The telltale yellowing of the leaves.
The soil so dry it felt coarse in her hands.
A knot of doom in her gut telling her the harvest was going to fail.
Darcy prayed for rain and, in the morning, walked the rows of contorted trees, sipping coffee and applying a strip of orange paint to any dead trunks the way her father had done before he died two years ago. Peaches needed the hot nights, but they also needed water, and the farm had gone weeks now without meaningful rain.
Shit, she said to herself. My first year in charge and the orchard withers into a pile of sticks.
That evening after work, Darcy turned the engine in her father’s old Chevy truck, the steering wheel still hot enough to burn her hands. She headed toward the Weeks’s Farm, a Christian boarding house for women a few miles from the town center, off Route 29. Her older sister, Beth, had lived there for several years, and Darcy was perpetually overdue for a visit.
Plus, she had something on her mind other than the parched family orchard.
There’d been a string of murders in town—three—and Darcy was getting nervous about Beth living away from home with minimal supervision. She was kind but had a low IQ. Big, blond hair and dimples. Beth bought every bogus magazine subscription, filled the offering plate at church, and said yes to every creep who made a pass at her. Was she not the easiest of targets?
Darcy rolled the truck windows down. Warm wind rifled through years of registration papers and fertilizer receipts paper clipped to the sun visor.
The light was falling and the blue hour came on. It was always Darcy’s loneliest hour, the most elegant hour, when she wanted more for herself. Better company, a different job, a family she didn’t have to look after. If only she’d stayed away from Gaffney after college. She’d give any ambitious young person that advice now—don’t go back home thinking you can just leave again. Your stoic father will up and die of lung cancer, your evangelical mother will beg you to keep things going, and your good-for-nothing brother will pawn the family silver and sell fireworks out of the truck he lives in. Beth, well, who could fault Beth for anything?
Darcy drove past farm stands, clapboard churches, kudzu-strangled billboards, and old white houses with blazing pink azalea bushes out front. Her auburn curls were pulled back in a loose ponytail. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head as the light faded. The truck’s turn signal was loud—a coarse, rhythmic ticking that stayed in her mind even after she flicked off the signal.
Darcy came to the turnoff and knew the Weeks’s place by its barren and browned pastures, discarded tractors, sun-bleached American flag, and the caved-in barn roof. As she slowed the truck to turn, she noticed a cow lying alone in the mud. Its neck looked funny, abnormally sunken toward the ground. Was it dead?
She stopped and stepped out of the truck. As her foot pressed into the dry grass, a few flies circled up from the earth and she swatted them away.
“Are you okay?” she called out, knowing it was a stupid thing to say to a cow, dead or not.
The cow did not lift its head or try to rise, but she thought she saw it breathing, a barely perceptible rise and fall in the rib cage. Then she saw its back leg move upward and come to rest on swollen udders. What could she do? Maybe I’ll tell Miss Barbara, she thought, getting back into her truck and pulling further up the dirt driveway. A barn cat dashed in front of her as she parked in front of the dilapidated house with cinderblock stairs and salmon-colored siding.
She knocked on the front door. No one answered, so she opened the door and called out, “Beth?”
There was a light on in the kitchen, and Darcy walked down a dark, carpeted hall to find Beth and another girl sitting at a table. The house smelled like beef broth and cigarettes. Beth stood up from the rickety kitchen table, smiling. Her thick, blond hair hung down to her shoulders and bangs fell across her eyebrows. She wiped her hands on her jeans and reached out to give Darcy a hug. Beth had gotten heavy over the years, the angles of her face now soft and rounded. Recently, Darcy had taken her to Belk to find new jeans and underwear.
“No one watches what she eats,” Darcy complained to their mother, Dee. “She has Eskimo Pies and Cheetos for lunch and microwaved fettuccine for dinner.”
“I didn’t know you were coming!” Beth said, beaming. “Want some ice cream?”
“No thanks,” Darcy said, looking around at the bare-bones kitchen, the row of slightly open cereal boxes, the cluster of brown bananas dangling from a hook. “I came to check on you.”
“Check on me?” Beth blinked.
Darcy paused. Of course Beth didn’t read the newspaper. Maybe her sister didn’t know about The Strangler, and maybe she didn’t need to. She got scared so easily. Shit, Darcy thought.
“How was work this week?” Darcy said instead. “Tell me about it.”
Beth exchanged wary glances with the other girl at the table, who went back to reading what looked to Darcy like a children’s chapter book about a cruise ship. The refrigerator hummed loudly.
“It was sad,” Beth said, looking down at her feet. Darcy noticed the cream-colored linoleum floor was warped and peeling.
“Sad how?”
“We had to take the stomachs out of the baby cows and put them in the freezer,” Beth clarified. “Don’t worry. I washed my hands a lot.”
