The Darkest Time of Night

by Jeremy Finley

  A chill ran through me so severely that I tightened the scarf around my neck. “What do you expect me to do?”

  “Come with me. Hear Steven out. That’s all. You can walk away again if you want. It’s just me and Steven this time, none of the others even know we’re here.”

  “All this time, you’ve known where Steven has been? And you say he’s here?”

  “No. I hadn’t spoken to him until he contacted me a few days ago. We only met here yesterday. I’ll let him tell you where he’s been; that’s for him to say. I’m the only one who knows how to even contact him now. That was his decision when he decided to run.”

  “Run?”

  “He can explain.” Barbara looked back at the shop.

  “He won’t have to. I’m not going with you. I don’t want anything to do with you or the others. Not after what happened. And I won’t put my family through the scrutiny that Doug would require for this information.”

  “Doug isn’t a part of this.”

  “I don’t know that. For all I know, you could take me to him again. I’m sorry, but no. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

  “Steven thought you might feel that way.” Barbara reached into her pocket. She brought out an envelope and offered it.

  “What is that?”

  “The names of two people Steven said for you to research. He said to look up their names at the local library, and you might change your mind.”

  I cautiously reached out and took the envelope. “I don’t understand.”

  “Steven says you will, if you look into them. I’ll give you all day tomorrow to inquire if you choose. Tomorrow night, if you want to see Steven, I’ll wait for you at Chevron gas around the corner. I’ll be there at nine o’clock. I’ll wait thirty minutes. If you come, I’ll take you to Steven. If you don’t, then I’ll take that as your decision. I won’t fault you either way. I felt horrible about what happened, and I told Steven that you deserved better. That’s why he came. That’s why I’m here.”

  She buried her hands in her pockets. “It’s colder here than I would have thought,” she said, walking back once more into the pine trees.

  * * *

  I’d immediately gotten online after we’d closed the shop and Roxy and Stella had gone home, checking for anything about the two names typed on a single piece of white paper, along with corresponding dates. The fact that it wasn’t written in Steven’s all-caps handwriting seemed dubious, for anyone could have typed the names. But I looked anyway, and could find nothing about a Josh Stone, August 5, 1945, or an Amelia Shrank, August 2, 1934.

  Amelia Shrank. I somehow knew the name. But like the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question that remained on the tip of your tongue and would not come until the other side of the card was read aloud, the explanation of how I recognized a name from the early 1930s would not surface.

  I was at the downtown library as soon as it opened the next morning, and made my way to the microfilm room. It was as visually impressive as the rest of the library, with its light fixtures and paint colors straight out of Restoration Hardware, but it did not have the lure of the popular fiction section or the civil-rights collection. The emptiness of the room was disquieting; I feared any moment there would be some kind of whispered ambush from Doug in full entitled-Researcher mode, working alongside Barbara to get me alone to try and browbeat me into submission.

  I cautiously sought out microfilm, peering down every aisle. I’d hoped the Nashville Banner published as far back as I needed to go. Before The Tennessean became the only newspaper in town, the Banner was its worthy competitor. Once I understood the catalog system, I found the archives of the paper for the entire year of 1934 and started sliding through the months.

  The ancient technology still hummed as I remembered, but I quickly grew frustrated with having to press the button to advance. I chastised myself, thinking of how I urged the grandkids to develop patience as they whined about a video taking too long to load on YouTube.

  At last came August 2, and I immediately started reading the obituaries. It was the only way to search by name. When I finished the last obituary, and found no Amelia Shrank.

  Was this just another way for Doug to try and wear me down? Was he watching from somewhere, maybe an adjoining room, to see how desperate I had become? Was he waiting, hoping I would break down in tears, when he would reveal himself, ready once again to make a deal? And what did he mean, that this wasn’t only about William?

  Barbara promised to take me to Steven, but if it were truly him, what would he want in return?

  I thought of what Deanna, Tom’s press secretary, had said: Is there anything controversial about your family that we don’t know about?

