THE SHADOW OVER VINLAND sample: “Where the Heart Is”

As Tim had expected, the farmhouse seemed smaller to him now. It was more than the difference between child­hood and adult perspective; he had noticed other times that abandoned houses looked hollow and shrunken from the outside. The yellowed grass was tall enough that the house looked like it was slowly dissolving into the earth, and the untrimmed elm tree now loomed over the roof. The dark windows were largely intact, but paint had flaked from enough shingles that the house could no longer be said to be “white.” The shed visible behind the house, never rock-solid to begin with, had slumped and folded in, with only one corner stubbornly staying close to upright.

Tim drove the rented van as far as he could up the cracked asphalt of the drive until he could feel the weeds from the cracks pushing against the front bumper.

Byron followed him up the crumbling concrete walk to the sagging front porch. Beside the front door was a tar­nished brass nameplate: The Roses. Before the final s was a scratched-on apostrophe; Tim couldn’t remember if it was he or Abby who had been so sure of their bad grasp of punctuation that they tried to correct it.

Byron turned and looked around. Surrounding the acre around the old farmhouse in every direction were the ram­blers of Rose Estates on tenth-acre lots, some with carports converted into extra bedrooms. Children shouted from blocks away. Someone gunned an engine. Two dogs barked at each other, or maybe with each other. A block to their left, someone cursed about his money, where was his fucking money, bitch.

“Wow,” said Byron. “Surreal.”

“I know,” Tim answered. “A house like this, you expect to look out the window and see cows. Not a subdivision. But that was the deal when Dad sold the land.”

“I guess they haven’t demolished it because of the owner­ship thing, right?”

“I don’t know there was a lot of demand,” Tim said. “Look.”

His wave took in the house to the right, beyond the over­grown hedge trees at the edge of the acre of property. The grass on that house’s lot was almost as long and at least as dry, and a rusting car was embedded in the grass where it had apparently been for multiple years.

Across the street, one of the three visible houses had a faded “For Sale” sign hanging askew from one hinge on its post. The house next to it didn’t even bother trying to sell itself; its windows were covered with particle board that had bloated and bleached in the weather. Only one house was occupied, and it didn’t seem much livelier by comparison.

“Yeah, I don’t feel like standing out here, Dad,” said By­ron. The wooden porch creaked under him, as if in answer. “You said you had a key?”

“No,” Tim said. “I said I could get us in.” He aimed a sharp kick at the doorknob, and another. The old wood trim splintered and the door shuddered as it bounced backward.

Byron looked around in all directions.

Tim said, “Nobody’s paying attention. Trust me.”

Each man took his duffel bag into the shadowed interior.

***

The first one Tim heard about was in 1980, when he was in third grade. The girl’s name was Emily. He didn’t have any particular connection to her; she was an unremarkable classmate in a class of 26. Her brother was two years younger, and he had seen them walking to and from school together.

It was February when she stopped coming, and nobody really noticed during that season of colds and flu.

After a week, some of the students started asking. The teachers probably did too, but they didn’t discuss that in class.

It was almost March when police, urged repeatedly by neighbors, broke through the locked front door at 152 Poly­antha St.

The father had pretty clearly done it. After he had forced his wife and two children to eat rat poison, he had clawed out the veins in his left wrist with a barbecue fork.

Rumors got around, and everyone had a version of the story. It wasn’t until decades later, when Tim researched old newspaper stories, that he discovered that none of the dis­torted rumors were actually worse than the truth.

Tim hadn’t known the brother’s name before reading it in the news story. It was Malcolm.

***

The outside of the farmhouse was familiar to him in a fun-house-mirror way, but the inside struck Tim as completely alien. Abandoned houses have a smell all their own—peel­ing paint and trapped humidity and carpeted dust—that sinks into the reptile part of the brain and makes it almost impossible to reconcile this interior, now, with the one stamped into memory. Yes, there were the doorways open­ing immediately off to rooms on the right and the left, there was the hallway running straight back from the front door with the staircase to the second floor on the right. But shad­ow cut off his vision well short, as if the floor plan of this smells-like-an-impostor house hadn’t yet built itself to con­form to his memories.

Byron was watching him, and Tim realized he had frozen just inside the doorway. He forced himself to look around, observe, treat this as rationally as anything he had studied for his doctorate or since. There was no mat inside the door, as there always had been in his childhood. The coat rack with the attached umbrella stand was gone from the corner, but Tim could see the four dents in the linoleum where its wooden feet had rested for years. Above the doorway to the left, opening into what had been the “front room,” was a framed cross-stitched banner, bedecked with fuzzy cobwebs and grayed by dust on every upward-facing surface of the frame: “Home is Where the Heart is.” Tim remembered his mother had hung that there when he was small; she must have left it behind when she had taken him and moved out.

“So,” said Byron, “where was your room?” It was an at­tempt at casual conversation that came out incredibly awk­ward.

“Up,” said Tim. He led the way.

…

For sale now!