Let Me Die in His Footsteps

In the spellbinding and suspenseful Let Me Die in His Footsteps, Edgar Award winner for Best Novel, author Lori Roy wrests from a Southern town the secrets of two families touched by an evil that has passed between generations.

On a dark Kentucky night in 1952, exactly halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don't go near Baines, not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before, but Annie runs through her family's lavender fields toward the well on the Baines’ place, hoping to see her future in the water. Instead, she finds a body, and Annie's future becomes inextricably tied with her family's dark past. 

In 1936, the year Annie's aunt, Juna Crowley, came of age, there were seven Baine boys. Before Juna, Joseph Carl had been the best of all the Baine brothers. But then he looked into Juna's black eyes and they made him do things that cost innocent people their lives. With the pall of a young child’s death and the dark appetites of men working the sleepy town into a frenzy, Sheriff Irlene Fulkerson saw justice served—or did she? 

As the investigation continues and she comes of age as Aunt Juna did in her own time, Annie's dread mounts. Juna will come home now, to finish what she started. If Annie is to save herself, her family, and this small Kentucky town, she must prepare for Juna's return, and the revelation of what really happened all those years ago.

Praise for Let Me Die in His Footsteps

“Rich and evocative, Lori Roy's voice is a welcome addition to American fiction." –Dennis Lehane

“Open Let Me Die in His Footsteps anywhere and Lori Roy’s melodious voice will float off the page. . . . This Depression-era story is a sad one, written in every shade of Gothic black. But its true colors emerge in the rich textures of the narrative, and in the music of that voice, as hypnotic as the scent coming off a field of lavender.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Let Me Die in His Footsteps is a hybrid of mystery, coming-of-age, and Southern Gothic literature. . . . It's taut and evocative—things simmer and tickle and sizzle underfoot, and the book practically smells like a lavender field.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
 
“The richness of [the] characters makes their decisions crackle. . . . Which, as any Harper Lee fan will tell you, is what makes these stories endure in our very protective hearts. . . . While intense and at times a little ruthless, Roy's novel has elements of both what we love about the Southern Gothic mixed with the other perennial American classic: the coming-of-age tale. This is a dark story of adolescence in all of its awkward, terrible, exhilarating glory. And that's what makes it sing.”—Bustle
 
“It teems with family feuds, forbidden love, second sight and wronged innocents, all held together by Roy's taut style and gift for suspense.” –Tampa Bay Times

“A richly detailed, highly suspenseful Gothic novel filled with indelible imagery.” –Huffington Post

“An atmospheric, vividly drawn tale that twists her trademark theme of family secrets with the crackling spark of the “know-how” for a suspenseful, ghost-story feel.” –Booklist (starred review)

“This powerful story…should transfix readers right up to its stunning final twist.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A Faulkner-ian tale of sex and violence from the Kentucky hills.” –Kirkus

“Edgar Award winner Lori Roy…serves up a mystery with a thick, rich blend of Southern Gothic mainstays…This coming-of-age story dropped into a world of hardscrabble existence has an almost painful poignancy.” –Fort Worth Star Telegram

"There are echoes of Flannery O’Connor here: poverty, violence, malevolence, and grace. Roy’s writing is spell-like, using a simplicity of language, deft characterization, an understanding of the dark side of human nature, and relentless plotting in order to pull together every aspect of the conjuring necessary to create a masterpiece of Southern Noir." –Historical Novel Society

"Reading Lori Roy is a sinuous, near-physical experience, her stories so rich and well-told they twine into the reader in a manner both gentle and profoundly deep. I consider her writing a love-sonnet to American letters. Simply lovely."  –John Hart, Edgar-Award winning and New York Times bestselling author of The King of Lies and Iron House

"This is a beautifully observed story whose details of time, place, and character are stunning little jewels sure to dazzle the eye on every page. . . . Quite simply put, I loved this book." –William Kent Krueger, Edgar-Award winning author of Windingo Island and Ordinary Grace

“Young love, Southern folklore, family feuds, and crimes of passion . . . Roy describes life on a lavender farm in rural Kentucky in vivid detail, and the mystery of what happened years ago will keep readers engaged until the end.” –Library Journal 
 

 Lori Roy is the author of Bent Road, winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel; Until She Comes Home, finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Let Me Die in His Footsteps, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; and most recently, The Disappearing. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with her family.

 

1

1952—ANNIE

ANNIE HOLLERAN HEARS him before she sees him. Even over the drone of the cicadas, she knows it’s Ryce Fulkerson, and he’s pedaling this way. That’s his bike, all right, creaking and whining. He’ll have turned off the main road and will be standing straight up as he uses all his weight, bobbing side to side, to pump those pedals and force that bike up and over the hill. In a few moments, he’ll reach the top where the ground levels out, and that front tire of his will be wobbling and groaning and drawing a crooked line in the soft, dry dirt.

