Hidebehind

Three

The next morning, I found the strange jar Penny had mentioned seeing on the patio. It was in the morning. I had woken up early. I hadn't been able to sleep well for the past few weeks, and Grandpa's weird mutterings had sort of floated around in my skull all night, causing me to wake up at various black hours and wonder where I was.

Penny was sleeping, looking like a ghost with her pale skin and dark hair splayed across her pillow. I didn't want to wake her up, so I'd gotten dressed and left the room, secretly hoping that neither Grandpa nor Great Grandma was awake. I was partially lucky—they were awake; I could hear them moving around in their part of the house (the other two bedrooms were on the opposite side of the kitchen as the living room and our room), but they weren't anywhere I could see them. Then I'd quietly gone out the front door and into the bright Minnesota morning sunshine. The weather was colder here, I could tell. Even though it was about seventy degrees at present, that was cool for late August weather; I wondered what the winters were like and decided I didn't really want to find out.

The night before, at dinner, Great Grandma had given me and Penny a bunch of advice that I'd found a little unsettling. "Don't go out into the tall grass," she'd said. "Tall grass hides snakes. So does the pond out by the silo. Lots of weeds and things . . . don't go near the water. There's the old house about half a mile down the road. It's on my property, but you don't want to go there. They never finished the place. House is full of holes. It's abandoned. There's no grain in the silo—no need to worry about much there; just stay out of it. In fact, I would just stay around the house. This farm's got a lot on it, and I don't have the time to care for it. I can't promise what is or isn't out there."

If she'd been trying to freak me out or make me more depressed about being there, she'd done a great job.

Still, in the morning sunlight, I wasn't afraid of much. So I went out onto the patio, where one of the dogs from yesterday was lounging. He perked up when I stepped outside but I shushed him so he wouldn't bark. I didn't want to see anybody right now. I just wanted to be alone.

I didn't know the dog's name, but it was the four-legged one—the one I'd thought had some sort of tumor or wart on its head. When I looked him over, though, I didn't see the thing anymore, and in spite of my former hesitation, I began to scratch him behind his ears and under his chin. Maybe he wasn't so unfriendly after all.

The jar Penny had mentioned was glass—the kind people preserved jam and other things in. I didn't know how I knew it was a preserves jar—I must have had some memory of my Great Grandmother's preserves from a past visit. In any case, the jar was on the patio table, and its contents were glittering in the sunlight. At first, I couldn't tell what the jar held. Whatever was inside looked like an odd mass of pearly yellow and bluish-brown marbles, floating close together in some liquid. The closer I got to the table, though, the more cautious I began to feel. And when I reached the jar and picked it up, held it in my hand, I realized that it wasn't full of marbles but of bloated bugs—ticks, to be exact. If I looked close, I could see their black heads and legs sticking out of their blood-fat bodies . . . blood. They were filled with blood. Squirrel blood, people blood, dog blood . . . whatever kind of blood.

I whipped the thing back onto the table. What sort of weirdness was this? Who preserved bloated ticks? I wanted to throw up. Wanted to wash my hands with soap and water, but that would mean going inside, and I didn't want to risk seeing anyone else. So I jogged away from the patio and into the dirt driveway.

To the right of the house was a carport. Great Grandma kept a maroon Cadillac in there. I didn't know if she drove or not. I wondered whether she was too old. Or if it was too old. That car looked ancient. Behind the carport was a small, one-story, square building. There were some windows in it, but they were too high up for me to see into them. As I continued my exploration, I found the door to the place and peeked through its four-pane window. All I could really see were a bunch of shelves—shelves with china and jars and canisters, a big table in the middle of the room with tools of various sorts scattered across it. It looked really dim and dirty inside. I thought about going in. My hand went inadvertently to the doorknob, but I found it locked.