Beasts of the Field: The Confrontation
Episode XIII
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← In Episode XII: The Murderer, the person responsible for Samantha Scott’s death recalled the crime.
While Beasts of the Field can be read as a standalone story, you may appreciate the characters and their interactions more if you are familiar with Judith’s first adventure, Down in the Holler, in which she investigated a cold case in rural Kentucky. Click here to read Down in the Holler.
Judith woke to something soft beneath her. A bright fluorescent light glared through her eyelids, and somewhere nearby was a voice.
As her senses floated back to awareness, fitting together the mismatched pieces of the world around her, the odd, tinny voice came into clearer focus.
“Police, fire, or medical?”
“Medical.” Tim’s voice was close to Judith, his tone ragged and tense. “I need an ambulance to the McFerrin police station.”
Alertness jolted through Judith’s body, and she opened her eyes. The harsh overhead light bore down on her, and reflexively she shielded her face with her hand. “No, no ambulance.”
Tim jerked back, startled.
“I don’t need an ambulance,” Judith said. “I was just trying to do a reading. I’m fine. Don’t call an ambulance.”
Tim watched her, his face tight and skeptical. After a long, hesitant pause, he spoke again into his phone. “Sorry, cancel the ambulance. But I might be calling you back in a minute.”
He hung up his phone. In the too-bright lights, he stared at Judith, and she stared back, explanations evaporating before she could formulate them.
She was in Chief Kelly’s office, on a threadbare orange couch, and Tim knelt on the floor beside her. Outside the office, the police station was empty, silent, aside from one gray-haired officer sitting at his desk.
Letting out a rough breath, Tim dropped his face to his hands, and a horrible, jagged ache nudged into Judith’s chest.
“I’m sorry.” Judith bit her lip, pinching it between her teeth. Slowly she sat up, easing herself into an upright position. “I thought I could do it without – without anything happening.”
“I thought you had a brain bleed or something.” Tim’s words were muffled in his hands.
“A brain bleed?” That was oddly specific.
“From your head injury.”
“What? No, the CT scan didn’t detect anything like that. It was just a little swelling that’s supposed to heal on its own. Just a mild traumatic brain injury.” Urgency pushed past the guilt that welled up in her at the sight of Tim’s slumped shoulders and pale, anxious face, and on an impulse Judith grabbed his hand. She regretted it almost instantly – what if he pulled his hand away? Swallowing, she pushed the strange worry aside. “But I did it. I saw Leon.”
Tim lowered his hands from his face, but he held onto Judith’s.
She leaned forward. “It was an accident. Leon had no idea there was angel’s trumpet tea in the pantry. It wasn’t labeled. He was just trying to make Samantha tea to calm her down, but when she died, he panicked. He hid her body in the shed.”
Tim’s shoulders tensed, and he shook his head. “Oh, Leon.”
“Did the officers leave already?” Judith said, looking around the mostly-empty building.
Tim nodded. “Some of them left right after we got the warrant, to get in position. Chief Kelly and everyone else left a few minutes ago, right after you passed out.”
“I thought you were going too.”
Something like shock, almost indignation, passed over Tim’s face. “I wasn’t going to leave you here,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Judith’s face grew hot, and she dropped her eyes.
“I gotta get a hold of Chief Kelly. This isn’t gonna end well.” Tim stood, holding onto Judith’s arm as she moved to follow him. When she seemed steady on her feet, Tim pulled out his phone again, dialed, and held it up to his ear, waiting. He pushed out the door of Kelly’s office and made his way through the quiet station.
Judith stayed closed behind him, shoving her arms into her coat as she walked.
With an aggravated sigh, Tim, returned his phone to his pocket. “He didn’t answer. I’ll have to try the radio.”
They hurried out of the station and across the parking lot to Tim’s car. As soon as the car doors shut, Tim started fiddling with the radio, asking for Chief Kelly. He backed up, tires squealing, and swerved the car around toward the street. Then, with a jerk, he slammed on the brakes.
“Wait, no,” he said. “You need to stay here. Leon almost certainly has a gun. It’s not safe.”
