It was another mile to Duane McBride’s farm. Dale passed his great-aunt Lena and uncle Henry’s farm to the right—the house was dark—and wondered who lived there now. Uncle Henry had died in 1970, but someone had told Dale that Aunt Lena was still alive in a home in Peoria—suffering from Alzheimer’s, beyond communication for the last two decades or so, but still living. If the report was true, then the old woman had lived through parts of three centuries. Dale shook his head at the thought. What would it be like to outlive one’s spouse by more than thirty years? He felt a lurch in his belly at the thought. He no longer had a spouse, and the idea still seemed strange to him.

He almost missed the driveway to the McBride farm. The place had always been marked by two things—Mr. McBride’s refusal, because of his late wife’s request, to grow corn that would conceal the farmhouse from the world, and vice versa, in summer, and a quarter-mile of flowering crabapple trees that had lined the lane.

Now the fields were stubbled with still-standing stalks of harvested corn and most of the crabapple trees were gone. Dale knew just enough about farming to know that the remaining stalks meant that whoever was farming this land was using the “plain-tilling” method.

Dale drove slowly down the lane. When his headlights illuminated the dark farmhouse, his first thought was, Jesus, it’s smaller than I remember.

The place was dark, of course, without even the usual farmer’s pole light illuminating the area between the house and the sheds and barn. There was a front door, but Duane and his father had never used it, so Dale pulled around the side of the house and looked at the side door. Sandy Whittaker, the real estate agent, had said that no one could find a key but that it would not be locked and that the power would be turned on by the time Dale arrived.