Page 65 of The Daring Times of Fern Adair
“Are we picking up anything?” She hoped not. When he answered, she let out a breath.
“No. I just need to talk to him. Name’s Tom. There’s a rumor he’s thinking about cutting free.”
“Maybe he knows it isn’t safe,” she suggested.
Cal shook his head and drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Man’s got a family to take care of and a farm to pull up out of the dirt. He doesn’t care if the work is dangerous. Nah, if he wants out, there’s another reason.”
Fern thought back to their visit to the Pier, and Cal’s cryptic talk with the pretzel seller. A few of his gin runners had been shot, and he’d seemed to think the pretzel seller knew something more than he was willing to share.
“Does this have anything to do with that Pretzel John fellow?”
Cal winced. “It might. That was a few months ago, but we’ve been hit a couple times since then.”
“Maybe Tom is being threatened,” she said. “Or his family is.”
Cal turned contemplative and went quiet.
The sun started to slip in the west, gilding the tops of the endless fields of corn. Farmhouses, silos, and barns were silhouetted against the horizon, the structures sometimes spread miles apart from one another, and other times clustered together in small communities.
They passed through a few sleepy, small towns, their main streets lined with hardware stores, diners, beauty shops, grocers and druggists. Some towns were more run-down than others. In each one, Fern wondered what it might be like to live and work there. To be one of the women hanging out the wash to dry in a dusty yard, chickens darting between her feet and children playing nearby. The rural towns and roads of northern Indiana had a sad, desolate quality to them, but the setting sun cast them in a golden light that seemed to promise better things.
Though for some places, it already looked to be too late. They passed a small house with boarded-up windows, and a little farther along, a weathered barn with a Coca-Cola advertisement painted on the broad side facing the road. The next few farms looked essentially the same, and the fields began to blur as hermind wandered.
When Cal let up off the gas, and the Roadster slowed, Fern blinked and looked ahead. “Why are we stopping?”
He’d come to a slow roll, still in the middle of the road. There weren’t any other cars on either horizon, just a weathered farmhouse and barn up ahead.
“That’s Tom’s place,” Cal said.
A green Ford truck sat parked in the yard, along with a maroon Buick and a black Ford. They looked familiar. Fern had seen them before, outside the Lion’s Den.
Rod was here.
18
“Ithought you were visiting Tom alone.” The knot in her stomach was immediate. Her pulse thundered in her ears.
“I was supposed to.”
Cal wasn’t happy. His brother’s presence worried him; after having seen the easy, almost relaxed side of Cal all day, his sudden tension and the snap of his voice were obvious.
“Can’t we just drive by?” Or maybe they could turn around. The Roadster had come to a full stop, though the engine still idled.
“Land’s too flat. We’ve already been spotted,” Cal answered, dashing away her hope of avoiding his brother. “Rod would’ve posted a lookout.”
What was he doing at the farmhouse?
Cal started driving again, picking up speed. Dread pooled in her stomach. The yard was clear, except for the autos. A single milking cow in a fenced-in pen watched the Roadster as it turned down the short lane betweenthe house and the road. The rutted tracks were muddy, freshly disturbed.
He rolled to a stop behind the maroon Buick. The engine clanked and hissed as he shifted in his seat.
“It’s too quiet,” he muttered. He brushed aside his trench coat, which he hadn’t taken off, not even in the diner, and settled a palm on the handle of a gun in his hip holster. Fern stared at it, pulse stuttering.
There was something wrong here.
“Stay by my side,” he said, then opened his door. He waited for her at the nose of the car, never turning his back on the house. The windows were blocked by drawn curtains. All of them.
The front door opened on squealing hinges, and a man stepped onto the porch. Vinny.