“You’re not going up to the house, are you?”
“No, I’ll be down the hill with the chief, helping with coordination.”
“I’ll stay in the car. I won’t get out, I promise. The car’s bulletproof, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but, Judith, you can’t –”
“I’m already here, and you need to hurry. I can tell you the rest of the vision on the way.”
Tim groaned, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. Then, straightening up, he shifted the car back into drive.
“They’re already in position. But I’ll radio Bowen, ask if he’s seein’ any signs of movement at the house.” Chief Kelly’s voice on the radio went silent, and Tim pressed harder on the gas pedal, rushing toward the mountains.
“That’s not good,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“Bowen’s leading the raid. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s any chance he’s gonna back off without a direct order from the chief.”
His mouth tight, Tim drove up the winding roads into the holler.
When Judith searched back through her memories, Leon’s face was different now. His expression wasn’t aggressive, but guarded, his eyes not angry, but wounded. They’d been wrong about him, so wrong. But in her vision she’d seen the shotgun in his hands, had seen him loading the shells. He knew the police were coming. The element of surprise was no longer on their side, but they refused to believe they were compromised.
It was a tragedy, a disaster waiting to happen.
As they neared the holler where Leon’s house loomed at the top of the tall, wooded hill, a battery of distant gunshots reached their ears. Suddenly cold in spite of the warm car, Judith clenched her hands in her lap, and Tim drove faster.
When at last Tim’s SUV screeched to a halt on the dirt road down the hill from Leon’s house and drew even with the line of silent police cars, there was a brokenness in the icy air, a frantic energy.
An ambulance was on the scene, doors open, and an officer lay on a gurney.
Tim’s face paled, his mouth set. “Stay here,” he said, turning to Judith. “Seriously. Do not get out of the car.”
“Don’t take off your Kevlar.”
Tim gave a brief nod and zipped his coat over the thick black vest. Closing the door, he ran to Chief Kelly, whose usually impassive face was stiff with stress and shock.
The freezing breeze carried snippets of their words to Judith.
“He started shootin’ through the window –”
“– two men injured –”
“– holed up in there with a gun.”
Then, five words came clear as a bell.
“Let me talk to him,” Tim said.
Glacial cold rushed through Judith’s body. What did he just say?
She watched them closely, straining to make out more of their hushed conversation. Tim couldn’t possibly be suggesting –
Chief Kelly’s caterpillar eyebrows lowered, but, whatever it was that Tim wanted, Judith knew, somehow, that he’d already won.
From the trunk of his car, Chief Kelly dug out a megaphone and handed it to Tim. Then, with his Kevlar beneath his coat and a helmet on his head, Tim strode up the hill toward Leon and his gun.
Judith’s breath stuck in her throat. She couldn’t just sit here, waiting, useless, while Tim walked toward an armed and terrified man.
But she had to, she’d promised.
She didn’t have a weapon, didn’t have combat training, and her body was broken. She couldn’t even do a psychic reading without losing consciousness.
She could do nothing, absolutely nothing.
Except wait.
For nearly half an hour, Judith could hear distorted echoes of Tim’s voice through the megaphone, and it was all that allowed her to breathe. He was talking; he was alive.
But then Chief Kelly’s phone rang. He answered it, spoke a few words. And Tim’s voice over the megaphone went silent.
She was going to vomit. She couldn’t breathe. Every nerve in her body was alert, panicking, her hands cold and pale and numb.
A sudden rap on the window sent an icy flurry through Judith’s skin, and she jerked her eyes up to meet Chief Kelly’s.
She cracked the door open. “Is he okay?”
His eyebrows lowered until Judith could barely see his blue eyes. “He asked if he could go up to the house, so he could talk to Leon.”
“He what?” Judith’s throat tightened, and for a terrifying, confusing moment, she thought she might cry in front of the Chief of Police.
“In this kinda situation, we usually try to set up a phone line for negotiation. But Leon’s shut off his cell phone, and he ain’t got a landline.”
“So Tim’s just walking up to the house?”