They’re singing in the trees again today, those cicadas. A week ago, they clawed their way out of the ground, seventeen years’ worth of them, and now their skins hang from the oaks, hardened husks with tiny claws and tiny, round heads. One critter called out to another and then another until their pulsing songs made Annie press both hands over her ears, tuck her head between her knees, and cry out for them to stop. Stop it now. All these many days, there’s been something in the air, a spark, a crackle, something that’s felt a terrible lot like trouble coming, and it’s been much like the weight of those cicadas, thousands upon thousands of them crying out to one another.

Annie has known all morning Ryce would be coming. It’s why she’s been sitting on this step and waiting on him for near an hour. She oftentimes knows a thing is coming before it has come. It’s part of the curse—or blessing, if Grandma is to be believed—of having the know-how.

They both have the know-how, Annie and Aunt Juna. That’s what Grandma calls it. The know-how. It floats just above the lavender bushes, trickles from the moss hanging in the oaks, drifts like a fallen leaf down the Lone Fork River, just waiting for someone like Annie or Aunt Juna to scoop it or snatch it or pluck it from the air. The two of them share the know-how because Aunt Juna is Annie’s real mother. Grandma has it too. She says there’s no evil in the know-how, though some are frightened of a thing they know little about. It’s my gift to you, Grandma is all the time saying, but that’s not true. The know-how passes from mother to daughter. Everyone knows that. Annie also has Aunt Juna’s black eyes. Not dark brown or almost black. But black, through and through. Folks believe that’s where the evil lives. In the eyes. It’s Annie’s fear, has been all her life, that evil passes from mother to daughter too.

Most days the know-how is like a whisper or a sigh, but with the approach of Annie’s half birthday—her day of ascension, they call it—the know-how has swelled, and this something in the air has made Annie startle for no reason, hold her breath when she thought she’d heard something she ought not have heard. All her years, fifteen and a half of them when she celebrates her day of ascension tomorrow, Annie Holleran has lived with the fear of turning out like her Aunt Juna. All her years, Annie has lived with the fear that Aunt Juna will one day come home.

Pushing herself off the bottom step and not bothering to smooth her skirt or straighten her blouse, Annie walks into the middle of the drive, kicking up dust with her bare feet. With every step, her middle caves and her shoulders slouch, Annie’s favored posture since she sprouted last summer. That’s what Mama called it . . . sprouting. And ever since, Mama has been telling Annie to stand straight and show some pride, as if being taller than most every other girl should be a prideful thing.

In addition to nagging about improper posture, Mama will be after Annie with soap and a rag by lunchtime, and she’ll remind Annie no more going barefoot once a girl has ascended.

“Thought you’d be working today,” Annie says as Ryce’s bike slows to a stop. She crosses her arms and hugs herself, another way to shrink an inch or two.

Ryce kicks out his right leg and lets his bike tip until he’s carrying his weight on that one foot. He’s wearing dark trousers, one leg rolled up to his shin so it doesn’t catch in his chain, double-knotted leather boots, and a white undershirt covered in the same dark smudges that mar his forearms, hands, and face.

“Lunch break,” Ryce says. He’s holding on to his handlebar with one hand. In the other, he holds a crumpled white kerchief. “All the fellows get one.”

This is the summer Ryce will buy himself a truck. He said the same last summer, but his daddy put all the money Ryce earned setting tobacco and picking worms in the bank and said college was but a few years away and it damn sure didn’t pay for itself.

“You come here expecting I’d feed you?” As has happened so often in the past days and weeks, the nasty words pop out before Annie can stop them. She crosses her arms. In addition to shaving another inch off her frame, this is also a fine way of hiding her chest so Ryce won’t notice it’s not one bit bigger than the last time he saw her. No matter what he says, Annie catches Ryce sometimes staring.

“Didn’t come expecting no food,” Ryce says, studying that crumpled kerchief like it’s something important. “Come to see if you was going tonight.”

“Might. Might not.”

“What does that mean? ‘Might. Might not.’”

“Might not want to.”

“You ought want to go,” Ryce says.

The sun has lightened his hair a shade or two, and now it’s the exact same color as his pale-brown eyes. Sometimes, Annie catches herself staring too.

“Says who?” Annie asks.

“Every girl, that’s who,” Ryce says, tugging on the edges of that kerchief. He’s got something wrapped up inside, and because of the way he’s using only his fingertips, it must be some kind of treasure to him.

When, several days ago, Annie first noticed the spark in the air, Grandma had smoothed the tangles in Annie’s ordinary yellow hair, given her a squirt of lavender-scented lotion to rub into her hands and elbows, and said not to worry. That spark was not a sign of trouble-to-come. No, indeed. That spark signaled the arrival of the lavender.

