Lana’s Story Part 28: Somebody Was Living in Our Hayloft

Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 27 here to catch up on Annie’s note in the swing chain, the replies on Nadine’s laptop, the freshly stamped page in Clay’s folder, and the scale house wall covered in photos of our farm.

Last time, we followed Nadine’s empty gray sedan to the grain elevator at the county road crossing. Her cardigan was folded on the seat, her badge was on the dash, and her phone was gone. Inside the old scale house we found a warm copier, a red Pulled stamp with wet ink, and a corkboard full of pictures of June carrying her egg basket, every one of them taken from our own hayloft window.

Then Sheriff Cole Pruitt read the last weigh ticket. A dark sedan with a county plate had crossed the scale at 5:52 this morning. His own unmarked car. There are only two keys to it. Cole has one. His nephew Deke has the other.

And while we stood there, a dark car with its headlights off rolled out from behind the last grain bin and headed straight for our farm, where Royce and Vera were waiting alone.

Twelve Minutes Behind the Dark Car

Cole didn’t run to his truck. He didn’t have to. He just walked very fast, and June and I had to run to keep up.

“Seat belts,” he said, and then he hit the county road so hard the gravel sprayed the scale house wall.

The dark car was already gone. There was nothing ahead of us but dust hanging over the road like smoke, and our farm was twelve minutes away on a good day.

Cole grabbed his radio. “Dispatch, go look at my unmarked unit in the courthouse lot. Look with your own eyes. I want to know if it’s sitting in its space.”

I was already calling Royce. It rang four times and went to voicemail. I called again. Voicemail.

“Try Vera,” June said. Her hand was clamped on the door handle so tight her knuckles had gone white.

Vera picked up on the first ring, but she didn’t say hello. She whispered.

“Lana. A car just came up the lane. No lights. It went around behind the barn.”

“Where are you?”

“Tack room. With Willow. Royce made me get in here. He said don’t come out and don’t look out the window.” Her breath shook. “Somebody went up the outside ladder. I heard boots on the rungs. Right over my head.”

“Where’s Royce?”

There was a long silence. Then, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it: “He went out there.”

The radio crackled. “Sheriff, your space in the lot is empty. And the key box log shows nobody signed that car out since Friday.”

Cole put his foot all the way down.

The Car Behind the Barn

We came up our lane in a storm of dust and stopped so hard my seat belt bit into my shoulder.

The car was right where Vera said it would be, parked tight behind the barn where nobody on the county road could see it. A plain dark sedan. No lights, no siren, just a little antenna on the trunk. The driver’s door hung open, and the engine was off, but I could hear the hood ticking as it cooled.

“That’s mine,” Cole said in a flat voice. “That’s my car.”

Nobody was in it.

Then the barn door slid open and Royce stepped out, breathing hard, with straw stuck to the knees of his jeans and a long scratch across the back of one hand. I have never been so happy to see that man in my life.

“He went out the loft door on the creek side,” Royce said. “Dropped right down onto the hay wagon and ran for the tree line. I got close enough to grab his jacket, and he twisted right out of it.” He held it up. A brown canvas work jacket, worn soft at the cuffs.

“Did you see his face?” Cole asked.

“Ball cap. Head down. He was quick, Cole. Real quick. And he knew exactly where that loft door was. He didn’t have to look for it.”

Cole took the jacket with two gloved fingers and turned it over. Something slid out of the inside pocket and landed in the dirt.

A phone, with a cracked purple case.

June bent down and stared at it. “That’s Nadine’s,” she said. “She set that phone on my kitchen table a hundred times.”

Cole didn’t touch it. He looked at the phone, then at his own car with the door hanging open, then off toward the tree line where the creek runs. He didn’t say a word, and somehow that was worse than anything he could have said.

Somebody Was Living in Our Hayloft

I went up the inside ladder before anybody could tell me not to.

I’ve climbed that ladder since I was six years old. I know every rung, and I know the smell up there, dust and sweet hay and old wood warm from the sun. But the second my head came over the edge of the loft floor, I knew somebody else had been calling it home.

In the back corner, behind the stacked bales where nobody ever goes, there was a nest. A green sleeping bag pressed flat in the hay. A steel thermos. A box of granola bars with half of them gone. An empty camera bag, the kind for a big lens, unzipped and lying open. And a phone charger plugged into the old outlet by the light switch, the one Grandpa Hank put in for the radio.

I put my hand on the sleeping bag. It was still warm.