Chief Kelly’s face didn’t change, but the silence stretched between them while cold air filtered into the car, making Judith shiver.
“If anyone can talk him down,” Chief Kelly said at last, “it’s Tim.”
The low winter sun was dipping back down toward the treetops, the harsh daylight softening in preparation for evening, when there was a sudden burst of movement from Chief Kelly and the officers around him.
Judith’s eyes snapped onto their faces. She hadn’t heard any gunshots. What had happened? Was Tim hurt?
Her muscles ached from sitting, but her heart thumped harder, a horrible chill leeching into her bones.
What had happened?
But then a cluster of figures appeared at the top of the hill. Judith squinted toward them, searching for Tim, her heart beating too loudly for her to hear Chief Kelly’s quick, sharp commands to the officers.
The first figure she made out was Officer Bowen. Holding the rifle tight in his hands, his face was red, his muscles taut. A sudden pain jabbed into her head as Judith looked at him. Fury rolled from him in hot, needling waves.
Then, amid the other faces in the group, she saw Tim.
He was alive, not a trace of blood on him, walking down the hill beside a handcuffed Leon. The air that Judith hadn’t breathed deeply through the hours of waiting and watching and worrying alone now rushed into her lungs, and dizzy relief swirled around her head.
Leon’s face was crestfallen, his eyes puffy with the dregs of tears.
Pain squeezed Judith’s forehead, throbbing, and suddenly she knew.
Tim had told him. She could see it in Leon’s face, could feel it in the horrified shame that permeated the air around him. He knew now what had killed Samantha.
An unexpected glimmer of hope welled up in Judith. Was it coming back, her ability? She’d take a headache now and then if it meant she could see again, see the things she’d seen before.
The officers moved with quick efficiency, speaking to Leon in loud, official voices, pushing his head down so he wouldn’t hit it on the top of the police car as he ducked into the back seat.
She watched Leon’s eyes settle on Tim with a grim respect, watched Tim nod in response.
Then a sharp knock on her window startled her from her thoughts. Bowen stood outside the car.
He pulled open the door, letting in a whoosh of cold air. “What did you tell him?”
Judith cocked her head. “Excuse me?”
“What did you tell him? You told Morrissey something, didn’t you?”
“I told him that I had a vision of Leon,” Judith said. “But, seeing as you don’t believe in psychic visions, I’m confused as to why you’re interested.”
“What’re you even doin’ here? You ain’t supposed to be here.”
“I’ve been in the car the entire time.”
“What’re you an’ your boyfriend tryin’a do?” Bowen’s voice rose. “Make us cops out to look like a bunch o’ idiots?”
Faces turned toward them, curious glances from the other officers.
Judith’s face burned. “He’s not my – We’re not –”
Bowen leaned down closer, and Judith jerked back with a start.
“What did you tell him?” Bowen said, his voice low, and the sudden quiet chilled Judith more than all his noisy blustering.
A sharp pain bloomed in her forehead, pressing behind her eyes, and a rush of sensations washed, unbidden, through her.
A seed of long-festering resentment, its roots growing, snaking into fragile layers of insecurity. Breeding, spreading, rotting –
“Bowen.” Tim’s voice, suddenly beside the car, held a tone that Judith had heard before, though usually only with angry, high-strung criminals. A note of calm, a wary authority, a warning. He set a hand on Bowen’s shoulder.
With the sudden, explosive swing of a baseball player, Bowen hurled his fist up, connecting with Tim’s face, and he shoved Tim back against the car with a metallic thump.
Blood spurted from Tim’s nose, and he threw up his arm, blocking Bowen’s second punch before it could land. Bowen snatched the collar of Tim’s coat and hit out at him in another wild, uncalculated swing.
“Bowen, cool it!” Tim yelled, using his arm as a shield against Bowen’s fist and holding him at bay with his other elbow.
Bowen drew his arm back again, hand clenched, and without thinking Judith darted from the car.
“Stop!” she shrieked, snatching his arm.
