the barn animals she thought of Thomas Hardy’s poem about the legend of oxen kneeling at midnight each Christmas Eve in memory of the Christ Child. I should go with him in the gloom, she remembered the final lines of the poem, the speaker’s longing to return to a childhood faith he had lost, Hoping it might be so.
Outside snow spilled from low clouds as dark came on. Logan was at the hospital in Sioux Falls, more than a hundred miles away. He hadn’t wanted to go after he’d heard the weather predictions, he explained in a note she found on the dining room table. There had been an accident, a car on an icy road sliding through a stop sign to strike a semi. The accident left the parishioner driving the car, a young father of three named Morgan, in a vegetative state. Logan had to be there with the family when the doctors removed Morgan from life support. Clara pictured Logan with his black communion kit, the red velvet lining and its vial of wine and canister of stale crackers. His quiet voice speaking promises of eternity. Unbidden, she thought of Leah down at the bottom of that pit, of her own mother trying to come home through such a storm. Dizzying thoughts whirred in her head like the thickening haze of snow whirring outside in the lamplight.
The doorbell rang.
Clara froze in place. How much time had passed since Grizz hurried off to the Gunderson farm? It must be him, returned with news about what happened. The doorbell rang again, but she remained where she was. All through her body her blood hummed right down to her fingertips, the nubs of her left hand quickening. The ringing went on and on until the sound hived in her mind. This is how you survive: stay still until the shadow passes over you.
Downstairs the door opened and slammed shut. She heard footsteps in her kitchen and only then did she move. Clara slid open the desk drawer where she kept her writing supplies, groping for any sort of weapon, a letter opener, scissors, anything. All she had was the Meiserstruck fountain pen she’d been using to set down her wolf child stories. She touched the tip with one finger, a sobering bite of sharpness.
The stairs creaked. There was no place to hide in this old room, not even a closet. Whoever had come in knew she was here, knew to follow the light upstairs. When he stepped into the nursery, he brought the cold from the outside in with him, a smell like methane. Cold and methane poured from his clothes into the warmth of the yellow room. He wore the same dirty tennis shoes and oilcloth coat she had seen months before. A black-haired boy with a pretty, curving mouth. Kelan.
He held a double-barrel shotgun in the nook of his arm, the gun loose and bobbing with each step. Snow dripped from his hair and coat to the hardwood floor, and he was shivering, breathing hard. When he spoke, his Adam’s apple danced in his throat. “Clara, I need you to come with me.”
Clara opened her mouth, but nothing came out. The line sounded practiced, obsessive, like he’d been rehearsing it in front of a mirror. “Is this about Leah?” she said, knowing it wasn’t. She didn’t ask about the gun.
Kelan nodded, his eyes glassy and vacant. Seth. This is what his ghost had been trying to tell her. All along she had known the truth. Two of them that day.
“In the corn. That was you.”
“We have to hurry,” he said, not looking at her.
It had not been Seth she had seen going back into that corn. It had been Kelan trailing him. It had not been Seth’s ghost she had seen emerge from the corn, but Kelan biding his time. And the town, reeling in shock over Will Gunderson’s death hadn’t considered that there might be something else out there, someone worse. “It must be so hard for you,” she said. “I can’t imagine.”
“Please, you got to help me, Mrs. Warren.” In his face she read some inner struggle, a tic pulsing violently in his cheek.
His voice, the pleading. It sounded so much like Seth, like he was channeling his dead friend. She felt the same icy fingers running up and down her spine as the night she thought she heard Seth’s spirit under the stairwell. Her grip tightened on the pen she held behind her back. Focus.