Spencerville Read Free Page B

the open cornfields, into the town, just ahead of the hard rain. She found herself crying again and kept thinking, We promised to meet again.

Chapter Three
    Keith Landry walked through the quiet farmhouse. Distant relatives had looked after the place, and it wasn't in bad shape considering it had been empty for five years.
    Keith had called ahead to announce his arrival and had spoken to a woman on a nearby farm that he called Aunt Betty, though she wasn't actually his aunt, but was his mother's second cousin, or something like that. He'd just wanted her to know in case she saw a light in the house, or a strange car, and so forth. Keith had insisted that neither she nor any other ladies go through any bother, but of course that had been like a call to arms — or brooms and mops — and the place was spotless and smelled of pine disinfectant.
    Bachelors, Keith reflected, got a lot of breaks from the local womenfolk, who took inordinate pity on men without wives. The goal of these good women in caring for bachelors, Keith suspected, was to demonstrate the advantage of having a wife and helpmate. Unfortunately, the free cleaning, cooking, apple pies, and jams often perpetuated what they sought to cure.
    Keith went from room to room, finding everything pretty much as he remembered when he'd seen it last about six years before. He had a sense of the familiar, but, at the same time, the objects seemed surreal, as if he were having a dream about his childhood.
    His parents had left behind most of their possessions, perhaps in anticipation of not liking Florida, or perhaps because the furniture, rugs, lamps, wall decorations, and such were as much a part of the house as the oak beams.
    Some of the things in the house were nearly two centuries old, Keith knew, having been brought to America from England and Germany, where both sides of his family originated. Aside from a few legitimate antiques and some heirlooms, a good deal of the stuff was just old, and Keith reflected on the frugality, the hardscrabble existence, of a farm family over the centuries. He contrasted this with his friends and colleagues in Washington who contributed heavily to the gross national product. Their salaries, like his, were paid from the public coffers, and Keith, who had never successfully accepted the fact that you don't have to produce anything tangible to get paid, often wondered if too many people in Washington were eating too much of the farmers' corn. But he had dwelled on that many times, and if any of his colleagues thought about it at all, they'd kept it to themselves.
    Keith Landry had felt good when he was a soldier, an understandable and honorable profession in Spencer County, but later, when he'd become involved in intelligence work, he began to question his occupation. He often disagreed with national policy, and recently, when he'd been elevated to a position of helping to formulate that policy, he realized that the government worked for itself and perpetuated itself. But he'd known that secret long before he was invited into the inner sanctum of the White House as a staff member of the National Security Council.
    Keith stood at the window in the second-floor master bedroom and looked out into the night. A wind had come up and clouds were sailing quickly across the starlit sky. A nearly full moon had risen, casting a blue light on the ripening cornfields. Keith remembered these fields long ago when a drought had been followed by constant rain, and the wheat — they had planted mostly wheat in those days — wasn't ready for harvesting until late July. A bright summer moon had coincided with a dry spell, with a forecast for more rain, and the farmers and their families had harvested until the moon set, about three A.M. The following day was a Sunday, and half the kids were absent from Sunday school, and the ones who showed up slept at their desks. Keith still recalled this shared experience, this communal effort to pull sustenance out of