“I know you did,” Darcy said, feeling queasy. She had the feeling Miss Barbara worked the girls too hard—and in exchange for what? This falling-down house that smelled like a sewer? Neglected cows wandering through the front yard?
“Do you want to come up to my room for a bit?” Beth said, smiling. Darcy knew Beth was proud of her room. She’d helped her paint it yellow—was it four summers ago? Time was folding in on itself here, and her promise of getting Beth back home seemed flimsy and distant.
They walked up the stairs together. The walls were bare except for a generic landscape painting of a forest clearing that someone had plastered a smiley face sticker onto. They opened the door to Beth’s room. There was a single, unmade bed over which hung a portrait of Beth when she was eleven, in a black leotard and tap shoes with a peach blossom in her hair. It had always bugged Darcy that her mother gave the portrait of Beth away so easily. “I can’t bear to look at it,” Dee told her once. “I had such high hopes for her.”
Beth took a few steps and then paused in the center of her room. She looked back at Darcy, then at the trash on her floor, then at the closet. Darcy sensed her distress.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, touching Beth’s back, wondering if her sister felt embarrassed of the dirty room.
“Nothing,” Beth said, turning around, forcing a smile. That’s what Beth did—she smiled. It was supposed to set others at ease, Darcy knew, but it only made her sad to see it, because it was one of Beth’s only tools in life for protecting herself or getting out of uncomfortable situations.
Beth picked up the candy wrappers and the soda bottle from the floor and put them in the waste bin underneath her desk. “Sorry it’s a mess in here,” she said.
“Don’t apologize,” Darcy said. Her eyes landed on a hair dryer on top of the bureau, still plugged into the wall. It was the old black one Dee used on them when they sat together on the bathroom floor with their heads hung, their mother’s impatient fingers tousling their hair. Darcy had a pleasant memory of the heat hitting the back of her neck.
“I should get you a new hair dryer,” she said.
“It still works,” Beth said, shrugging.
God, Darcy thought. Don’t you want anything for yourself?
“How would you feel about coming back to the farm for a while?” she asked.
Beth hesitated. “You know I want to. But you work so hard, and Mama don’t want me there.”
“We’ll show her how good it can be,” Darcy said, holding Beth’s arm as they sat down on the bed. “We’d all have a nice time, share the chores.”
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Beth said, smiling, “but you always get my hopes up when you talk like that.”
Darcy couldn’t find words to fill the hot silence. She wanted to do better by her family, but it was hard to push herself up and keep everyone out of trouble. It was hard to spend time with people she loved but didn’t enjoy when she was tired from work and already short on cash.
“How’s the orchard?” Beth asked, tilting her head.
“Dry,” Darcy said, looking down at her lap. “Real dry.”
“I pray for rain,” Beth said earnestly, patting Darcy on the back. “Every night.”
“I know you do. What about Daniel?” Darcy asked, looking pointedly at her sister. “Do you hear from him?”
Beth ran her fingers through her hair and looked out the window into the fading light. Darcy could tell she didn’t want to talk about their brother.
“Does he call or come by?” she pressed.
“No,” Beth said. Then, out of nowhere, she asked again, “Do you want some ice cream?”
Darcy shook her head no, then saw her sister’s mud-encrusted tennis shoes lined up next to someone’s boots by the wall.
“Have you had any male friends over recently?” Darcy asked, worried Beth was getting taken advantage of. Again.
“No!” Beth said, blushing. “I just, uh, borrowed those.”
“Do you need boots?” Darcy asked.
“I get by fine,” Beth said. “Sometimes the girls and I tie grocery bags on our feet.”
Darcy winced. She was starting to feel responsible for her sister in a way she’d never felt before. Beth shouldn’t live like this. It had been her mother’s decision, but now it felt like hers.
“How’re you and Mama getting along?” Beth asked, sweating.
“Not very well,” Darcy said.
“I know she’s hard,” Beth said, her big eyes radiating sympathy.
“We fight like dogs,” Darcy said with the same matter-of-fact voice she used when trying to act like the man of the house they all missed. But maybe that wasn’t the right model. Maybe her dad hadn’t been that great after all. Years of hard drinking, a bad temper, and not much in the way of emotional connection. But when he died, a void opened up and Darcy stepped in. Sometimes it gave her purpose to help her family and take over the orchard, and she prayed that feeling would only grow, because right now it didn’t feel like enough.
“Where’s Barbara, by the way?” she asked. “I saw a dead, or nearly dead, cow on my way in.”
“Miss Barbara’s laid up at the big house right now. She isn’t well.”
“Is she taking care of you? Do you have enough spending money?” Darcy asked, leaning toward her sister. “Do you need me to run to the grocery store?”
“I’m fine. Stop worrying!” Beth said, smiling. “You’re the younger sister, remember?”