The loft window was propped open with a stick. When I looked out of it, I could see the whole farm. The house. The porch swing. Willow’s paddock. And the henhouse, with the third nesting box from the left lined up perfectly in the center of the frame.

That’s where every one of those pictures had been taken. Right here, from the exact spot where I used to sit and read with my feet hanging out over the yard.

Under the thermos was a spiral notebook. I didn’t open it all the way. I only lifted the cover with one finger, and there were dates and times in neat rows. Tuesday, 6:10 AM, J to henhouse, basket. Thursday, 6:05 AM, J to henhouse, third box. And at the very bottom of the newest page, in the same careful hand: Today. L found the folder. Tell N.

I had to sit down in the hay for a minute before my legs would hold me.

When I came back down the ladder, Vera was standing in the barn aisle with her arms wrapped around Royce’s middle, her face pressed into his barn coat. Willow had her nose over the stall door, blowing softly at both of them.

“You went out there,” Vera was saying into his coat. “You told me to stay put and then you went out there by yourself.”

“Somebody’s been sleeping over my horse for two weeks,” Royce said. “I wasn’t going to wait for an invitation.” But his big hand was cupped around the back of her head, holding her there like she might blow away. “You’re all right. That’s what counts. You’re all right.”

I had never seen Vera let anybody hold her like that. Not even me.

What Cole Didn’t Say

We all ended up in the yard by Cole’s car, and nobody wanted to be the first one to talk. So June did it, the way she always does.

“Cole Pruitt,” she said. “I taught you Sunday school when you were nine years old and you lied to me about eating the communion crackers. You had that same look on your face then that you have on it right now.”

Cole took off his hat and turned it around in his hands.

“Nadine Hollis,” June went on. “She was Nadine Pruitt before she married that Hollis boy. Wasn’t she.”

It wasn’t a question. Every one of us turned and looked at Cole.

“She’s my little sister,” he said at last. “And Deke is her boy. My nephew. I gave him that spare key last winter so he could run the car in for its oil changes. I didn’t think anything of it.”

“You stood in my kitchen this morning,” I said, “and read her email. She has something on my boy. And you never said that boy was Deke.”

“Because I didn’t know what Rita had on him,” Cole said. “I still don’t. I swear on my badge, Lana. Three years ago Deke got himself into trouble over in the next county, and Nadine fixed it. She never told me how, and I never asked, because I didn’t want to know.” He looked down at the canvas jacket in the evidence bag. “That’s Deke’s coat. I bought it for him at the feed store two Christmases ago.”

Royce let out a low breath. “So he’s been up in my hayloft. Watching June. Taking pictures for Rita.”

“Or for his mother,” June said quietly. “Watching for her. Telling her what we found. Tell N.“

Nobody had an answer for that. Cole put his hat back on and walked to the edge of the yard, and I heard him on the radio, asking for two more units to search the creek bottom and the tree line. He asked them to bring a dog.

His voice sounded like it belonged to an old man.

The Photo From the Tree Line

The sun was going down behind the cottonwoods by the time the second unit pulled in. The light came in low and gold across the yard, and the tree line along the creek turned black against it.

I went back up to the loft. I told myself it was to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. The truth is, I wanted to stand where he had stood and see what he saw.

I was at the open window when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

A text, from Nadine’s number.

Nadine’s phone was sitting in an evidence bag on the hood of Cole’s car. I could see it from where I stood.

I opened the message. It was a picture. A woman with curly strawberry-blonde hair, standing in a hayloft window with gold light on her face, looking out over a farm. It was me. Taken from the dark trees along the creek. Taken less than a minute ago.

Under it were three lines.

Lana, it’s Nadine. I’m on Deke’s phone. He didn’t take me, I came with him, and he is not the one you should be afraid of. Don’t tell Cole where we are. It wasn’t me or Annie who stamped that twelfth page. Ask my brother where he was nine days ago.

I looked down into the yard.

Cole was standing alone by his car. Everyone else had gone to meet the new deputies. And while I watched, he leaned in through the open driver’s door, opened the glovebox, slid something small and flat out of it, and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Then he looked straight up at the hayloft window.

Straight up at me.

So now I’m asking you. Is Nadine telling the truth, or is she protecting her son? What did Sheriff Cole Pruitt just take out of that glovebox? And if the man who has been watching our family all along is the one wearing the badge, who in this house is still safe?

Part 29 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss what happens next.