  Holding information for ransom wasn’t the way of the Researchers I’d known. Intimidation, ultimatums, threats weren’t how they operated. They were misfits, outsiders, even reclusive about what they knew, what they had seen. They wanted no attention.

  In my time among them, I’d certainly learned they had reason to be afraid.

  I leaned back and rubbed my eyes. A late night spent staring at a computer screen followed up by hours fixated on microfilm made my eyes as dry as the winter air. They’d felt that way so many times as I sat at my desk in the astronomy department, reading case after case, only finding relief when my tears moistened my bloodshot eyes.

  * * *

  I’d been so thrilled to escape that desk and all those tragic stories when Steven had come to me, almost in desperation, asking if I was able to meet one of his colleagues in a remote rural area outside Springfield.

  “It should be me going, but every spare second has to go to my course review. I suppose I failed too many students last semester. Dr. Roberts says it’s something important and he needs me to come tomorrow, and he doesn’t come down from Chicago very often.”

  “Dr. Roberts?”

  “Mathematics professor at Loyola University. Chair of the department. Rhodes Scholar. And one of us.”

  I had calmly, almost indifferently, agreed to go, but under the desk clasped my hands together. I’d done my best to stay aloof ever since Steven kneeled dangerously close to me in his office the day I revealed the weather commonality of the disappearances. I didn’t like how I left his office feeling flushed.

  I told Tom the truth—at least the part that I had to go to Springfield the next day for some research at the state capital. When he had failed to even ask why an astronomy project would require a trip to the home of the legislature, I knew he wasn’t paying attention and abruptly left the apartment.

  I’d passed Decatur, rolling up the window at the smell of the cornstarch plant, and headed down I-72, finally getting off on exit 23. Cornfields flanked me on both sides as I traveled down a paved road.

  About twenty miles north of the interstate, I saw the lights from police cars. Two squad cars were at the end of a dirt road, and three more were parked around a white farmhouse tucked on the edge of a tree line. An ambulance was rolling up to the house. I’d slowed, and one of the officers waved me on past. I’d hoped someone elderly hadn’t died in the heat.

  Five minutes later, on that same road, I found the address I was looking for. As Steven had explained, there was the heavily faded navy-blue stripe on the mailbox, the number thirty-five, and the dirt drive.

  Yet as I stepped out of the car, I saw the house clearly hadn’t been lived in for years. The windowpanes were cracked in several places and the roof sagged; it most likely was abandoned following one of the tornadoes that so plagued this area of the world.

  “Mrs. Roseworth?”

  I’d missed the pickup truck parked behind the house. A man leaned up against the bed. He was dressed in pressed pants and short-sleeved dress shirt.

  “Dr. Roberts?

  He walked out across the road, looking down in the direction I’d driven. His close-cropped white hair revealed skin splotchy with age spots, but he moved with a young person’s urgency.

  “So you’re her,” he ex
tended his hand. “You’re the one he talks so much about. Shall we be on our way?”

  I was glad I wore a head scarf, or he would have seen that my ears flared an alarming shade of red.

  “It’s nice to meet you. I thought we were meeting in someone’s house.…”

  “That’s the closest address that I could give to show Steven what I’d found. Apparently, no one lives there. Where we need to go is actually in the corn. You have on pretty shoes, but the ground is as dry as bone. They’ll get dusty but not ruined. I’d pull your car back beside mine; we don’t want to draw any attention from the road.”

  I did as he suggested and then joined him in the corn. Once again, I was thankful for the scarf. I could already feel beads of sweat on my neck.

  “Did you bring a camera?” he asked.

  “A Hawkeye Instamatic.”

  “Good. Steven will need to see on the ground what I saw from the sky.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I took some pictures from a friend’s crop duster this morning. He’s a photographer, too, and brought with him one of the photos we processed. But he can’t print all of them in time for you to take with you tonight, so it’s good you can snap some pictures while you’re here. I’ll send the aerial photo back with you, though.”