Bowen shook her off, flinging her back. On the frost-slick grass, Judith’s feet shot out from under her, and she tumbled backward. Her shoulders struck the open car door, and she ricocheted off, striking her ribs against the running board before slamming into the hard ground with a force that knocked the breath from her lungs.
Judith didn’t see Tim throw a punch.
But she heard the heavy thud as Bowen hit the ground, saw him scramble back to his feet, stunned and red-faced with rage, just as Chief Kelly and another officer reached him. Each of them grabbed an arm, yanking him back from Tim.
Then Tim was kneeling over her, his face spattered with blood. “Are you hurt? Did you hit your head?”
She shook her head, struggling to drag air back into her chest. Pushing herself onto her elbows, she sat up, gasping for breath as her lungs stuttered back into motion. “I’m okay. I just – landed hard.”
Tim watched her, his hand on her back, as her breaths slowly evened out. Then, before she had time to process what he was doing, he put his arms around her and stood, pulling her up with him.
Her face suddenly warm despite the chilled air, Judith looked up, then gasped. “Your nose!”
“It’s just a nosebleed. I’ve had worse.”
Judith reached into the car for her purse. Digging through it, she came out with a wad of tissues and shoved it at Tim.
Holding the tissues to his nose, he tipped his head back.
“Don’t do that!” Judith reached for his arm.
“What? It’s what you do with a nosebleed.”
“No, it’s not.” Judith tugged Tim’s arm until he acquiesced and sat sideways in the passenger’s seat, his feet on the frozen grass. She adjusted the angle of his head. His hair was soft, she noted, just as she’d pondered in her fleeting, distracted thoughts the night before. Not that the texture of his hair was relevant to anything at all. “You hold your head in a neutral position, slightly tilted forward.”
“I thought the point was to slow down the bleeding.”
“If you tilt your head back, you’ll end up swallowing your own blood.”
“Oh,” Tim said, his voice muffled and nasally. “That’s gross.”
“Exactly.”
“How do you know so much about nosebleeds?”
“When a question pops into my head, I look up the answer,” Judith said. “Everyone does that.”
“Are you saying you lie awake at night thinking about bloody noses?”
“It was just something I’d wondered about.” Judith caught the amused smile on Tim’s face, camouflaged behind the tissue and drying blood, but she continued anyway. “I’d heard people argue for both a backward and forward tilt, and I wanted to have the most correct, up-to-date information. I don’t like ambiguity.”
“You don’t like ambiguity?”
Judith chose to ignore Tim’s tone, which she’d learned to interpret as gentle sarcasm. “It doesn’t make me some kind of exotic animal. Most people don’t like ambiguity.”
“You two okay?” came a voice behind her.
Chief Kelly approached, still wearing his Kevlar, his blue eyes lined and weary.
“I’ve had worse,” Tim said with a shrug, then turned to Judith. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m okay, but that’s due to Noah and Clem, not Officer Bowen,” Judith said. “He didn’t intend to knock me down.”
Anger flashed again over Tim’s face as he looked toward Officer Bowen, who now sat glowering in the passenger seat of one of the squad cars.
Chief Kelly cleared his throat, making his mustache shiver. “Doesn’t much matter if he meant to or not. He’s an officer of the law, and he’s held to a higher standard. He can’t just go around throwin’ punches ’cause somebody steals this thunder.”
“Is that what that was about?” Tim said, frowning.
“His ego’s about as sturdy as a chicken egg,” the chief said. “Havin’ you swoop in to save the day without firin’ a shot after his raid went wrong, that had to sting.”
Judith pulled more tissues from her purse and handed them to Tim. “It’s nothing new. He’s been resentful of you for years, probably since middle or high school.”
“What? Why?”
Judith cocked her head, trying to ascertain if Tim really, truly, couldn’t understand why an insecure, unlikeable man would be jealous of him. “You’re good at most things you try. You’re good-looking. You’re likeable, and people naturally respect you and get along with you. I don’t think any of those statements apply to Officer Bowen.”
Behind the blood-soaked wad of tissues, Tim smirked. “You think I’m good-looking?”
