The vehicle was a four-door Jeep Wrangler, and Lance pulled open the rear passenger door and jumped inside, sliding his backpack in beside him and closing his umbrella quickly before shutting the door. The inside of the Jeep was warm and smelled faintly of peppermint mixed with sweat. There was a hip-hop song on the radio, turned down low. Lance adjusted himself in his seat and then looked ahead, found the driver—presumably Luke—turned and staring at him with a large smile. “So you’re really staying out at the spook farm?” Luke asked.
Luke looked to be about Lance’s age and sat tall in the driver’s seat. He was thin and long—like Lance—and wore jeans with a frayed and tattered hoodie.
Lance didn’t have to ask what Luke was referencing. He just shrugged. “Apparently.”
Susan hit Luke in the shoulder. “Luke! I told you not to call it that. It’s … I don’t know. Disrespectful.”
“Even if it’s true?” Luke smiled and then winked at Lance.
Susan smirked and shook her head. “You’re a jerk.”
Luke leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. “Yeah, but you love me.”
Lance cleared his throat, reminding the people up front they had a third wheel present.
Pushed away the memory of the way he and Leah had kissed that night in the Westhaven bus station. Before he’d left her.
Luke turned his attention back to Lance, then seemed to really look at him for the first time. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Fear flushed through Lance’s veins.
Was his face making the rounds through the local news stations, broadcast on the six o’clock segment as folks were sitting down to eat their dinners? Was there an APB out? Was his photo circulating through county sheriff’s offices throughout the state?
Had Leah been forced to give up information about him? Hounded and threatened until she’d been left with no choice but to admit she’d seen him leave on a bus headed out of town? The bus station attendant might remember selling the ticket. Might remember the destination. From there it would only take a bit of amateur sleuthing to potentially follow Lance’s trail here to Ripton’s Grove and—
Luke snapped his fingers. A strangely loud sound that startled Lance and brought his attention back to the Jeep’s driver. “You played ball, right? Not around here, but in-state.” Luke closed his eyes and thought for a moment, searching for the right memory. His eye’s popped open and he said, “Yeah, you played for Hillston High. We played you guys in the first round of States a few years back. We beat you, but man, you were tough. You were tough, I mean. I think you dropped thirty on us.”
With the proper context, Lance’s memory recalled Luke instantly, remembered the game. “Thirty-four, I think,” Lance said. “You guys killed us on the boards.” Then he added, “But we never played a team from Ripton’s Grove.”
Luke nodded. “Yeah, I didn’t go to school here. I’m from the next county over. Got a job in the city while going to community college. Rent’s cheaper here. I split a place with a buddy of mine a few miles away. Only reason to come here, really. Except for this cutie right here.” Luke reached out and squeezed Susan’s knee, and she laughed and rolled her eyes.
“All the city girls are out of his league,” she said.
Luke shook his head. “Give me a country girl over one of them fake city bitches any day of the year.”
Susan looked back to Lance. “See?”
They all laughed, and then Luke asked the question Lance always wanted to avoid. “So, what are you doing here? I figured you’d be ballin’ at some D1 school right about now.”
Lance shook his head. “I’m here for work.” Then, to quickly change the subject and try to get some more answers, “Why do they call it the spook farm?”
Susan looked at the clock on the dash and nudged Luke. “Let’s go, we’re going to be late for the movie. And I’m telling you right now, there’s no way I’m going into the theater wearing this and smelling like meatloaf.”
Luke put the Jeep into reverse and started to back out of the parking lot.
Susan sighed and adjusted her seat belt to what Lance considered a very unsafe position that seemed to negate the whole point of wearing the thing in the first place, but also allowed her to turn around nearly backward in her seat and look at Lance while she spoke. The Jeep’s windshield wipers flapped back and forth across the glass behind her, almost bringing her in and out of focus as they worked to clear away the water. The large mud tires hummed softly on the wet asphalt.
Susan said, “Did your town have a local haunt?”
“A what?” Lance asked.
“A haunt. A place everybody always said was haunted, or spooky? A place that some stupid kids always broke into during Halloween to show how brave they were, or to drink beer or some dumb shit like that? A place with some history that over time people turned into a local legend?”
Lance knew what she was talking about. Nodded his head. “Sure.”
“Okay, well the—God, I hate calling it this—the spook farm is Ripton’s Grove’s version of that.”
Lance had heard these types of stories about places before. Anybody who’d grown up in a small town had. It was what small towns did. They embellished and told stories and tried like hell to keep things interesting.
“So I’m guessing something bad happened there?”
Luke gave off a quiet chuckle. “You could say that.”
Susan shot him a glare before returning her eyes back to Lance. “An entire family was found dead.”
Lance was smart enough to pick up on Susan’s deliberate wording. “And nobody knows what happened? Murder? Suicide? Both?”
Luke turned and looked at Lance, his eyes searching. Susan did something funny with her nose, curious.
Lance tried to recover. “I mean, you said ‘found dead,’ so I just assumed that the situation wasn’t exactly black and white.” Then shrugged and added, “I watch a lot of cop shows.”
