Fenwick Farm sat at the end of a mile of gravel road, past the grain elevator, past a sign that said SLOW CHILDREN AND GEESE. The gravel ended at a gate. After the gate, there was mud.
I parked beside the farmhouse at 9:52 on Thursday. Vivian Ashcombe looked out of the passenger window for a long moment.
“That,” she said, “is not a driveway.”
“It used to be,” I said. “You can see the outline.”
The outline was the only part of it still committed to being a driveway. The rest was a wide brown plain that ran from the house to a red barn about two hundred feet away. Puddles sat on it like they had paid rent.
Vivian was wearing the four-inch charcoal pair. It had been a ninety-minute drive. I had not commented. I had learned.
“Trunk,” she said.
I should explain about the trunk.
Every top agent in Corliss County has a trunk. Most of them hold signs, a toolbox and a scented candle for houses that need one. Vivian’s trunk held all of that, plus things no other agent would ever need.
A level. Six kinds of light bulb. A folding step stool with her initials on it, which she claimed was for reaching smoke detectors.
That morning, it also held four rubber doormats from the staging closet.
She had me lay them down in a line, starting at the passenger door.
The first said WELCOME. The second said HOME SWEET HOME. The third had a pumpkin on it. The fourth, which belonged to a seller nobody liked, said GO AWAY.
Vivian stepped from mat to mat. When she reached GO AWAY, I picked up WELCOME and carried it forward. She stepped onto it. I picked up HOME SWEET HOME.
“This is going to take a while,” I said.
“Everything worth doing takes a while,” she said. “Keep moving the pumpkin.”
We had covered about forty feet when a pickup truck came up the gravel road. It was green under the dirt, and there was a lot of dirt. It parked behind my car with the comfortable crunch of a vehicle that had never once worried about a puddle.
The man who climbed out was enormous and smiling. He had a gray-blond beard, a canvas jacket and a metal detector over one shoulder like a fishing rod.
He looked at the mud. He looked at the doormats. He looked at Vivian.
Then he walked straight across forty feet of mud to say hello. His boots made a sound like a cow getting comfortable.
“Viv,” he said warmly. “Good to see you.”
“Boone,” said Vivian. Nobody called her Viv. I watched it register on her face and get filed away for later.
“And you must be Caleb.” He shook my hand, gently, which was somehow worse. “Boone Radley. I hear you used to teach band.”
I had no idea how he knew that. Real estate is a small county.
Boone’s boots were brown leather, laced to the top and resoled so often that they had probably outlived several marriages. They were not interesting boots. That was the interesting thing about them. He wore them the way some people wear glasses: without noticing, and without being able to function otherwise.
He looked down at the mats again. Not unkindly.
“I’ve got spares in the truck,” he said. “Boots, every size from six to fourteen. I keep them for buyers who show up in sneakers. Happy to—”
“Thank you,” said Vivian. “I’m fine.”
“It gets worse past the barn.”
“These,” said Vivian, “are my flats.”
Boone considered the charcoal heels. He considered the mud. He nodded slowly, like a man accepting a weather forecast he didn’t agree with.
“Ground doesn’t lie, Viv,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Then we’ll get along fine,” said Vivian. “Neither do I. Caleb. Pumpkin.”
Mrs. Ida Fenwick arrived on a tractor.
It was an old red tractor, older than me and possibly older than Boone. She drove it out of the barn at roughly the speed of a brisk walk. She was tiny, four foot eleven at the most, in a barn coat several sizes too big. A white goose waddled behind the tractor with the air of a supervisor.
She stopped beside us. She did not climb down.
“You’re the town agent,” she said to Vivian.
“Vivian Ashcombe. Hadley & Marsh. Thank you for having us, Mrs. Fenwick.”
“Ida.” She looked at the doormats and settled on the one that said GO AWAY. “Well, that’s honest.”
“It’s a staging mat,” I said.
“Hm,” said Ida. Then, to Boone: “You found my pin yet?”
“Not yet, ma’am.” Boone patted the metal detector. “Twenty-three horseshoes, though.”