Judith didn’t need a mirror to know that a red flush was creeping up her neck and into her face. “I just mean – I was speaking objectively. As a third party.”
Chief Kelly made a protracted blink which Judith suspected may have concealed an eye roll. “Well, this little escapade ain’t gonna make Bowen any friendlier to you. He’ll be lucky if he gets off with just a reprimand, not to mention this was his first time runnin’ lead on a raid, and it blew up in his face. We’re lucky nobody died. And to add insult to injury, his coworkers just saw him lose his cool, hurt a girl, and get knocked flat by one punch from the sheriff. Meanwhile you took Leon into custody pretty much singlehandedly, you’ve got everybody’s sympathy for gettin’ punched and their respect for punchin’ back when you did, and now you’ve got the girl you’re sweet on fussin’ over your busted nose.”
Tim chuckled but didn’t say anything in response.
Judith’s mind went into panic mode, malfunctioning like an overheated computer, and she pretended to be absorbed in rooting through her purse.
Tim didn’t correct him.
“And I, uh, think an apology’s in order,” Chief Kelly said, shifting his weight and rubbing his mustache, “You said we were goin’ in too hot. I shoulda listened.”
Tim shrugged. “It was just a hunch.”
“Well, your hunch sure as heckfire ended up bein’ right.”
As they wound down the bumpy roads of the holler, cocooned by close-growing skeleton trees and the deep green of pines, the heavy clouds opened up, and a faint dusting of snow drifted from the low-hanging sky.
It might even stick for a little while, Judith thought. The ground was certainly cold and frosty enough, as she’d learned firsthand.
“Do you think Leon will get a fair trial?” she said, her voice landing softly in the muted silence of the car.
Tim sighed, his shoulders dropping a bit. “I hope so.”
“Clem will testify in his favor, I’m sure, for what it’s worth.”
“For what it’s worth is right. She’ll be on the hook for her own charges, and that won’t endear her to the jury. She’s looking at a murder-for-hire charge for getting Noah to kill Heather to keep her from talking, not to mention two attempted murder charges for you. I can testify for Leon, though. It took a while to calm him down, but when I told him how Samantha died, that was what ended it. He completely broke down, and he surrendered right away.”
Quiet crept back into the car, and Judith picked at a loose string on the hem of her shirt. “You stopped using your megaphone.”
“Yeah. I needed to be able to talk to him and hear what he had to say, not yell at him from across the woods.”
“Chief Kelly said you walked up to the house.”
“I did. But I told Leon exactly what I was doing every step of the way. I sat against the wall by one of the windows and talked to him through there. After a while, he started responding.”
“What if he’d shot you?”
“I was wearing my Kevlar this time.” He aimed a half-smile in her direction. “Following the rules, like you asked.”
“What if he’d shot you in the leg? You don’t have Kevlar covering your femoral artery.”
“Judith,” Tim said, so gently it made her throat tighten. “I was doing my job.”
“You’re not Superman.”
“I’m Batman,” he said, his voice suddenly gravelly.
“This isn’t a joke.”
“You walked right into it. I couldn’t resist.”
“I didn’t walk right into anything. You’re trying to use humor to divert the conversation.”
Tim let out a breath. “That’s fair.”
“You’re not invulnerable, and you’re not disposable. Sometimes you act like you’re both of those things.”
Tim gave a slow, silent nod.
Judith waited, hoping he would break the quiet, but he said nothing.
It wasn’t until they’d made the last hairpin turn on the winding road down the mountain that Tim spoke.
“You know, you’re not invulnerable either.”
“Trust me,” Judith said, shifting in her seat, her aches and pains and cracked ribs and shredded skin and all the testimonies of the past week protesting her movement, “I’m well aware of that fact.”
“Just don’t forget it once you’re healed.” Tim kept his eyes on the road ahead, but the levity was gone from his face and his voice. “When I started to call the ambulance today – I mean, that’s three times in less than a week I thought you might not pull through. I can’t do that again.”