This seemed to put them both back at ease. Luke flipped on his turn signal and turned left onto a rural road. Passed a few small houses, and then the road became lined with mostly trees and field.
Susan’s tone was that of somebody eager to tell a tantalizing tale. She seemed suddenly excited, but also, if Lance was correct, a bit unnerved. “Nobody knows exactly what happened in the house that night. I can only tell you what the police found the next morning.”
Luke shook his head. “Weird shit, man. Especially the girl.”
Susan looked once to her boyfriend, reached across and turned up the Jeep’s heater, and then started to tell the story.
6
“The spook farm has only been the spook farm for maybe … how long would you say, Luke?” Susan looked to her boyfriend for help. Lance watched in the rearview as Luke crinkled his brow and thought.
“I was a freshman, I think. No, wait … I was a sophomore. Yeah, I had just gotten my driver’s license when it happened. I remember because a bunch of kids were driving up to the house at night after it happened to try and get a look at the crime scene. Just like you said … dares and dumb shit like that. My parents promised me that if they found out I drove over here to that house, they’d make sure I never drove a mile on my own until I finished high school. So you better believe I stayed away.”
Susan nodded. “Okay, yeah. So it’s been … six years.” She shook her head. “Damn. I can’t believe she’s been gone that long.”
Luke shrugged. “The way you told it, she’d basically been gone longer than that. Was gone before it all went down.”
Susan nodded again. A quiet concession.
“She?” Lance asked.
Susan met his eyes. “Mary Benchley. She was the girl who lived there with her family. She was my age. Lived on the farm with her mom and dad.”
“It’s an actual farm?” Lance asked.
Susan nodded. “Well, it was. Mary’s family inherited it from her great-uncle on her mother’s side. Apparently Mary’s
mom and he were close, and he left it all to her when he passed. It was more of a farm when he owned it—cows, chickens, cornfields, maybe some other stuff. But when Mary and her family moved in, the first thing they did was sell off everything they could. Mary’s dad said they weren’t farmers and never would be. No sense in pretending.”
“Now how could you possibly know that?” Luke asked.
“People talk. It’s a small town. I was nosy.”
Luke laughed. “Still are.”
Susan punched him on the shoulder. “You just remember that.” Then she continued. “So they sold everything but the chickens, because Mary’s mom argued they could use the free eggs. But otherwise, as a farm, it was just the skeleton of one. Shed, barn, abandoned fields. You know?”
Lance nodded. “So what did Mary’s father do? Since he had no interest in farming.”
“He was a preacher. Well, that was what he told everybody.”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t actually preach at a church.”
Lance was confused, and must have looked it because Susan explained, “Mary’s mom got a nursing job at Central Medical, and they apparently got a decent payout when they sold a lot of the farm equipment and the livestock. So Mary’s dad didn’t have to work. Her mom didn’t either, really, but Mary always said her mom loved it too much to quit.”
“So what does this have to do with Mary’s dad being a preacher?”
“Oh, well, he always walked around town carrying a Bible and would occasionally give impromptu sermons on the street, or in the park. Sometimes he’d invite folks up to the farm to celebrate the Lord and share in the gospel, away from all the distractions of life.”
The image of a man walking around town, a tiny black Bible tucked under his arm, brought thoughts of the Reverend into Lance’s mind. He shivered at the memory of how the man had spoken to him through his own mind. Effortlessly gotten into Lance’s head. And he was still out there. Still coming for Lance. Both of them—the Surfer, too. Lance knew this without knowing how he knew this. He could feel it.
Luke slowed the Jeep for an approaching curve in the road, a steep hill climbing upward where the road dropped off. He made the turn and they began to travel up, rising in elevation as if climbing up the side of a mountain. They drove maybe a hundred yards before switching back around another curve, continuing to climb. “I always forget how high it feels up here,” Luke said. He turned his head and looked out the window. Lance followed suit and saw the glowing lights of Ripton’s Grove growing smaller below them.
The rain was still falling. Not even a hint of letting up. The Jeep’s headlights cut through the falling rain, and the tires stayed firm to the road. Lance figured he’d lucked out with his free ride. And his free history lesson.
His mother did not believe in coincidences.
Lance was finding it harder and harder to find fault in her thinking.
Susan continued. “So yeah, Mary was embarrassed like hell by her dad. I mean, he was nice enough and all, but”—she shrugged—“sorta got the reputation of being a kook, ya know? And once Mary got to middle school, the kids started making fun.” She shook her head, then added softly, “I don’t think anybody actually thought he was dangerous, though. Crazy? Yes. But crazy for the Lord, ya know? In that way that sometimes makes people seem out of touch with the real world?”
Lance nodded. Said nothing. Tried to figure out where this was going.
Susan was quiet for a moment, then shook her head as if tossing aside a rotten memory. “Anyway, I don’t know if it was because the teasing got to be too much for Mary, or maybe just too much for her dad, or if it was something else entirely, but Mary left public school halfway through our freshman year, and her parents shipped her off to some boarding school. Natalie, that was Mary’s mom, never told anybody much of the specifics when she’d come into town afterward and people asked about Mary. But something else must have been bothering her, too, because a couple weeks later, she quit her job at Central Medical and was almost never seen after that.”