“I’ll call tomorrow,” Darcy said, rising to her feet. She hugged Beth tightly. Her sister smelled like baby powder and flowers, like a little girl. When they were young they used to smell perfumes at the drug store while their mother shopped for toothpaste and lipstick. Beth loved the smell of White Shoulders and once spilled half a bottle on the front of her shirt at the store and burst into tears. The family car smelled like White Shoulders for a long time.
As she pulled away from her sister, she noticed Beth’s dry and blistered hands.
“Next week, I’m going to take you to the nail salon next to my office,” Darcy said, nodding at Beth’s fingers. She hated when she made promises like this.
“I’d love that,” Beth said, squeezing her arm. “If you can find the time.”
“Goodnight,” Darcy said. “Lock the door after I leave, okay? And call if you need something. Please.”
“You take care,” Beth said, standing at the front door.
Darcy felt unsettled driving out. The boots by the door. The Strangler at large. The cow was still when she passed it this time, no breath filling the chest. Who would remove it? Would anyone?
Darcy drove too quickly over the uneven gravel driveway back out to 29. She turned down the radio because the advertisements for mattresses and used cars for no money down made her angry. It wasn’t the message as much as the urgency in everyone’s voice.
We’re paying attention to the wrong things, she thought.
Her mother had used a similar urgency when they were children and the lack of rain threatened the peaches. If you care about your father and this family then you should get on your knees every night and pray to God for rain. Sometimes, when the rain didn’t come, Darcy threw the Bible across the room, and it landed like a tent on the carpet.
▴ ▴ ▴
The next afternoon, Darcy hustled alongside the workers in the orchard, a hot sun overhead. She reached into the back of the pickup and lifted a gallon bucket of gray water. It sloshed onto her T-shirt and bare knees as she lugged it to the base of a peach tree and poured someone’s shower water onto the trunk. The ground was so dry the water pooled on top of the soil before filtering down to thirsty roots.
She didn’t want to fail her family or the farm. Failing was expensive and embarrassing.
The fumes from Bruce’s truck exhaust mixed with the smell of her body every time she lifted her arms to grab a bucket of water. Bruce, her lead farmhand, was obsessed with Nicolette Larson and played “Lotta Love” several times a day from his running truck, singing in a falsetto as he watered trees alongside her.
The stupid jazz flute part came on.
“Last time I can take this song today, Bruce,” Darcy said, her tone too sharp. She was hot and the small of her back ached.
“Okay, Boss,” he said, smiling. Large beads of sweat clung to his nose. He clamped a cigarette between his teeth. They’d gone on one date in high school—a slasher film at the drive-in—but that was a decade ago, and now they were just two humans trying to make life work in a small, South Carolina town. Every now and then there was a flash of interest, lust, something, but heat and hard labor had a way of dampening things. She wished she liked him more. Maybe one day.
Bruce had cut the lower half and sleeves off a white Hanes T-shirt, and Darcy could see a trail of coarse blond hair running from his navel to the waistband of his khaki work shorts. He was the kind of man with a big, easy smile you couldn’t pin anger on. Late twenties. Former military. He had a drinking problem but it didn’t get in the way. Yet. She glanced at the pile of empty Coors cans in the bed of the pickup.
“You seen the papers today?” he asked. He was standing behind her as she lifted the last gallon bucket, sweat falling from her forehead across her eyes. He reached into the cab of his truck with one long, deeply tanned arm and pulled out the paper. He pointed to a black-and-white police drawing of a man with thin lips and wide-set eyes.
“He’s strangled three women within ten miles of the police barracks. Now that’s crazy.”
Darcy knew immediately who it was. Her heart began to race. She hoped she was wrong.
No, she thought. I have to be wrong.
“You know him?” Bruce eyed her.
“That’s everyone you’d see at Deval’s,” she said, turning away with the bucket. Deval’s was a convenience store with a small cafe that sold reheated rotisserie hotdogs and beer. It’s where all the farmers, landscapers, and hourly workers went for coffee and lunch. She hated going in there because her father’s old friends sat smoking in a corner and they’d get real quiet when she walked in.
“With those weird eyes? Far apart like that? I dunno.”
Darcy watched the cloudy water swirl around another tree trunk. She was quiet, thinking about the drawing. The eyes.
“It’s not your fault if the orchard fails this year,” Bruce said, assuming she was upset about the trees. “Your daddy had bad years too.”
“You think people would see it that way?” she asked, exhausted. She slammed the tailgate of his truck shut.
“They don’t care that you’re a lady farmer.”
“That’s all they’ll talk about if I mess up.”
Bruce cleared his throat. “What do you hear from Beth?”
She appreciated his attempt to change the subject.
“I’m going to get her out of the Weeks’s place as soon as the harvest is over with.”
“Beth’s a good girl,” Bruce said, nodding in approval. “Never meant anyone no harm.”
“I wish Mama could see it that way.”