  “Photos of what?”

  “We’re almost there. I am surprised, though, that he sent a woman.” He turned around with a sheepish grin. “Forgive me. There’s not many of us of the female gender. But he obviously finds you capable, otherwise he wouldn’t have sent you. I should have known he wouldn’t have come.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the cornfield.”

  “I’m sorry, what’s wrong with the cornfield?”

  Dr. Roberts took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “His sister, obviously. He still hasn’t gotten over it.”

  He continued walking, and I hurried to catch up. “I don’t understand what a cornfield and Steven’s—I mean Dr. Richards’s—sister, has anything to do with anything.”

  “You’ll see.”

  We walked for another ten minutes, until the corn gave way to a clearing. The sunlight was blinding without the shade of the stalks. When I shielded my eyes, I realized it was no barren field.

  Whoever farmed this land would soon come upon the bent stalks and ruined corn and most likely utter a litany of curses. The green stems and husks were pummeled to the ground for several yards in all directions. I knelt down, examining one of the stalks, seeing it was bent at a perfect ninety-degree angle.

  “They’re all like that.”

  I looked over to see a man sitting on an overturned bucket. The sight was almost comical, due to his immense size and how he somehow balanced himself on the pail.

  “Lynn, this is Marcus Burg: pilot, ham-radio expert, and photographer. He’s the one who first heard about the missing boy. He’s also the one who found the circles.”

  “Circles?” I asked.

  “Crop circles.” Marcus held out his sagging arms. “You’re in the middle of one now. Points right to where—”

  “Let’s let her look at the picture first, so she understands.”

  “Steven told me a two-year-old boy was missing, but that’s all I know. How long ago did he disappear?”

  “Two nights ago,” Dr. Roberts answered.

  “Two nights?” I looked out towards the police lights at the farmhouse. “He could still be alive, just not found yet. He went missing not far from here, correct? Why would you think he’s been…?”

  Dr. Roberts gave me a pitying smile. “It took me a long time to say it out loud as well. And I’ll admit, it’s even strange to say it now. Abducted. By extraterrestrials. The longer you’re at this, the easier it becomes to verbalize it. As you know, we typically don’t get involved until much later, when the cops are gone and families get desperate. But when Marcus told me what he heard on the radio and what he saw from the sky, I came down. And summoned Steven here, figuring he wouldn’t come. But I hoped, regardless.”

  “Why wouldn’t he come?” I asked, frustrated at having to repeatedly ask for clarification of everything this man said.

  “I probably shouldn’t be the one telling you this, but if you’re going to work with Steven, you need to know. Maybe sending you here is his way of letting you find out. He’s strange, that one, but brilliant, and a good man.”

  “Steven’s sister was abducted by aliens,” Marcus said, rubbing his neck.

  “Dr. Richards’s sister is missing?”

  “Abducted. It’s the truth as he sees it, and it set him on this path, that’s for certain,” Dr. Roberts said. “I don’t want to gloss over the details, and perhaps one day he will tell you all about it. He was eight, maybe nine. Steven, his parents, and younger sister, Elise, went to spend a weekend at their family farm in northern Iowa. I think it was his uncle’s place. Anyway, there had been a terrible storm, and Elise and Steven were trapped in the house all day. When it let up a bit, they’d thrown on their boots to go play in the corn at dusk. Steven said his boots got stuck in the mud, and he was separated from Elise. He knew he would get in trouble for losing her, so he kept searching, until night. He was found by his parents, thanks to the farmers who saw his flashlight. A strong beam of light. Except that Steven wasn’t carrying a flashlight.”

  Despite the heat, goose bumps rose on my arms. “His sister was never found,” Dr. Roberts continued. “His mother later committed suicide, and his father blamed Steven for all of it. I don’t know if Steven was a strange kid before that, but he certainly was afterwards, he even admits it. He became obsessed with trying to find Elise. It was only when he became a young man that he was able to get the police reports from that night. There was absolutely nothing to explain what happened. The assumption was that some kind of bobcat or something got her. The fields were even cleared to try and find her body. There was no sign of her. All the police report noted was that Steven’s uncle didn’t care if that particular stretch of land was cleared, because it was useless anyway. And it was useless, because something had flattened the crops in large circles.”