Judith stared at her hands. Rebuttals sprang up in her mind – She had fainted, that was all. She had obviously still been breathing; what had he been so worried about? Plenty of people lose consciousness and then wake up again within minutes, none the worse for wear. But something in Tim’s voice held her back. It was a hard-earned lesson for her, that not everything had to be said simply because it was true.
Snowflakes lit on bare tree branches, joining together as though debating whether or not they would stop and stay for a while. It had been several years since Judith had seen snow, and she drank it in, the white silence of it.
Tim’s voice broke the stillness. “You know, it’s funny. For a while there, in high school, I was jealous of him.”
Judith frowned. “Jealous of whom?”
“Bowen.”
“Why on earth would you have been jealous of Bowen?”
“Because his dad was alive.”
Tim said it so plainly, and yet the air in the car seemed to shift, a new current swirling into motion.
“I didn’t know –” Judith stopped, hesitating. “I’ve never heard you talk about your father.”
Snow drifted down over the narrow road in thick, fluffy flakes that caught on the dry grasses and melted against the windshield. The quiet, muted world outside the car seemed to seep inward, permeating the air.
“He died when I was sixteen,” Tim said. “Bowen’s dad wasn’t the greatest guy in the world, but he was at every baseball game. A part of me hated Bowen for it.”
“How did your father die?”
“Aneurysm. It had been sitting there inside his brain for years, and he never had any idea. One day it just burst.”
Judith looked at her hands again. “I’m sorry.”
She hated saying I’m sorry in response to someone else’s grief. It was an inaccurate, ambiguous statement. What was she sorry for? She had nothing to do with the aneurysm that had killed Tim’s father, so why was she apologizing for it? The only reason she used the phrase at all was because Constance had explained that it was a social convention, a way of expressing sympathy, even if logically it didn’t make any sense. That, and she didn’t know what else to say.
Without Judith’s conscious thought, memories began sliding into place. Tim hated hospitals – why? Had he waited at the hospital as his father lay dying?
“Are you hurt? Did you hit your head?”
“I thought it was a brain bleed.”
When she’d collapsed on the floor of the police station, he’d thought –
Suddenly his pale face, the distraught way he’d dropped his head into his hands, came to her mind in a clearer picture, and something cold and sharp twisted inside Judith’s chest.
Then another thought struck her, and her hands clenched of their own accord. “Is it hereditary?”
Tim shook his head. “Not as far as the doctors have been able to tell. My mom had them run all kinds of tests on me after it happened, but they never found anything concerning. And no one in my extended family has ever had one. My dad’s was just a fluke.”
The car left the mountainous tunnel of trees, and the road opened up onto the field, now dusted with snow. Like a tic, Judith’s eyes instinctively sought the railroad tracks and the drainage ditch where Willow had stumbled upon Samantha’s body.
“Sorry, this is a very abrupt change of topic,” Tim said, “but there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while.”
White light burst across Judith’s eyes, and a stabbing spasm of pain shot through her forehead, squeezing her temples. With a gasp, Judith bent forward, her hands flying to her head.
“What is it? Are you okay?” Through the engulfing pain, Judith vaguely felt Tim’s hand on her shoulder, felt the car slowing.
Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the pain dwindled, dissipated.
She eased herself back up. “I’m fine. Just a – a headache.”
Outside the window, something caught her eye, and she turned.
There, in the snow-flecked grass and the dying winter light, was a figure. A girl, a young woman, with mousy brown hair and pale skin and no coat, only a thin sweater. She sat in the white-tipped grass, looking out toward the horizon, gray and thick and heavy against the trees.
“Stop the car,” Judith said.
Tim slowed down, pulling up alongside the field. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes. I just need to check something.” Judith reached for the handle.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
Opening the door, she stepped into the gathering snow. “No, I’ll just be a minute.”
“Whoa, hey.” Tim thrust her forgotten coat toward her.
“Oh. Thank you.” Tugging her arms through the sleeves and zipping it tightly, Judith strode through the crunching grass. The new snow slipped into her shoes, wetting her socks, but she kept walking.
As she neared the girl, Judith slowed. She crept forward up the slight rise to where the young woman sat, her arms around her knees. Despite the snow, the girl didn’t shiver, didn’t even look cold.