“You’re the woman of the house now, ain’tcha?” Bruce said, clapping her on the back before getting into his driver’s seat. She heard him crack open a warm beer and rewind Nicolette Larson as he drove through the two-track dirt path out of the orchard and onto the access road. He’d grab dinner at Deval’s, linger with his friends for a drink, then head onto Route 29 and back to his trailer in Cowpens, and show up at the orchard at seven thirty a.m. sharp the next morning. They both knew she couldn’t get on without him.
Darcy walked back to the split-level ranch her family had owned since the sixties, where she now lived with her mother. It was an eight-minute walk she could do in her sleep. She entered the house and walked straight toward the bathroom for a shower. Dee was in her recliner, watching the television on top volume.
“Look!” she cried out without turning around. “An angry rabbit attacked Jimmy Carter. While he was fishing!”
“Mama.”
Darcy liked Jimmy Carter. Dee couldn’t stand him.
“It’s true! He’s so ridiculous out there—can’t even fend off a little rabbit.”
Darcy ducked into the bathroom. She turned on a cold shower and stepped in, enjoying the shock, rinsing her hair. She was determined not to take her mother’s bait.
When she walked out of the bathroom in pajamas, Dee was standing at the sink doing dishes in bright yellow gloves, watching the second television she kept on the counter in the kitchen. Darcy saw her mother was staring at the police drawing of The Strangler, which had made the five o’clock news.
Dee looked up from rinsing the lasagna pan to address the television directly. “He’s not bad looking.”
“You can’t say that about a serial killer,” Darcy said, wincing. She looked at her mother’s face. Had she seen the resemblance?
“Why the hell not?”
You know why, Darcy thought. But neither of them wanted to say it.
“I guess he has stupid eyes,” Dee said quietly. She scrubbed the pan vigorously, staring into the soapy water.
“Don’t you think The Strangler looks a little like Daniel?” Darcy blurted out. She’d been holding it in all day, and it came out of her like a lightning bolt.
Her mother’s eyes widened behind her thick glasses. The corners of her little smoker’s mouth curved downward.
“I told you,” Dee said, gazing into the darkness of the trees, blowing a stream of smoke into the night air, “that man has stupid eyes. Daniel doesn’t have stupid eyes.”
Daniel had been in and out of police custody since he was fifteen and was selling fireworks and pickled eggs at a truck stop on Route 29 the last she’d heard. She figured he was also into some hard drugs. Last time he’d come around, he’d taken a drawer full of silver and the cash from Dee’s purse.
“Have you seen him lately?” Darcy asked.
“You won’t let him in the house anymore,” Dee said, scowling. She exhaled. “How could I see him?”
Darcy sensed Dee had always loved Daniel best of all. He was the youngest, and when he was a baby he’d screamed every time he left Dee’s arms and that had meant something to her mother. It showed loyalty, Dee said.
What it really showed, Darcy thought, was a prolonged sense of entitlement.
Later that night, Darcy sat at the kitchen table in a pilled, white bathrobe doing her checkbook. She liked to keep an immaculate checkbook; to her, it felt like setting her world right, controlling what she could.
She was staring out of the sliding glass doors that led to the deck when she thought she saw a man standing in the yard. She gasped and ran to the window.
“What’s gotten into you?” Dee asked, scowling.
“I thought I saw a man out there. Looking at us.”
“We’re not much to look at anymore.” Dee made her way to the glass doors with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “You can’t let the news get to your head.”
“You’re not going out there!” Darcy said, holding her arms out wide to block her mother’s path.
“You think someone’s gon bother messing with an old lady?” Dee asked, pushing past.
Darcy didn’t want to admit that, yes, that’s exactly what she thought.
“You’re supposed to be the smart one,” Dee said, lighting her cigarette and taking a draw. Defiant, she leaned casually against the railing in red-rimmed glasses, a light cotton sweater, short khaki pants, and scuffed white tennis shoes, her mouth pinched around the cigarette.
Darcy, heart pounding, stood protectively out on the porch with her mother while Dee finished her cigarette.
Later, as Darcy reconciled the last entries in her checkbook, she had the sense someone was watching her again through the window. She stared out at the dark night.
Dee filled a glass of water, preparing herself for bed.
“I saw Beth today,” Darcy said. It felt like a confession.
“And?” Dee drank a sip of water, staring at Darcy.
“And I was thinking she’d be safer here.”
Dee rolled her eyes. “If she comes back she’ll be your responsibility for life. You’ll never get rid of her. You’ll find her behind the azaleas, spreading her legs for one of the workers,” Dee continued, shaking her head.
“That’s not true,” Darcy said, starting to shake with anger.
“It’s happened before. Don’t think you’ll find another Miss Barbara willing to take in a girl like Beth.”
“Have you seen the way she lives, Mama? Do you know what they have her doing for work?”
Dee marched to her bedroom and slammed the door.
