Page 4 of Stolen By the Billionaire
On both sides of the farmhouse plot, cornfields stretched to the horizon. Some of the fields were Sarah’s. Her parents had left the farm and its debts to her when they’d gone to be with Jesus three years prior.
The corn in the fields stood, on average, a little shorter than she was, rows upon rows upon rows of it swarming over the rolling hills. The house and its environs were in a lower section of the farm, which was why the old house had escaped so many tornados. Twisters bounced over hills.
That, and luck. Farming and dodging tornados always depended on luck.
The year had been dry with windstorms and substandard rainfall, so the corn was a little behind in its growth at only five feet in mid-June. It would catch up, though, if there was sufficient rain in the coming summer months.
Hopefully, rain would come.
Sarah didn’t like to think about what might happen if the farm had another dry year with another pitiful crop. Banks were greedy.
In the barn, Sarah did the morning chores—feeding oats and worm medicine to Charlie the horse and HowNow the Brown Cow and then milking HowNow—and then opened the back doors to let them out to pasture for the day. Grazing them helped reduce the bills from the feed store. The animals liked the grass and freedom better, too.
Yeah, the freedom to roam around and graze all day was important to her animals. Must be nice.
With the feeding done, Sarah started to trudge back to the house, carrying the milk jug and collecting her basket with three eggs on the way. She opened the fence gate of the chicken run, and she and Remi herded the chickens out to the kitchen garden for the morning to eat bugs. Letting the chickens roam the garden also cut down on expenses for feed and garden pesticides, not to mention fertilizer.
Sarah’s stomach was rumbling as she closed and locked the garden gate.
Leggy weeds were sprouting in her neat rows. After breakfast, she would need to get to working on the weeding.
The tomatoes and peas looked wilted, so she’d have to haul some of her precious well water over to them.
The kohlrabi and broccoli needed harvesting, and she should plant squash, cucumbers, and melons in those rows over the next few days. Those required the warm summer soil to thrive in the Midwest, so she’d rotate them in now that it was mid-June.
As usual, she was anticipating the watermelon already.
Sarah had an online appointment at nine o’clock, too. She couldn’t forget that one, she reminded herself as her work boots stomped on the parched ground and she made her way back to the house. She couldn’t be late for it.
The cornfields that hemmed in the plot of land with the house, garden, and barn might make some people claustrophobic, but Sarah had lived there her whole life. Never once had the corn come marching out of the field to murder anyone, so she figured she was safer than most.
White light flashed from among the corn on the apex of one of the rolling hills.
Weird. That beam was almost like a reflection of the sun, now lifting into the blue dome of the sky, on metal or maybe glass.
There shouldn’t be any metal or glass out there. She kept her fields clean.
Sarah braced her hands on her hips and scanned the cornfields.
The cornstalks undulated in the slight morning breeze like flotsam on a choppy ocean.
The flash didn’t show itself again.
Maybe a white bird had landed out there and she’d just mistaken it for a glare of light.
It was probably nothing.
She walked up the hill toward the farmhouse, built on a small high point in the valley. From the porch, with its rocking chairs and swing, cornfields furred the rolling hills in deep green vistas like a patchwork quilt.
The view was important, her father had always said. The open land and vast sky were why her parents had moved to Iowa before Sarah was born, away from scurrying and scavenging at the bottom of a metallic canyon like New York City.
The kitchen door banged behind Sarah as she walked into her kitchen, bouncing before settling into its frame.
Muffintop the cat skittered away from the door’s banging for a second before she recognized her cat-mom and then wove through Sarah’s legs, rubbing and pleading. Sarah scratched the gray beast’s head and scooped out the morning ration of cat food, which was what Muffy wanted.
Inside, Sarah passed the scarred kitchen table where she used to sit with her parents, eating every meal of her whole life. The fruits, vegetables, and potatoes had been grown in the garden that she maintained out back. The chicken had been from the coop. She and her dad had hunted pheasant, quail, and partridge during the winter. When her parents had been alive, they’d raised the occasional beef cow.
And, a long time ago, another person had sat at the table: her older brother, Logan. He’d been gone by the time she turned seven, and so she moved from her chair into his place at the table at her father’s left hand. After that, they never spoke of him because her father got so mad about Logan “breaking up the family.”
