The Farm

Chapter Twenty-three

Katy was elbow-deep in dirty dishes when the back door swung open. Gordon must have forgotten to lock it, and the wind was picking up, skating leaves against the side of the house, sending cold air against her bare legs. She realized with a start that she wasn't wearing panties, and she must have changed into the autum nal-print dress sometime after dinner. She put a soapy hand to her forehead. What was happening to her memory?

The wind skirled the pantry curtains. The pantry. What about it? Something had happened in there. Not just broken pickle jars and hidden recipes, but a secret as old as the Smiths.

Yeah, sure, sounds pretty melodramatic.

But she was attuned to melodrama. After all, she'd married a man on what amounted to a whim, she'd tossed away her past and her career and settled for a housewife role in a mountain commu nity where the women were valued as good cooks and compliant bed partners. Not that the bed part had been much of a challenge, with Gordon content to fall asleep reading research books while she waited for him to doze so she could masturbate. Something was wrong, a deep part of herself knew, but she was caught up in the small rhythms of daily life and had surrendered herself to them. Surrender was good, surrender was easy. A man to provide, leaving her free to focus on raising a family...

Jett.

She flung the suds from her fingers and went to the back door. Jett should be upstairs studying. Had Gordon sent her out to do chores? Surely not on a night like this, not when Jett was acting so strangely.

She stepped out on the back porch and looked around the farm. The barn made black angles against the purple sunset. A white shape moved beyond the fence, then another. Goats. Gordon's damned goats. She shuddered and stepped inside, drawing me door tight and fastening the dead bolt.

"Katy."

She spun, looking toward the foyer, which was the only other entrance to the kitchen. "Gordon?"

But it couldn't have been Gordon. This was a female. And the voice was near.

Coming from the pantry.

Katy yanked the curtains, nearly pulling down me bar that held the checkered fabric. The smell of crushed lilacs overwhelmed her, intoxicating enough to make her head spin. "Who's mere?"

"Come inside." The whisper was an Arctic breeze, a frozen scalpel, a long, cold fingernail down the nape of her neck.

The pantry was empty. Katy wasn't sure whether she was imagining voices or whether a ghost lived in her kitchen. The imaginary voice sounded like a more practical, though possibly more unnerv ing, option. Because how would a ghost know her name?

A pint jar of stewed tomatoes fell on its side on one of the waist-high shelves, rolling with gritty purpose. Katy reached to catch it, but it slipped between her fingers, shattering on the floor, throwing me seasoned smell of basil and oregano in the air to join the lilac. The sprayed viscera of tomato pulp glistened against the broken glass. Among the wreckage was a metal object, smeared red by the juice.

Katy knelt, careful not to cut herself on the glass, and fished out me object. It was a bronze key, pocked by the acid from the tomato juice. She could imagine a ring, or perhaps a measuring spoon, being accidentally dropped into a jar during high-pressure canning, but a key?

"Katy?" This time the voice was Gordon's, booming from the living room. For some reason, Katy felt the key held a secret meant only for her. It was such an obvious metaphor, and she had come to think of the pantry as her domain, part of the kitchen she'd come to love.

"Yes?" She clutched the key in her fist so that it was hidden.

"Where's that daughter of yours?"

"Isn't she upstairs in her room?"

"I didn't hear her come in from feeding the goats. She's proba bly out there shooting up heroin."

God, how long had it been? She tried to remember Jett going out the front door, but her mind was blank. Considering the stack of dirty dishes and the leftovers being put away, Jett must have been gone at least half an hour. "Will you go check on her?"

"I've got a faculty report to get to the dean tomorrow. Departmental politics."

Katy wiped her hands, opened the odds-and-ends drawer, and slid the key into an envelope of pumpkin seeds. She pulled out a penlight and went out the back door, the wind chilling her bare legs. The goats were gathered at the back side of the barn, probably eating the hay Jett had thrown down from above.

Passing through the gate, she called Jett's name, but the wind and the low murmuring of the goats smothered her voice. The pen light did little against the darkness, and she dreaded climbing the narrow wooden stairs into the loft. The hens clucked uneasily, dis turbed in their nests.

"Just like last time," came the voice she'd heard in the pantry. Or it might have been the breeze whistling under the eaves of the tin roof.

Just like which last time? Katy thought.

"The time Jett freaked out, and you found her in the barrel."

Maybe she was imagining a voice, but this voice was insistent, and the words tugged at her memory. The door was open, which probably meant Jett was inside. Gordon was a stickler for closing gates and doors, and hammered his point home at every chance. Jett wouldn't have left the door open despite her rebellious streak, because the bitterness of the punishment more than offset the plea sure of the crime.

Though the inside of the barn shielded the bulk of the wind, the open room was cold. She ran the penlight over the wall. The scare crow hung on its nail, grinning in sleep. The back door was open as well, and the cluster of goats gave off a strong, musky odor. She hesitated afraid of them, the moon shining on their curled horns.

"Get the fuck away from me, Fred," Jett yelled. She was among the goats, and must have risen to her knees because the top of her head was on level with those of the goats.

Katy ran among the goats, flailing the penlight as if it were a weapon. "Shoo, damn it," she said, pushing at the animals, careful of the flashing horns as the animals bucked and started. There were so many of them. It seemed as if the flock had swelled dramatically in just the last few days. She finally reached Jett and pulled her to her feet, and they backed away from the goats.

The animals fell quiet and still, all eyes on Katy and Jett as they retreated into the barn. The goats stared with interest (hunger, thought Katy) until Katy threw her weight against the barn door and it began its groaning path along its track. The goats hesitated then moved forward as one, not in a rush but with purpose. Katy slammed the door home and took Jett's arm.

"Are you okay, honey? What happened?"