Minutes later, Darcy could hear her mother having a coughing fit; she usually had three or four each night. Dee hadn’t given up cigarettes after her husband’s lung cancer—in fact she’d added half a pack per day, as if hastening toward the same end.
Her parents hadn’t even liked each other when they were living, she thought. Why rush to be together again?
That night, lying in bed between worn floral sheets, Darcy thought about a sentence Daniel had written about himself in his high school yearbook. People say I’m one of those tortured geniuses, it said beside his picture. But as far as Darcy knew, no one had ever mistaken her brother for a genius. And he wasn’t all that tortured either.
“It’s because your father liked the smell of DDT,” Dee once confided after they lived alone together. “He chased the crop dusters, huffing that stuff, and I don’t think it did wonders for any of y’all.”
Darcy slapped a mosquito on her arm and wiped her hand on the bedsheets. It was hot but she was too afraid to open her windows.
The papers said The Strangler had a three- or four-day old beard and was over six feet tall. What if one day they mentioned a tattoo of a copperhead on his forearm? Darcy wondered. That’s how she’d know it was Daniel.
But it wasn’t Daniel, she assured herself. The killer just looked like Daniel.
Feeling foolish, she got up to turn on the lights. She checked underneath the bed and in the closet the way she and Beth used to do when they shared a room. Confident she was alone, she climbed back in bed.
Darcy, her mind falling toward sleep, recalled her brother at nine years old, knocking the wind out of her mother with a baseball bat, swinging it at her back when she wasn’t looking. Dee had crumpled onto the grass, glasses flying off her face onto the lawn, too shocked to scream, rows of hot-pink peach blossoms swaying behind her.
▴ ▴ ▴
Darcy and her mother always ate their oatmeal in front of the kitchen television. They could turn from the television and look out at the morning from the big bay window. Bruce and his team were already outside, lugging hoses and buckets into the orchard. Dee eyed them as she swiped a spoon through her oatmeal and rifled through the paper.
“You don’t think it’s one of our fellas killing folks, do you?” she asked, looking down the bridge of her nose.
“Mom.”
Darcy watched her mother take in stingy mouthfuls of food. Wrung-up little mouth, she thought, pinched from clenching cigarettes and being angry all the time. Dee was bad with criticism of any kind; she took it all personally. Tell her she put too much butter in the green beans and she wouldn’t serve you any. Tell her you’re allergic to the fabric softener and she’d stop doing your laundry.
Dee straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “I was thinking last night,” she said, “thinking about calling on Daniel.” She looked at Darcy for a reaction. “For security purposes. He’s good with guns.”
“We don’t need him around here causing trouble,” Darcy said, annoyed. “We’re already short on cash.”
“I’d give up a few dollars to stay safe.”
“I can keep us safe.”
“We need a man or a mean dog.”
“I’m late for work,” Darcy said, feeling as though she might explode just like her father had done routinely throughout her childhood, pushing his chair back from the table, swearing, throwing plates.
She stood up and placed her unrinsed bowl in the sink, a passive-aggressive way of leaving work for her mother, underscoring her place in the pecking order. Tax season and too many dead trees had drained her; she felt justified in her anger. She was working two jobs! Her family was impossible! But by the time she reached the office for her day job, an accountant’s office in a shopping center between a nail salon and a paint store, she felt guilty and imagined her mother scrubbing dishes and thumbing through books she’d already read, alone in their house, smoking cigarette after cigarette on the back porch. Waiting.
▴ ▴ ▴
When Darcy got home from her accounting job, Dee was making shortcakes, pressing her fluted biscuit cutter into the dough with aggressive strokes. Peaches were boiling down to syrup in a pot.
“Those look good,” Darcy said, standing next to her mother. She was trying to make peace, and maybe Dee knew it.
“In case Daniel comes by,” Dee said, a gleam in her eye. She broke an egg into a glass bowl, whisked a drop of water into it, and using a yellowed brush, applied the egg glaze to the pastries, giving them a strange sheen underneath the fluorescent lights.
“You called him?”
Dee nodded, a defiant look on her face. “It’s still my house,” she said.
“What did he say? Where has he been?”
“Lord only knows. He didn’t answer.”
“I don’t think he has a phone anymore, Mama.”
“I called his friend and left a message.”
Darcy poured herself a bourbon and orange juice, the drink her father had made in the evenings when he was tired or coming down with a cold. She leaned against the counter and watched her mother’s lean body arranging the pastries just so.
“I don’t want him here,” Darcy said, bringing the glass to her lips.
Dee didn’t respond. She just kept brushing the pastries with butter.
Finally, Dee turned around. “You know he’s killed again,” she said. “A woman behind the Winn-Dixie.”
Darcy felt her blood go cold. “You think it’s Daniel too?”
“No, stupid. The Strangler.”
Darcy swirled the ice in her glass. She walked out to the orchard to look at the trees, pausing every few feet to look over one shoulder.
