "My name's Ellie Colson. I live on the Lower Saranac. Have you seen or spoken to George Tolbert recently?"

  The man didn't hesitate. "That animal was perfectly healthy when I sold it to him. It picked up something on his farm or he doesn't know how to treat a beast."

  "So you remember him," she said dryly.

  "We had words. And then a heck of a lot more words. If you're looking to buy, you come see them for yourself. Talk to anyone in town. Then decide for yourself whether those winds of doubt are just a bunch of hot air."

  "Were any of those words recent?"

  Noesi shook his shaggy head. "Haven't seen him since last Christmas. I was in town to find a present for a lady friend. George seized the opportunity to slander me."

  "Last night, someone killed one of his dogs."

  Anger flared in the man's deep-set eyes. "I'm a friend of everything on four legs. You accuse me of killing a dog again and we'll see how I feel about those on two."

  "I'm not accusing anyone," she said levelly. "I'm narrowing things down. Thank you for your time, Mr. Noesi."

  He watched her go. When she glanced back down the path, he was gone.

  She dropped the bike off at the Blue Moon and walked back to the Tolberts'. Shrieks carried over the lake. She broke into a run, then saw Quinn leap off the dock and cannonball into the frigid water. Dee laughed and high-stepped out of the water, hugging herself, water dripping from her bikini. Ellie slowed to a walk and waved. Quinn got a funny little smile and wrapped a towel around his waist. He said something to Dee and then approached Ellie by himself.

  "It wasn't Bill Noesi," she told him. "Jury's out on Sam Chase."

  "I didn't want to tell you this," Quinn said, "but this summer when we were swimming, I went inside for a drink and when I came back out, he was in the water with her." He lowered his voice further. "He propositioned her."

  "Maybe he's just a fan of the free market. I'm going to spend the night out here, Quinn. Don't get trigger happy."

  "You sure you trust me?" he grinned. "I'm
not sure the law would arrest a man for shooting his mother-in-law."

  She snorted and went home to grab a nap. At twilight, she walked to the woods beyond the Tolberts' home with her camping gear and set up for the night. She kept watch until the early morning, then returned home to sleep. Not long after, an engine grumbled through the open window. She flopped over and went back to sleep.

  A rolling crackle woke her a few hours later. She lay in bed, thick-headed, but then it repeated twice more. From dead north across the lake. She tore out of bed and sprinted up the trail to the Tolberts'.

  5

  Lucy waited astride her bike in the shadow of the towers, oblivious to the cold bay wind channeling down the avenue, and tasted the air. This wasn't some Folgers shit she was smelling. These were fresh beans.

  Down the block, a man emerged onto a sidewalk overhung with scaffolding and headed across the intersection. Caught in the full beam of the fall sunlight, a brushed steel thermos winked under his arm.

  She flung aside her bike with a metal rattle, grabbed her umbrella, and strolled to the doorway the man had vacated. Through the dim windows, she took in something she hadn't seen since the prior age: a coffee shop.

  She entered, jangling the bell mounted on the door. A row of candles burned behind the counter and the rich, sickly smell of tallow mingled beneath the scorched caramel smell of the beans. The man behind the counter looked less like a barista and more like the bartender at an Old West saloon: prolific sideburns, heavy jaw, a mustache whose handlebars were as sturdy as the ones on her bike. Two young men turned from their booth to give her the eye. By the window, a conversation between two middle-aged men and an older woman continued uninterrupted.

  The saloon-looking dude scanned her up and down. "All you can drink for ten minutes in the back room."

  "That's not a very profitable way to run a business." Lucy slid onto a round padded stool. "What do you charge people you don't want to stick your wick in?"

  "Couldn't say." He kept a straight face as he lifted a carafe and poured a steaming mug and slid it over the counter. "First one's free. Cream or sugar is extra. I accept gold, silver, and anything else that tickles my fancy."