Judith took a breath, pressing her lips together. “Samantha?”
The girl turned her head slightly, aiming not her eyes but her ear at Judith. “I don’t know you.”
“My name is Judith.”
Samantha nodded, as though that was all the information she required. “I’m waiting for the sunset.”
Judith crouched down, not wanting to sit in the wet snow. “Why?”
“My mom used to sit and watch the sunset with me. I can see the light, a bit. Sometimes, if it’s really bright, I can even see the colors.”
“She used to come with you to this field, before she died?”
“We used to walk here.”
Sadness nudged at Judith from somewhere deep in her chest, and, though she tried to force it back down, it was rebellious, difficult to settle. “Samantha, do you remember what happened, with Leon?”
“He was kind.”
“He never meant to hurt you. It was an accident.”
Samantha’s lips tightened, and she shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
Judith let out a faint sigh. “It might help, talking about it.”
“I’m waiting for the sunset,” Samantha said. “My mom used to watch it with me.”
“Samantha, if you ever decide you do want to talk about it, you can come find me. I can hear you.”
“No, thank you.”
Judith waited, watching Samantha.
Samantha’s eyes stayed fixed on the horizon, where not a single ray of sunlight peeked through the thick clouds. “I’m waiting for the sunset. My mom used to watch it with me.”
“Goodbye, Samantha. Come find me if you need to.” Judith stood and looked again at Samantha’s face, turned determinedly toward the gray sky. Then she made her way back through the wet, snowy field to Tim’s SUV.
When she reached his car and climbed back into the warmth, Tim’s face was white, and his eyes stared, wide with shock, at the field.
“Is that –?”
“That’s Samantha,” Judith said.
“But I can – why can I see her?”
“It happens sometimes, even to people who don’t have significant psychic abilities. The technical term for it is an apparition. Some people would colloquially call it a ghost, but ghost can be confusing, as people often use the term to describe both hauntings and apparitions, which are very different things.”
Judging by the stunned expression on Tim’s face and the way his eyes were fixed on Samantha’s form in the field, Judith guessed that very little of her explanation had made it from Tim’s ears to his brain.
“Is she okay?” he said, his voice quiet.
“She’s in denial. I’ve heard of cases like it before. Sometimes after a sudden, unexpected death, it takes time for the person to be ready to move on. It took Autumn twenty years. By the time she reached out to me, she was almost ready. I don’t know how long it will take Samantha. She didn’t even want to acknowledge her death.”
Judith glanced once more out the window at the now-empty field. Samantha was gone, the place where she’d been sitting dusted with snow.
After the biting cold outdoors, the warmth of Tim’s car sank into Judith’s bones, making her eyelids heavy. Her body, pained and exhausted, suddenly ached for sleep. Slipping her arms out of her coat, Judith folded it up, laid it against the window, and rested her head on it.
Then, suddenly remembering, she lifted her head. “You said you wanted to talk about something. I got distracted when I saw Samantha. What did you want to talk about?”
Tim’s eyes jerked away from the field and back to Judith, and after a moment his face recovered a small smile. “No, it’s okay. It can wait. You rest.”
Tim tugged his coat out from where he’d tucked it behind his back, and, reaching across, he laid it over Judith.
Bone-deep tiredness overwhelmed Judith’s curiosity, and Tim’s coat still held his warmth. The car rumbled into motion again, leaving the woods and the field behind, and Judith leaned her head against her makeshift pillow, sinking finally into sleep.
Thank you so much for taking time to read Beasts of the Field! Merry Christmas, and check back Saturday, January 4th for a behind-the-scenes look at Beasts of the Field and a teaser for Judith’s next adventure! If you have any questions about the writing or background of Beasts of the Field, feel free to leave a comment or message me so that I can answer it in the behind-the-scenes post next week.
A special thank you and Merry Christmas to my paid subscribers! I’m so grateful for your support and readership.
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What an amazing chapter! I may need an Orwell-focused sequel...
Oh, Bridget. Magnificent. Thank you.