Page 83 of Girl, Haunted

CHAPTER FORTY TWO

Marrow Farm was their destination, but the place might as well have been on the dark side of the moon for all her Internet searches found about it.

Ella’s eyes were glued to an endless stretch of asphalt that bisected oceans of corn. They’d blown past the ‘Now Leaving Yamhill’ sign ten minutes ago and civilization had petered out and gave way to the primordial dark of the Oregon wilderness. All that remained was a backwater wasteland.

‘How far left, Redmond? You know where this place is?’

The sheriff gnawed his lip. ‘Out here somewhere. I swear it!’ He jerked the wheel and sent them careening down a dirt track better suited to tractors.

‘When’d you last see Marrow Farm with your own eyes?’

‘Can’t remember. Four presidents ago.’

She glanced at her cell. No bars, no GPS, no chance in hell of a digital assist should things go awry. Some things you couldn't leave to silicon and satellites. Right now, their only GPS was the sheriff's rusty memory, and Marrow Farm was the kind of place you only found if you knew the way.

Ella checked her Glock for the dozenth time, popped the mag, slammed it home. The weapon was an extension of her arm at this point, as much a part of her as her trigger finger. But even its familiar heft couldn't ground her, not with Luca's life hanging in the balance.

His face swam in her mind's eye – that cocksure grin, those bright eyes glinting with mischief or concentration as he puzzled over some casefile. The easy slope of his shoulders when he lounged in the precinct breakroom, lazily spinning theories. All of it, every stupid, wonderful, maddening inch of him – shecouldn't lose it. Not like this. Not when she'd just found her one in seven billion.

But first, she had to find the bastard who took him.

Miles bled into more miles. The cruiser bounced over potholes the size of swimming pools. Redmond cursed under his breath and then, like a miracle or practical joke, he stabbed a finger at the windshield.

‘There! God damn, I’d recognize that shitheap anywhere.’

Ella squinted through the bugspattered glass. At first, she saw nothing – just an ocean of rotting cornstalks stretching to the horizon under a black sky. But then, as they crested a hill, it loomed into view.

Calling it a building felt generous. The thing hulked on the edge of a desiccated field like a tumor metastasized out of the very earth. Wood slats, gray as a corpse's flesh, bent inwards under the weight of its sagging roof. The windows were all blown out or boarded up, like gaping sockets in a dead man's face.

The roach motel at the end of the world, but maybe the place where a madman was holding her boyfriend.

And right smack in the center, swaybacked and shot through with rust, was a weathered sign that read:

MARROW FARM. EST 1897.

The same one from the photograph in Ghostlight Books. This was it.

Redmond cranked the wheel and brought the cruiser skidding into a gravel-spitting halt a hand's breadth from the sign. Before he could kill the engine, Ella was out, Glock drawn, ready for battle. As she passed the sign, the rest of the farm appeared. Beyond the building she’d seen from afar, she spotted the main house squatted off to one side. Then there was a dilapidated silo that thrust skyward like an accusing finger. Other outbuildings dotted the land; tool sheds, chicken coops, what might’ve once been a smokehouse.

And there, dead center of it all, stood the barn. The building she’d seen from a mile down the road, and perhaps the biggest damn barn she’d ever laid eyes on. It dwarfed everything else, a titan among lesser structures.

Redmond appeared beside her. ‘Which building?’

Something in Ella’s primal brain, the part that’d kept her ancestors from being eaten by lions, screamed that the barn was where they needed to be.

Ella led the way across the damp grass and down to what she hoped was the entrance to the barn. But when she reached the door, something hit her.

Her blood flash froze. ‘Sheriff, you smell that?’

A now-wheezing Redmond said, ‘Gasoline.’

Ella let the thought settle. Cassius Auctor, or Vincent Marrow or whatever the hell his name was, suggested in his writings that he was planning on killing himself tonight. What if the crazy son of a bitch was planning on taking Luca with him? This psycho was exactly the kind of deluded wannabe-artist to go down with his ship.

‘He’s going to torch the place.’

She pulled open the wooden door and stepped into the darkness within. She fished her Maglite from her pocket and cracked it to life. Thethin beam captured snapshot glimpses of their surroundings – a derelict foyer, the remains of some ticket booth-looking setup, and ten tons of mold. Everything fuzzy with a decade's worth of cobwebs and dust.

‘Stay quiet, Sheriff. If he hears us, he might strike the match.’

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