Bruce was cleaning up after a harvest day and was drinking a beer by his truck. He waved her over, somehow still cheerful after eight hours in the hot sun.
“You onto your second job?” He handed her his beer can.
“Mhmm,” she said, lifting the can to her lips. The beer was a little warm but somehow still good. Somehow still able to remind her of drinking in a field as the summer sun went down at eighteen, smoking a cigarette in a hammock. Unburdened.
“We work too much,” he said, swatting at a mosquito, “and now we’re too ugly to make it in Hollywood.”
“Speak for yourself,” Darcy said, punching him in the stomach, his sweat clinging to her fist. Was there a flicker of interest? It had been so long since that feeling had been stirred up inside of her. Now, as years ago, the spark between them felt faint and anemic. She wanted a spark in her life. Any kind of spark would do.
She said good night and turned toward the house, eager to get inside before dark.
She locked the door behind her. Did Daniel still have a key?
In the morning, the biscuits her mother had made were still there, untouched on a silver tray, hard as porcelain on top, soft and rotten looking on the bottom, swimming in a pool of gelatinous fruit.
▴ ▴ ▴
Darcy had orange paint on her fingers; she’d discovered six more dead trees on the south side of the property that morning. The leaves were sun-scorched and much of the south-facing fruit had turned brown and mummified, not unlike the skin of ancient men people pulled from those peat bogs, she thought. Some trees were still producing fruit, and the barn was half full of crates brimming with fat peaches, not quite ripe, the white fuzz catching the small rays of light that peeked through the barn slats.
Bruce was taking stock of things when she reached him. Fruit flies swarmed his truck, which he’d loaded early before it got too warm to handle the fruit. Handling the fruit was everything—one bruised peach could spoil a bunch.
“Careful,” she said to a man throwing a crate inside the truck bed, an admonishment she knew was more about her anxiety and maybe an attempt to reassure herself of her authority. Bruce and his men knew how to load the peaches. They’d done it a hundred times the year before and the year before that.
“It’s going to be all right,” Bruce said. His skin was already glistening.
It wasn’t a great harvest, not even close—they kept estimated yields per year written on the wall of the barn for comparison—but it might be enough to get them by. They couldn’t have another year like this, though, Darcy thought, and certainly not two.
“I’ll keep food on the table,” Darcy said, swatting a bee away from her face.
“Hey,” he said. “I was thinking. Do you want to see a movie this weekend?”
She looked at him funny, like she couldn’t hear him. “What?”
“A movie.”
“Would you take a maybe?” She wanted to go to the movies with him but not in her current state—worried, exhausted, with a stress breakout on her chin.
“From you? Sure.”
Later that morning, Dee unfolded the paper and spread it out in front of them. She took a big swig of coffee, winced at its heat, and pointed her finger at the headline as she swallowed.
This time The Strangler had taken a twenty-three-year-old nurse who lived alone not five miles down the road from the Weeks’s farm. She’d worked the late shift and hit the grocery store afterward, and the police said he likely followed her to the store.
“I’m going to get Beth right now,” Darcy said, standing up from the table.
“You just wait and see,” Dee said. “You’ll never—”
“What’s so hard for you about having her here?” Darcy snapped.
Dee looked down at her lap. Darcy could hear the chatter of the workers out back, the clink of footsteps on metal ladders.
“You think I’m mean,” Dee said, eyes still downcast, “but you can’t imagine how hard it is to see your own child like that. So easily hurt. I got to the point where I couldn’t take it.”
“I can’t take it,” Dee said again, starting to cry.
“Well I can. We have to.” Darcy turned her back on her mother and let the kitchen door slam behind her.
▴ ▴ ▴
The cow was still motionless in the mud as Darcy drove by the Weeks’s pastures, but she was certain now it was dead. She didn’t stop.
She parked in front of the farmhouse, underneath a lightning-scarred willow tree that moved a little in the breeze. When she opened the front door, she sensed the house was not entirely awake, though she could hear a television or a radio on in a room somewhere. She stepped over a dish of food that Beth had probably left out for the cats.
The bright morning light didn’t flatter the house. There were magazines and catalogs piled in the foyer and hallway. The house stunk of rotting bananas, waterlogged carpet, and mildewed shoes.
“Beth,” Darcy called out on the staircase. She could feel the stairs heaving underneath her steps.
Beth’s bedroom door was closed. Darcy sensed a commotion, the sound of two people moving frantically, perhaps just awake.
“Beth?”
Beth opened the door and stood, backlit, in an overly large T-shirt with a dolphin on it. Darcy was shocked at the sight of her sister’s saggy knees and dimpled thighs.
“You surprised me!” Beth said, scrunching up her nose.
“Beth,” Darcy said, stepping forward, “is someone with you?”