Lance considered this. How bad had things really gotten with the teasing? He knew kids could be cruel. The world was cruel. But something about the story didn’t seem right to him.
“What do you think really happened?” Lance asked.
Susan replied instantly, her opinion locked and loaded. “Her dad lost his mind, and when Mary came home to visit, he killed her and his wife. Why? I don’t know. But he had some sort of plan, and once he was finished, he killed himself, too.”
Lance said nothing.
Luke shook his head. “We don’t know what happened that night,” he said. But from his tone, Lance figured the guy wouldn’t be able to offer an alternative story.
Lance hated that he had to ask the next question, but he could tell Susan was waiting, waiting to drop the bomb, the climax of this whole story. “How did he do it?”
“He used a shotgun on Mary’s mom and himself,” she said. “The police found Mary’s mom’s body on the front porch steps with a hole the size of a bowling ball in her chest. Like she was trying to run away and got gunned down. Mary’s dad killed himself in the recliner in the living room, half his head blown off.”
Luke rounded another turn and the land flattened out a bit. Forest on either side, giving way to fields and rugged terrain. He squinted through the windshield and said, “It’s up here close, right, Suze? On the left?”
“Yeah, maybe another hundred yards.”
Thinking about how far they’d seemed to drive, and the constant switchbacks they’d climbed, Lance asked, “I thought you said I could walk here?”
“Oh,” Susan said. “Yeah. I mean, it’s possible, but not exactly ideal. There’s a hiking trail that comes straight from town up the side of the hill. It’s shorter than driving, for sure, but in this rain, it’d be a disaster.”
Luke looked to Susan. “You told him he could walk?”
“I didn’t lie.”
Luke rolled his eyes. He hit his turn signal despite the nonexistent traffic, slowed the Jeep to a crawl, and then turned left onto a dirt road.
Knowing that Susan was purposely dragging out the final bit of information, with a sick feeling in his stomach, Lance asked, “And what happened to Mary?”
Susan sighed, as if telling this part of the story was actually painful. “They found her body burnt beyond all recognition on top of a brush pile in the back field. There was almost nothing left by the time they found her. They had to use her teeth to get a positive ID.”
Then, after looking down and giving a long, dramatic pause, Susan lifted her head and added, “They don’t know if she was alive or not when she started to burn.”
Luke hit the steering wheel with his palm and said, “Jesus, Suze, you tell this story like you’re trying to win a damn Oscar or something. Like you actually enjoy it.”
She looked offended. “I do not.”
“Yes, you do. You tell it like we’re telling ghost stories around a damn campfire.”
The two of them continued to bicker, but Lance ignored them. He leaned forward and looked through the rain-splattered windshield. Up ahead, faintly illuminated by the Jeep’s headlights, was the house. The spook farm.
And Lance was nearly positive he’d seen something move behind one of the front windows.
7
Luke drove the Jeep slowly along the muddy road until the front bumper nearly touched the railing of the farmhouse’s front porch.
“Jesus, Luke. Why don’t you just go on ahead through the front door?” Susan said, sitting up straight in her seat.
Luke shifted the Jeep into park and then leaned over the steering wheel, looking through the windshield and out to the house before them. “I’ve never seen it up close,” he said. “I told you, my parents would have killed me if they ever found out I came out here like the rest of those idiots back then.”
Susan didn’t look over to him, just continued to stare through the dancing windshield wip
ers, her eyes locked onto the house. “You never came after? Later on?”
Luke shook his head. “For what reason? I’m not a ghost hunter or anything.”
I’m not either, Lance thought. The ghosts tend to be the ones to do the hunting, in my experience.
Susan shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it’s different when you’re from here. Me and my friends, we all just felt sorta … I don’t know … compelled to come see it. Almost like we were paying our respects or something.” She shrugged again and asked, “Does that make sense?”
“No,” Luke said.
Susan was quiet for a beat. Then: “She was my friend.”
Luke had no answer to that.
Lance said nothing.
The rain beat down on the Jeep’s top, and the warm glow of the headlights illuminated nearly the entire front of the house. The place wasn’t ramshackle exactly, but in the gloomy and wet night, it definitely showed its age, and exposed the neglect it must have endured all these years since the night that … whatever happened had taken place. Shutters hung skewed and slanted on the dirty gray vinyl siding, the windows cloudy with dirt and dust. A wooden front door looked solid, but the storm door was blown permanently open, plastered against the side of house, the screen ripped completely free of the top of the frame and draped over the bottom half like a man keeled over. A wooden front porch spanned the entire width of the house. Splintery rails and peeling white paint. The overhang sagged a bit on the left side, and rain cascaded off it like a small waterfall.
Lance couldn’t see the second story from his position in the rear of the Jeep, but he suspected it would look much the same. There were probably a few shingles missing. Hopefully there weren’t any leaks in the roof, because with a storm like this, he’d have a swimming pool inside.
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