Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Soil
The drive to the northern county felt like traveling through a monochrome world. The autumn trees along Route 9 stood stripped and skeletal against an overcast sky. The address from Gordon’s hidden papers led me down a rutted gravel road lined with overgrown brambles and rusted wire fencing.
The main farmhouse of what used to be Mill Creek was now a derelict two-story clapboard structure, its wrap-around porch sagging toward the earth just like the couch Gordon had guarded so fiercely. A weather-beaten wooden sign swinging by a single chain read: Private Property – No Trespassing.
I stepped out of my sedan. The cold November wind whipped my graying hair across my face. As my boots crunched on the gravel, a voice cut through the stillness like a shotgun blast.
""Can't you read the sign, lady?""
A man in his late sixties emerged from an old corrugated metal workshop behind the barn. He carried an oily crescent wrench and wore faded canvas overalls. His suspicious eyes scanned me from my sensible leather shoes to my tremulous hands.
""I'm looking for information about Mill Creek Farm,"" I said, my voice firmer than I anticipated. ""About the children who lived here in the nineties.""
The man spat onto the dirt. ""State shut that place down twenty years ago. The church board packed up and scattered. Nothing here now but scrap metal and field mice.""
I stepped closer, reaching into my purse to pull out the photograph of the seven-year-old girl with the hazel eyes. ""Please. I just need to know who took care of her. Her name was Faye.""
The man glanced down at the photograph carelessly, but his expression suddenly froze. His weathered fingers twitched, leaving a smudge of motor oil along the white border. He looked from the photograph up to my face, studying the bridge of my nose, the high cheekbones, the identical shape of my hazel eyes. The hostility drained out of his posture, replaced by something resembling profound dread.
""Good Lord,"" he muttered under his breath. ""You're Martha.""
My heart stopped. ""You know who I am?""
""My name is Hank. Hank Vance,"" he said quietly, slipping the wrench into his deep pocket. ""Gordon was my older brother.""
I stumbled back a step, nearly losing my footing on the loose stone. Gordon had always told me he was an only child, raised by distant aunts in an orphanage after his parents died in a car crash. For thirty-five years of marriage, I believed he had no living kin on this earth.
""Gordon... Gordon had a brother?""
Hank let out a dry, bitter laugh that ended in a cough. ""He spent his whole life trying to pretend this dirt didn't exist, didn't he? He went to college, wore his neckties, married a lovely schoolteacher from the city, and built a fence around his clean little life. But when the fire started burning at his heels, who did he come running to? Me.""
Hank nodded toward the farmhouse. ""Come inside. The wind is picking up, and if Gordon finally died, then there's no reason for me to keep his damn lies buried in the mud anymore.""
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The interior of the old farmhouse smelled of wood smoke, kerosene, and decades of damp rot. Hank gestured to an ancient vinyl chair beside a roaring cast-iron stove. He walked over to a metal filing cabinet, unlocked the bottom drawer with a small brass key he pulled from around his neck, and retrieved a ledger wrapped in brown paper.
""Gordon didn't abandon that baby out of malice, Martha,"" Hank said, his voice dropping an octave as he turned to look at me through the dim light. ""He was running from the monsters that owned his soul. And if he had let you bring Faye home from that hospital, both you and that little girl would have ended up in a ditch before the week was out.""