Beth shook her head. Her eyes were wide, maybe red, maybe filling with tears. Her blond hair was matted on one side as if she had been sleeping hard.
“Where is he?” Darcy said, starting toward the closet. “Is he in here?”
“Don’t,” Beth said, holding up a hand. “Don’t go in there.”
Darcy pushed past her sister and opened the closet. She felt her breath catch as her eyes adjusted to the figure hugging his knees before her.
“Daniel,” she said, looking at her brother in the dark closet.
It was eerily quiet except for the dull sounds of a television somewhere in the house.
“Why are you hiding?” she asked.
As he began to stand up, she felt fear move through her body. “Why are you here?” she asked again, backing up a little. She tried to keep her voice firm and authoritative.
“I needed a place to stay,” he said, rising to his full height. “I don’t see the big deal.”
He was around six feet tall, unshaven, his dark hair grown long and curling on his neck and behind his ears. He wore a black T-shirt and a baseball cap. But everyone wears a baseball cap, Darcy told herself. Everyone.
“I’m sorry,” Beth said between sobs. She stood behind them with her face in her hands. “But he needed help. He said he was homeless.”
“I’m between jobs,” Daniel said, clearing his throat. “I just come and sleep on the floor at night.”
“Have you been taking her money?” she asked, looking from Daniel to Beth. She kept the tone of her voice as unemotional as she could. She wanted the facts, but she didn’t want Daniel to get angry.
“Yeah, I owe her some money,” Daniel said, shrugging his shoulders. He had dark rings underneath his brown eyes. Darcy could smell his body odor.
“He’s good for it,” Beth said encouragingly, “and I like helping him.”
“How much has he taken?” Darcy asked. Looking into Beth’s eyes, she knew Beth had no idea how much her brother owed her. “How long has he been sleeping on the floor?”
“I like having him here. He sleeps on the floor and makes me feel safe. He doesn’t cause trouble.”
Darcy took a deep breath. Who was she to say what they could and couldn’t do? Who was she to arrange the lives of her adult siblings? She walked over to the big window and looked out at the backyard, and farther out, the pastures. The body of the dead cow was still there. Darcy figured it would be there for a long time.
She became aware she was uncomfortable having her back to her brother and turned to face him. “What do you get up to these days?” she asked, the tension in the room as thick as spoiled milk.
“Nothing much. Still selling fireworks, but I went out on my own.”
“Out on your own how?”
“I sell from the back of my car.”
Darcy nodded. He’d been in trouble before for selling stolen merchandise.
Daniel smiled as if something ridiculous had just occurred to him. Even though a few teeth were missing, he could still turn on the charm. “What—you think I’m that killer they been talking about on television?”
Darcy tried to keep her face as plain as possible. “No,” she said.
“Liar. You never did think too highly of any of us,” he said accusingly. “Did you?”
“All I did was come here to check on Beth.”
Beth smiled at both of them.
“You thought I might come up here and cut my sister into a few pieces and leave her body with the cows, didn’t you?”
“Shut up.”
“You and Mama got to turn off that TV.”
“Shut up both of you!” Beth said, her slow and pretty face breaking into tears. “We’re family. Ain’t none of us going to cut the other up.”
She reached for both of their hands. Darcy stared at her feet.
They stood there in Beth’s dirty bedroom, listening to a fly hit a windowpane over and over again.
“I heard the cows last night,” Daniel said, moving away from his sisters and rubbing his eyes.
“That’s because they separate the moms from the babies,” Beth said, her face solemn. “I asked Miss Barbara once. I wish I hadn’t.”
“They were loud.”
“It’ll stop soon. It only lasts for a few days. They sure do hate being apart.”
Darcy realized she hadn’t been in the same room as her brother and sister for a long time. It made her think of a day when her father lifted them into the bed of his truck so he could check out a domestic dispute down the road involving one of his friends. He’d hit 29 going fast and the wind swept the saliva out of the kids’ mouths. The sun was hot but setting, and the ribs of the truck bed scalded their skin. Beth had held on to Darcy, who was still small, maybe ten or eleven at the time. Daniel was on his knees, leering dangerously over the side of the truck bed when her father took a sharp turn, and they all tumbled into each other, knocking heads, laughing.
“How’s life with the old witch?” Daniel asked Darcy.
“Oh, don’t say that,” Beth said. “She’s our mother.”
“She made you shortcakes last night,” Darcy said, “with peaches.”
Daniel grunted. “How’s the orchard?”
“One bad year away from a for-sale sign and a bulldozer,” Darcy said calmly. “Maybe two. Wait long enough and it’ll be a housing development.”
Beth clutched her sister’s arm and Darcy could feel her rough and blistered skin. Mom is right, she thought. It’s easier not to watch. It’s easier not to take responsibility. But she knew she was going to put both of them into her car and drive them home. Feed them. Make sure they were okay.
“I miss Mama’s shortcake and peach ice cream,” Beth said, sighing.
