The nearest town to her was Lake Bronson, one of those roadside towns that was over almost before it began. It was still several miles north. A river squiggled through the town streets and widened into a lake in the state park two miles east. She’d lived in this area for over a year, but she still didn’t know the town well. It wasn’t home to her. No place was home anymore.

Lisa pointed toward the railroad tracks. “Do you remember coming this way? Across the train tracks?”

The boy shook his head. “No.”

“What about the highway? Did you hike along the highway at all?”

“No, I told you, I came through the fields behind the house.”

“All right. There aren’t any roads that head directly that way. I’ll find the next crossroad and come around on the other side. If anything looks familiar to you, you let me know, okay?”

“Okay.”

Lisa headed north. She drove for a mile, seeing no farms or other vehicles coming or going. The clouds spat on the windshield, enough that she had to run the wipers occasionally. Unlike Laurel, she didn’t like the noise of the radio distracting her. She preferred silence when she drove. The only sounds were the hum of her tires and the shudder of the wind speeding out of the northern plains.

When she spotted a driveway leading across the railroad tracks to a mobile home sheltered inside a grove of birches, she slowed the truck so the boy could take a look. “What about there? Do you remember that place?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“When the truck stopped, were you near a house? Or was it a trailer like that one?”

“A house, I think. It was dark and rainy, and I couldn’t really see. I don’t remember very well.”

“That’s all right. We’ll keep going.”

Lisa accelerated again. The telephone poles sped by beside them. A solitary truck carrying a load of timber passed going the opposite way. Not long after, she reached an intersection at a single-lane dirt road. There were no structures and no traffic nearby, just two empty roads cutting across each other. She turned right, traveling past farm fields that had already been plowed over for the winter season. Fall colors painted the trees that grew along the ribbon of a creek.

“So you write books?” Purdue asked, breaking the silence.

“Yes, I do.”

“What kind of books?”

“Thrillers.”

“You mean like where people get killed and stuff?”

Lisa smiled. “Sometimes.”

“Is it hard to write a book?”

“It’s very hard.”

“So why do you do it?”

She found herself slowing the pickup, watching the furrows of black dirt in the fields. “Well, I don’t really have a choice. That’s how my brain is wired.”

“What do you mean?”

Lisa pointed out the window. “What do you see out there?”

“Nothing.”

She pulled the truck onto the shoulder. Her wheels splashed through the puddles as she drifted to a stop. “No, seriously. Tell me exactly what you see.”

Purdue folded his arms together as if he were working on a school assignment. “I see tire ruts, like from a tractor. Mud, because it’s been raining. Bits of old cornstalks. Evergreens way far down on the other end of the field. A little bit of smoke going up in the sky, like somebody has a fire. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right, but that’s not what I see.”

The boy frowned. “What do you see?”

“I see something pretty scary. Maybe too scary for you.”

“No, tell me.”

“I see a dead body in the field. A woman. She’s wearing a red blouse that makes a splash of color against the black soil. I don’t know who she is yet, but I’m wondering who was cruel enough to leave her in this remote place. I see a sheriff’s car coming down the highway toward us at high speed. I can see its red lights from a mile away. There’s a man inside. He’s a good man, a handsome man, but he’s afraid, because this woman isn’t the first victim, and he knows what he’s going to find when he examines her body. An arrow, black, with white feathers, stuck in the woman’s mouth and going through the back of her neck into the mud. There’s a single word painted on the shaft of the arrow in tiny ancient script like you’d find in an old Bible. The word is Demon.”

Purdue’s mouth hung open. “Seriously? That’s what you see?”

“Yup. Scary, right?”

“Yeah, but scary stories are fun. I like them. What does it all mean?”

“I don’t know. I won’t know until I write the book. But all my life, those are the things I’ve seen wherever I go. I don’t look at the world the way other people do. I live somewhere else. To me, every place turns into stories and crimes and characters and mysteries.”

“That sounds pretty cool.”

“It is. Although honestly, there are days when I wish I could see nothing but tractor ruts, just like you.”

She gave Purdue a grin. With a scrape of rock under her tires, she guided the pickup back onto the dirt road and headed east. Another mile passed. She could see the boy staring through the window, deep in thought, as if he was trying to see the things that she saw. Thriller things. Mystery things. And maybe he could. Children had the gift, the second sight, the sixth sense. Sometimes she wondered if most writers were really just children who’d never grown up.

At the next dirt road, she turned again.

That was when Purdue shouted, “There! That’s it!”

Lisa tapped the brakes. She leaned across the pickup, her stare following the direction where the boy was pointing. A quarter mile away, she saw a cluster of farm buildings on the border of an old cornfield. The property had seen better days, the white paint on the house flaking away, an old snowmobile rusting in the unmowed grass. She drove on until she reached the dented mailbox near the road, which bore the name LANCASTER.

In the driveway near the house was a dirty black Volkswagen panel van.

“That’s the truck I was in,” Purdue said.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, that’s it. It was black, just like that. I remember now, the back door was open, so I snuck inside. There was a blanket bunched up in the back, and I hid under it. Then somebody came and slammed the door, and the truck drove away. This is where I got out. Right here.”

Lisa studied the farm field, and she could see trees marking the horizon line under the dark clouds a couple of miles away. There were no roads between here and there. She knew what you would find if you took off across the field and kept going through the trees.

Her house.

“Stay here,” she told Purdue.

The farm felt deserted, almost abandoned. She turned into the driveway and parked behind the van, and when she got out of the pickup, a fierce wind pushed at her back. A few stray drops of rain landed on her face. She walked toward the house and realized that the quietness of the property was an illusion. Getting closer, she heard wind chimes, and she smelled fresh bread. A dog barked, and then a white Lab bounded across the overgrown grass to greet her. She bent down, letting it get to know her, and the two of them climbed up the porch steps together.

Lisa rapped her knuckles on the frame. A few seconds later, a middle-aged woman pushed open the screen door, letting the dog inside. She stepped outside onto the porch with Lisa. She had graying hair and a pleasant face, and she wore a cream-colored dress with a bright white apron tied around her waist. With the door open, the smell of baking bread got stronger.