Lila laughed, perhaps more than the joke deserved. She was more relieved at the outcome of her near collision. But she laughed anyway.
“Second star on the right...,” Lila began.
“And straight on to morning,” Ella finished, without any break in the rhythm.
Still laughing, Lila turned the ignition key.
The car did not start.
The engine grumbled once, then fell silent.
“Not here,” Lila said. “I don’t....”
“Just give it a moment. Maybe it has to catch its breath, like we did.”
Lila glanced quizzically at Ella. That wasn’t precisely the kind of automotive advice she was used to receiving.
After a minute or two, Ella nodded. “Now.”
The engine turned over on the first try, and purring like a giant tiger on some unknown pathway rank with growth, the car rolled forward.
Like a forgotten memory, canting slightly on the uneven gravel, the small bucket rested by the side of the road.
CHAPTER THREE
Apparently, Ella really did know Shadow Valley well, although, as she explained as they made their way through the thicket, she hadn’t lived at the place back by Main Street for years and years. Even so, as soon as Lila guided the car in one final long, looping circle paralleling the creek—crick—maneuvered it through a sharp right-hand turn onto an almost invisible lane, and urged it to the top of a small rise, the two women found themselves looking down into a hollow.
It seemed deeper than the rest of Shadow Valley for some reason, with barely enough arable land for a couple of reasonable-sized fields and a large frame house. The house was more weathered than the rest Lila had seen, and, although it had at least two stories, it seemed almost to crouch beneath the thick branches of two huge box-elders. Neither had yet been scarred by axe or saw, and the scattered outbuildings were similarly untouched.
“Perhaps it will be deep enough here that they won’t have to pull the buildings down,” Lila said, more to herself than to her companion.
“Perhaps.”
“I’m not sure that I would want to live out here, though,” Lila said as she began the slow descent toward the farm house. “Seems awfully isolated. Even a little scary.”
“Perhaps.”
The drive had nearly disappeared beneath weeds and thistles—surely more overgrown than merely the past few months would account for—so Lila turned most of her attention to picking her way around discarded bits of machinery, random-seeming piles of wood so weather-worn that it could serve no earthly purpose except as tinder, and assorted potholes and rocks that formed an unofficial minefield.
Neither she nor Ella spoke until the car stuttered to a stop a few yards from the porch. The engine clattered a couple of times after Lila had turned the ignition off, then with a shudder, died.
“So here we are,” Ella said into the silence. “The old Stevenson place.”
“Yes. The last one.”
“Last?”
“I’ve gotten quit-signatures for all of the other farms in Shadow Valley. That’s the last formal act of transferring ownership from the families to the government.”
“Ah, so that is what you are doing out here. I was wondering. You didn’t look familiar and you certainly weren’t familiar with the area. And it’s not exactly the perfect place for a picnic.” There was an unspoken question in the casual comments, one that Lila chose not to answer.
“No,” she said, “I’m not from here.”
They sat in silence for a while. A rather uncomfortable silence, if truth be told, because Lila really didn’t want to discuss why she found herself at this derelict of a farm, and Ella seemed unwilling to introduce any new topics of conversation.
Finally, Ella broke the silence.
“Why are you out here?”
This time, faced with the direct questions, there was little Lila could easily do but respond. And truthfully, there was no reason not to.
“Here? Well...it’s not quite the same situation as the other farms. I held off coming here until the end, until I had met with all of the other families. I had hoped that....”
“Yes.”
“Well, to be frank, I hoped to see someone out here. I would even have been glad...well, perhaps relieved would be a better word...to see an angry homeowner glowering at me from the porch. This silence...this emptiness...it’s disconcerting.”
“So no one lives here?”
It seemed a bit odd to Lila that Ella, who obviously knew how to get to the Stevensons’, didn’t know what had happened. But before she could say anything about it, Ella continued. “Why did you make the long trip, then, if there’s no one here?”
“That’s just the problem, Ella. I don’t know if anyone lives out here or not.” Lila sighed. “It’s...it’s complicated.” She felt like an actor in a badly scripted soap opera, falling back on triteness and cliché.
“I don’t have anywhere to be in the next little while,” Ella said, fussing with a fleck of invisible dust on her blouse. That was an open invitation for Lila to tell all, even while the phrasing skirted any direct questions.
“Okay. Let’s get out and check the front door. And I’ll explain.”
They opened their doors and got out, their feet crackling on bits of dried grass and weeds. Together they made their way up three rather precarious steps, wobbling once or twice as the wooden risers threatened to give way, then stopped at the dark wooden door. Its panels were splintered and rough. Lila felt sorry for any hand that tried to knock on that surface.
The only thing breaking the unrelieved black of the wood was a small square of white paper covered with tiny print.
“That,” Lila said, pointing to the paper as if it were a source of lethal contamination, “that is an Eminent Domain declaration.”
Ella looked at her blankly.
“That means that unless someone shows up today to sign for transferral of ownership, this house, the outbuildings, the land will all belong to the state government without any restitution to the current owner. The state gets it free. The owner gets screwed.”
“But I thought you said that no one lived here.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know if anyone does or not.” Not for the first time today, Lila sighed deeply. She glanced around. At the far end of the porch an old wicker-work swing hung from two thick, rusted chains.
“That looks strong enough to support us,” she said. “Let’s sit down for a bit and I’ll try to explain.”
