Page 68 of In Her Wake
“Patricia, wait!”Jenna called, reaching out to grasp what was already intangible.“Please, I need more—”
But the dream was collapsing around her, the farmhouse blurring like a watercolor painting left in the rain.The hill beneath her feet began to flatten, the sky folding in upon itself.
“No,” she protested, “not yet—”
Light assaulted her closed eyelids—morning sun streaming through her bedroom window where she’d forgotten to close the blinds the night before.Jenna sat up with a gasp.The dream clung to her, more vivid than usual, refusing to fade into the background noise of consciousness.
“The lost and found,” she whispered.
She hurried to her desk and woke her laptop.The screen blinked to life and she typed “farm” and “lost and found” into the search bar.
The results populated immediately—thousands of links to lost and found services at farms, agricultural festivals with lost and found booths, farms that had been lost and found again through historical preservation efforts.Too broad, too unfocused.
Jenna narrowed her search, adding “Missouri” to the terms.The results refreshed, fewer now but still too many to be useful.She scrolled through several pages, scanning for anything that might match what she’d seen in her dream.
On the fourth page, a link caught her eye: “The Lost and Found Collective—A Haven for Wayward Souls in Missouri’s Heartland.”
Her pulse quickened as she clicked the link.A simple website loaded, its appearance intentionally rustic—a header image showed a farmhouse with white clapboard walls and a red roof.Beside it stood a weathered gray barn.
“That’s it,” Jenna breathed, leaning closer to the screen.
She scrolled down, devouring the information.The Lost and Found Collective described itself as “a communal living experiment and working farm for those who have lost their way in life.”Founded fifteen years ago by a former social worker named Eliot Lansing, it offered sanctuary to people needing to rebuild their lives away from whatever they were leaving behind.
Photos showed the farm from various angles—aerial views confirming its location nestled between rolling hills, just as in her dream.Images of people working the fields, sharing meals at long wooden tables, gathered around bonfires under star-filled skies.Faces blurred or turned away from the camera, privacy clearly a priority.
The “About Us” page explained their philosophy: “Some come to heal from trauma, others to escape situations they can no longer endure.We ask few questions about the past.Here, it’s about building a future, day by day, through honest work and simple living.”
At the bottom of the page, an address: 4738 Wildwood Road, Haversham County, Missouri.
Jenna’s hands trembled as she wrote down the address.Haversham County bordered Genesius to the north—perhaps a two-hour drive from Trentville.She checked the time—just past seven in the morning.If she left soon, she could be there well before noon.The possibility that Piper might be there, might have been there all these years, sent a surge of adrenaline through her veins.
Jenna headed to the shower.The hot water washed away the last cobwebs of sleep as she mentally prepared for what lay ahead.She couldn’t be certain her sister was there, couldn’t allow herself to hope too fiercely after twenty years of disappointment.But this was the strongest lead she’d ever had.
As she toweled off and dressed in practical clothes—jeans, a light sweater, boots sturdy enough for farm terrain—Jenna felt an unfamiliar sensation.It took her a moment to recognize it: hope, fragile but persistent.
She would need to call Jake, let him know where she was going.But that call could wait until she was on the road.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
The fields that stretched out before Jenna were a patchwork of greens and browns.Two hours on the road had given her time to think and to temper her expectations.Dreams, even lucid ones, were rarely as straightforward as they seemed.
She had called Jake after she got underway, giving him a brief explanation of where she was going and why.He’d offered to come with her, but she’d declined.This journey felt deeply personal, something she needed to face alone.
“Still,” he’d said before hanging up, “let me know how things work out.I’ll be thinking about you.”
The memory of his concern warmed her now as she navigated a particularly sharp bend in the road.Ahead, the landscape opened up, revealing a crossroads marked by a single blinking yellow light suspended above the intersection.But it wasn’t the light that caused Jenna to ease her foot off the accelerator.
A scarecrow stood at the corner of the field to her right.
Jenna pulled over, gravel crunching beneath her tires as she brought the car to a stop on the shoulder.She sat for a moment, staring at the scarecrow through her windshield.Surely this must be the one that Patricia had told her about in a dream.
She checked the directions one more time.According to the website, the Lost and Found Collective was half a mile down the road to the left of the intersection.With a deep breath, she pulled back onto the road and made the turn.
The entrance appeared exactly where it should be—a simple gravel drive marked by a hand-painted wooden sign that read “The Lost and Found Collective” in faded blue letters.An arrow pointed up the drive toward buildings visible in the distance: a white farmhouse with a red roof, and beside it, a weathered gray barn slightly to one side.
Jenna turned into the drive.The car bounced over ruts in the gravel, dust billowing behind her.She parked in a small area near the barn where several other vehicles were stationed—an old pickup truck, a couple of modest sedans, a van with peeling paint.Taking a deep breath, Jenna stepped out of her car.
Up close, the farmhouse looked like her dream vision, but older.The white paint was peeling in places, the red roof had faded to a rusty hue.Just outside the open barn doors, a young man was repairing a tractor, his hands blackened with grease.He looked up as Jenna approached, wiping his palms on a rag tucked into his back pocket.