In the distance a cow was lowing, calling her calf through a barbed wire fence. Darcy’s mind was already drifting away, thinking of where she could get a mean dog. She thought of credits and debits, of water in and peaches out. Of women and cows and broken necks.
“You know,” Daniel said, looking out at the dry yard behind the house, “I’ve always hated peaches. But I still have the habit of praying for rain.”
▴ ▴ ▴
Dee dumped a box of spaghetti noodles into rapidly boiling water.
“I guess you just think you can show up and I’ll make magic happen,” she muttered. She lifted the lid of her saucepan and dumped a can of crushed tomatoes over browning hamburger. She poked at the meat with her wooden spoon. To Darcy, it smelled like childhood. Like a warm summer night with peaches baking in the dying sun. Someone cutting grass, a neighbor grilling, a child crying in the distance. It activated the pit of her stomach, the old unhappiness. The past none of them could explain or touch. The anticipation of a fight brewing in the house.
“Mama, ain’t nobody confusing those dry noodles with magic,” Daniel said. He chewed on a toothpick and rocked backward in the kitchen chair.
Beth covered up her laugh too late and Dee turned to glare at her. The three children were sitting around the kitchen table in the same spots they always had. The caning was a little loose in the chairs now. Bite marks on the furniture legs from a long-gone dog. Beth sat in the center across from Dee’s place, with Darcy and Daniel on either side.
“I guess you three just think I’m here to look out for you for life,” Dee said, turning her back to them again. “Like I’ll just keep picking up after your messes.”
“I haven’t made a mess far as I can see,” Daniel said. He cracked open a warm Coors he’d found in the garage. Darcy stared at the copperhead tattoo, now faded on his forearm.
Beth stood up and put an arm around her mother’s shoulders. “Why don’t you sit down, Mama?” she asked. “Let me finish dinner.”
“And burn the sauce? No, thank you.” Dee said stiffly.
Beth shrugged and returned to the table. Darcy swallowed a sip of water that tasted swampy, as if it had been sitting just underground. Her stomach was knotted up. “Well,” she said.
Dee didn’t say much as they were cleaning up after dinner. Daniel was pulling out blankets for a night on the couch. Beth was brushing her teeth, her duffle bag slung into a corner of Darcy’s room.
“Happy now?” Dee asked through clenched teeth.
Darcy didn’t answer.
▴ ▴ ▴
The next morning, Darcy walked into the kitchen, blinking in the light, to pour herself a cup of coffee.
“He’s gone,” Dee said bitterly. She had an unlit cigarette and was walking toward the back porch.
“Did he take any money?”
“You know he left because you were so awful to him. He knew what you thought of him! That he was some deranged killer capable of strangling women and leaving them in a pile of trash behind the Winn-Dixie.”
“Don’t pretend like you didn’t consider it yourself.”
“You know they have a lead now? And it’s not Daniel. But you just go on thinking you’re better than all of us!” Dee said, lighting her cigarette indoors. “You think you have life figured out, that you’re going to save us.”
“Who else is going to save you?” Darcy practically spat.
“The good Lord himself!” Dee’s cigarette dropped from her lips and fell to the floor. She mashed it into the carpet with her foot but didn’t bother to pick it up and stormed out onto the back porch.
“Good luck with that one, Mama,” Darcy yelled. She was still wearing her bathrobe, but she slipped on sandals and stomped outside into the orchard, grabbing a can of orange spray paint.
The sky was sherbet colored and the air already hot. Darcy could smell the scent of peaches rotting on the ground. The wasps were increasing in number.
She heard voices in the barn. It was too early for workers to be there. She was scared. As she got closer, the voices sounded like moaning, as if someone was in pain. What if The Strangler was in there, pressing a wire into another woman’s throat? What if her mother was mistaken or the police had the wrong guy?
Adrenaline coursed through her body, numbing her tongue. Darcy lifted the old metal latch and ripped the barn door open, only to find Bruce on top of Beth in the back of his pickup truck. Her pasty white legs were thrust upward. Both were stunned and just stared at her—Bruce in a modified push-up position balanced precariously over Beth.
There was a quiet moment, the three of them in the hot barn with the flies and peaches, the morning sun coming through the dry slats of the barn. Darcy began spraying the truck and then Bruce’s back and Beth’s legs with orange paint. The can, nearly empty, hissed. She threw it on the ground and ran back through a row of peach trees toward the house, bathrobe flapping open, the hot air streaming around her body, sweat beading on her forehead and chest, dripping into her eyes. She screamed in anger at the trees until she stopped, breathless and hunched, in the middle of the orchard. She thought of the dead cow in the Weeks’s pasture and how it had wandered away from the herd, putting itself in danger. Dying slowly and alone.
Just how wrong would it be to save myself? she wondered, looking up at the watercolor sky. And only myself?