"I fell. I don't know. I saw something up mere." Jett's gaping, tear-flooded eyes rolled toward me loft. "The scarecrow..."

"The scarecrow's hanging on me wall, honey. See?" Katy di rected me light toward me spot near the stairs. The scarecrow was gone.

"Let's get out of here, before the goats come around front."

They linked arms and jogged out of me barn, not stopping to close the door. Let Gordon be pissed. He could come outside and deal with it himself. They were his damned goats, after all.

They reached the gate, and Katy fumbled with me latch. The goats had come around me barn but were not in pursuit. They stood in that mocking, silent way, working their hooves back and forth under the moonlight.

"Jeez, mere's so many of them," Jett said.

"I shouldn't have let you come out here alone."

"Mom, I'm freaking out."

"I know, baby. We'll get you tucked in and everything will be all right. We'll get through this together."

"What about the scarecrow? He was walking around, he smiled at me, he—"

"There's no scarecrow, honey."

They headed to the porch, the scent of manure and brown oak leaves riding the wind. Katy looked back at the barn. The goats still watched, their dark noses lifted and ears twitching as if they were awaiting some unspoken command. Katy shivered and led Jett into the house. As soon as the door closed, she was overcome by the scent of lilacs and tomatoes and forgot all about the goats.

Alex surveyed the perimeter from the small glass windows along the front of his house. All clear for now, and Meredith was waiting the night shift at the Ruby Tuesday in Titusville. He finally had time to ponder his encounter of the day before, not distracted by her silly needs.

Goats as government conspiracy. It finally made sense to Alex. That's just how they would do it, come at him in the most unpre dictable way possible. If only he had an Internet connection, he could go into some of the freedom organization chat rooms and learn from the fighters on the front lines. But he had no doubt the government was tapped into every Web server in the country, and that in big underground caverns near Washington, D.C., FBI agents sat before banks of computers, monitoring every e-mail.

If the government was behind the whole thing, then the man in the black suit must be some sort of genetic freak, the result of a se cret experiment gone wrong. The fact that he was prowling near the Eakins compound meant only one thing: they were on to him. Four years of tax evasion wasn't that serious of a crime, not when Congress was stealing billions, but it was the principle of the thing. They didn't care about the money, they just didn't want word to get out that the government could be cheated and was therefore vulnerable. What better way to catch your enemy off guard than to come disguised as a backwoods preacher?

Except this preacher had been eaten alive. Even if he was an FBI agent in disguise, such a stunt took some effort. Maybe they had used some sort of hologram. Classic brainwashing technique involved challenging the subject's notion of reality and eventually replacing reality with the desired set of beliefs. Alex nodded to himself, finished twisting a pinkie-sized joint, and lit up. He liked that answer better. Sure, he was paranoid, and like any freethinking man, he had good reason. But he wasn't crazy.

With the joint hanging from lips a la Bogart in Casablanca, he made his way to the back room, a space barely larger than a walk- in closet. He unlocked the two Case dead bolts and entered, search ing for the candles he kept on an overhead shelf. Lighting one, he stood before his shrine: a wall covered with small arms firepower. His pride and joy was an AKR submachine gun, a favorite deadly toy of the Russian Special Forces that held 160 rounds. Alex had traded four pounds of seedless buds for the short-barreled gun, worth about eight grand on the street. The lethal and compact grace of the gun appealed to him as much as its country of origin. Not that the Russians could be trusted either, but at least they were more sincere in their oppression.

Then there was the Swiss SIG 510 assault rifle. The good old Swiss claimed neutrality, but during every war of note, the country served as a clearinghouse for whatever loot happened to be pil laged by the victor. The Swiss made their weapons with all the love and precision they invested in their watches and chocolate. With bayonet, the rifle made a nasty but sleek package.

A row of well-polished handguns lay spread across a velvet- covered shelf. A Mauser C-96 was the centerpiece. No hidden arse nal was complete without a piece of German hardware. It was an older model, manufactured between the two World Wars, but it had a heft and sheen that justified its place in the collection, though he'd only been able to procure two ten-round clips for it. The Germans were arguably the most militaristic people in modern history, ex cept perhaps for the Japanese, Montana freedom fighters, and Republican presidents.

He owned an Austrian-made Glock, a weapon currently in favor with police officers, though he preferred the proven accuracy of the Colt Python. Occasionally, Americans mustered up some pride in their craftsmanship, and the Colt had pedigree. The Beretta resuited from a sense of romanticism only, because he'd never bet his life on something Italian, unless it was manicotti or a young Sophia Loren. He owned a few other sidearms, a couple of M-l practice grenades a staff sergeant had smuggled out of Ft. Bragg, and a Mossberg twenty-gauge shotgun. The collection also included the Pearson Freedom bow, which retailed at around six hundred dollars, unless you happened to be swapping grass for it. As for arrows, he went with Easton, mostly because he'd known a kid named Easton growing up in Chapel Hill. An array of knives completed the collection, though they were mostly for show. Alex wouldn't have invested in all that hardware if he was interested in hand-to-hand combat.

The other walls of the room held posters, antiestablishment stuff, an Abbie Hoffman portrait, psychedelic posters of nothing in particular, an art print of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who was as famous for his beret as for his celebrity death photos. Richard Nixon, the patron saint of all latter-day paranoiacs, glowered down with his sharp nose and sinister eyebrows.

As he had done in the well-lighted shed where his marijuana grew, Alex sat cross-legged before the wall that held his weapons. He sucked the joint down until it burned his lower lip; then he pinched it out and swallowed the roach. You couldn't leave evi dence lying around not when they might be closing in. He shut his eyes and enjoyed the silence, the Python cool in his lap. When the government agents came, he'd be ready.