  Dr. Roberts motioned around them. “Obviously, no one took pictures back then, but when Marcus heard about the missing kid, and that the farmer of this land reported someone had ruined large swaths of his crops—”

  “I took my plane up, and I saw the circles, but I couldn’t take pictures while I had the controls. I had to get Max down here from Chicago, and when we went up, he took some pictures with my camera,” Marcus said. “Want to see?”

  When he didn’t bother to stand, we walked over. He reached into the front of his bib overalls and took out a black-and-white photo and handed it to me. “I’ve only had time to print one of them.”

  The photo clearly showed a series of large circles—ten in all—in a single row among the corn. At closer inspection, I could see they varied in size, the first much larger, gradually diminishing to a tiny circle.

  “We’re standing in the middle of that row now,” Dr. Roberts said. “You keep following the circles, and they end at the farmhouse where the boy is missing.”

  I looked closer at the photo. “It’s like they’re marking where they do it.” Marcus pointed. “An arrow straight to their target—”

  “That’s my bucket.”

  The voice caused us to turn around. In the row we had walked now stood a thin man.

  He was filthy, with tattered, dusty clothes and hair that clearly hadn’t been washed for days. I couldn’t tell if it was the angle of the sun or his complexion that enhanced the dark circles around his eyes, which had caused me to misjudge his age. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

  “Mama says we can take an ear or two,” the teenager said. “I need my bucket.”

  “You live near here?” Dr. Roberts asked.

  The boy flicked his thumb back down the row. “You done parked at my house. Why you’ins out here? You wit’ the cops? They ain’t gonna find that boy. Not them men in sui
ts neither.”

  “Shit,” Marcus said. “Max—”

  “Why won’t they find him?” Dr. Roberts took a step forward. “Where is the boy?”

  “You got money to pay me to tell you what I seen? Them suits had money.”

  Dr. Roberts dug into his back pocket and pulled out a worn wallet. He slid out a few singles, handing them over.

  The boy smiled, exposing rows of crooked teeth and squinting in the sunlight. “Mama says I’m lyin’, but I seen it. I seem ’em get dragged right up into them clouds. He gone. Straight up to heaven. That’s what I told them suits too.”

  “When did you talk to these men in suits?” Dr. Roberts demanded.

  “’Bout two hours ago.”

  “Shit!” Marcus said, looking around wildly. “Shit!”

  “Go,” Dr. Roberts ordered, motioning for me. “We’ve got to go.”

  “But I haven’t taken a single picture,” I said, watching Marcus practically bulldoze into the corn after brushing past the teen.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Dr. Roberts took me by the arm. I looked back one last time at the boy, who stared after us with dull eyes.

  “They could be anywhere!” Marcus cried out.

  “For Christ sake, keep it down, Marcus!” Dr. Roberts whispered.

  “What is going on?” I asked.

  Dr. Roberts didn’t answer. When we at last emerged at the house, Marcus was already in the truck, firing up the engine.

  “Come on, Max!”

  Dr. Roberts ushered me to my car. “Drive until you hit the interstate and don’t stop. Drive the speed limit. If anyone in a black suit tries to pull you over or talk to you, remember my sexist comment about Steven sending a woman. If you can, don’t stop, keep driving. Do you have enough gas to make it back to Champaign?”

  “I filled up when I got off the interstate—”

  “Then go. Right now. And take this,” he said, giving me the photo.

  “Max, let’s go!” Marcus yelled.

  “Give it to Steven, tell him what we saw.” Dr. Roberts ran over to the truck. As he got in, he leaned over Marcus. “Hide that photo in your purse, Lynn! Go now!”