“Twenty-three horseshoes,” Ida repeated. “Luckiest field in Corliss County, and it can’t catch a break.”
The goose came up to the WELCOME mat. It looked at it. Then it bit the corner and began, with great determination, to walk away with it.
“That’s Mortgage,” said Ida. “Because he never goes away. Let him have it. He likes things with words on.”
I let him have it. Vivian was now standing on HOME SWEET HOME, with a gap behind her where welcome used to be.
We followed the tractor into the barn. Vivian made the last fifteen feet on two mats and an overturned feed bucket. I did not ask how she balanced on the bucket. Some things you just witness.
Inside the barn, the floor was concrete. I watched Vivian’s whole posture change. It was like watching someone reach their own office.
Ida climbed down from the tractor and laid it out for us.
A hundred and sixty acres. Hay in the east fields, pasture in the west, and the woodlot along Hollins Creek. Her husband, Arthur, had farmed it for fifty-one years and had died two winters ago. Her sister had a spare room in Tucson and an opinion about humidity.
“There’s one problem,” Ida said. “The north line.”
The north line, it turned out, was a forty-year disagreement with her neighbor, a man named Royce Danforth. Royce believed that six acres of Fenwick hay field belonged to the Danforths. His grandfather had said so. His grandfather had said a lot of things.
“The surveyor set an iron pin at the corner in 1958,” said Ida. “Arthur used to show it to me. Then the fence went down in a storm, and the brush came in, and nobody’s seen the pin since.”
“The title company won’t insure the sale without that corner,” said Boone. “I’ve been looking for three weeks.”
“Horseshoes,” said Ida.
“Horseshoes,” agreed Boone.
Vivian had been quiet. She was looking up at the barn’s roof beams.
“Bank barn,” she said. “Built into the hillside, so you can drive hay wagons straight into the upper floor. Chestnut beams, if I had to guess. They don’t make them like that anymore because there isn’t any chestnut left.”
Ida turned and looked at her properly for the first time.
Vivian pointed at the tractor. “And that’s a 1952. Narrow front end. You have to be careful on slopes with those.”
“How does a town agent know that?” asked Ida.
“I read,” said Vivian. That was all she said.
I had driven this woman to four hundred showings. I had never once heard her say the word tractor. I made a note in my head, under a heading I didn’t have a name for yet.
Ida gave her terms in the barn doorway, looking out at the rain.
“Here’s how this goes,” she said. “Saturday morning, I’m walking the boundary, all of it. Three and a half miles, the way Arthur used to every spring. You both come.”
“Happy to,” said Boone at once.
“Of course,” said Vivian.
“Whoever’s still walking when we get back to this barn,” said Ida, “I’ll listen to. Whoever isn’t, I won’t.”
She turned to Vivian. “Wear what you like. I don’t care about shoes. I care whether you walk.”
“Understood.”
Mortgage the goose came back from wherever he had taken the WELCOME mat. He had nothing in his beak. He looked pleased.
Ida climbed back onto the tractor and started it. Then, over the engine, she called back one more thing.
“Oh. And the line crosses Hollins Creek.” She held up two fingers. “Twice.”
We drove home in silence. That was normal. Vivian made calls in the car, and when she wasn’t making calls, she was thinking about the next one.
But she wasn’t on her phone. She was looking out the window at the fields going by, brown and wet and shining.
At the county line, my phone buzzed in the cup holder. It was a text from Nell.
Well???
A second one arrived before I could answer.
Second floor wants to know if the mats worked. Somebody saw you from the road.
Of course somebody had.
Then a third one arrived, a photo of the Flats Pool jar. The slips had climbed noticeably higher. Someone had taped a handwritten label to the glass, underneath Nell’s laminated one. It said SATURDAY??
I turned the phone face down.
“Caleb,” said Vivian.
“Yes?”
She didn’t look away from the window.
“Cancel my Friday,” she said. “All of it. And find me some mud.”
Up next: Practice Mud
Continue to Part 3 →