Annie is almost of age, midway between fifteen and sixteen, and so is finally coming into her own. She’s ascending into womanhood, though she prefers to think she’s ascending into adulthood. “Womanhood” makes her think of the wide-bottomed women who sit in church, tissues always in hand to wipe clean the noses of whatever children crawl across their laps. “Adulthood” sounds not so confining as “womanhood.”

All kinds of yearning come with a girl’s ascension—so says Grandma—beautiful, glorious yearning that will twist up a girl’s insides, wring them this way and that. Seeing as she has the know-how, Annie will feel things now she’s never before felt. She’ll feel things the ordinary girls will not. The arrival of the lavender is only one of them. Acres of it grow around Grandma’s house, acres and acres, and the sweet smell has been gathering since last year’s crop was cut. There is coming, Grandma said, a single moment when those flowers, rows and rows, mounds and mounds, will explode into full bloom. Yearning, Grandma had said. You’ll soon know much about yearning.

Ryce is right about one thing: All the girls in Hayden County look forward to midnight of the day halfway between their fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. They buy special nightgowns and new cotton robes. They stay up late to curl their hair and dab on a coat of pink lipstick, and as midnight approaches, these girls of Hayden County sneak out of their houses, travel to the nearest well, usually the well at the Fulkersons’ place, and peek down into it in hopes of seeing the reflection of their intended. They huddle around the well, the girl who will that very night ascend and her best friends or closest relations, while their mamas and daddies stand at a distance, smoking a cigar or sipping whiskey from a coffee cup. The mamas will call out, because it’s the mamas who worry most about who their girls will marry, “Who you see down there?” The girls will giggle, squint into the darkness, wave their flashlights in one another’s eyes, and call out the name of a favorite boy.

“Could ride up here after supper, if you want,” Ryce says. “After everyone’s in bed. Your bike working? We could ride down together.”

“Why would I want that, Ryce Fulkerson?”

Ryce’s daddy is the sheriff, and before that, his granddaddy was sheriff, and hand to God, his grandma too, which makes Ryce think he’ll be sheriff one day. It makes Ryce think he’s more of a man than he really is.

“Just offering,” he says. “Thought you might not want to make the trip alone.”

For the past ten years, most every girl has made her way to the Fulkersons’ on her day of ascension. Mrs. Fulkerson makes a big show of keeping up the well at their place. In the spring, she plants marigolds around it, and in the winter, she makes Ryce shovel a path through the snow. Sheriff Fulkerson has even been known to pace nearby as a girl looks into the well, one hand resting on the handgun hanging at his waist because a person never knows what might happen when the spirits are being conjured. Even though it’s dark, he’ll wear his hat and march back and forth because nothing is more important than the virtue of the young women of Hayden County. Then he’ll share a sip of whiskey with the dads and uncles and whoever else may have come to bear witness. Grandma says they never had such pageantry in her day and doesn’t much appreciate the sheriff making light of tradition. Daddy says there isn’t a thing wrong with a bit of pageantry or a good shot of whiskey.

“Not such a long trip if I go to the Baines’ place,” Annie says, nodding up toward the tobacco barn at the top of the rise behind her house. “There’s a perfectly fine well right up there. Still got water in it, so I hear.”

Everyone knows there’s only one thing beyond the Hollerans’ place, and that’s the Baines’ place. Everyone also knows Hollerans don’t go near Baines. Aunt Juna was the start of all the hatred between the families, and even though she’s been gone a good many years, the hatred has stayed put.

Juna Crowley is a legend. She’s the one the girls sing about as their jump ropes slap hot concrete. Over and over the girls of Hayden County chant . . . Eyes like coal, she’ll lead you astray . . . How many Baines will die this day? And the ropes swing around and around until their fibers turn frayed and prickly to the touch. Last summer, Dorothy Howard visited her grandma in Topeka, Kansas, and she said even those girls all the way up there were singing about Juna Crowley. One Baine, two Baines, one hundred and four Baines, those Topeka girls chanted. And if they’re chanting in Topeka, they must be chanting all over the country.

Course, there were, are, only seven Baine brothers. No telling how many are still alive. Aunt Juna killed only one of them. Some twenty years ago, she saw to it Joseph Carl hanged by his neck until dead, and all these many years later, Browerton is still the town known for—known only for—being the town to last hang a man in plain sight for all to see.

Just last month, Arleen Kellerman caught three of her grandsons, who were visiting from Atlanta, Georgia, as they were about to kick the box out from under the neighbor boy. The rope was strung up over the pole that holds one end of her clothesline, the other end anchored to the side of her house. Every one of those boys got whipped. The one dressed up as Aunt Juna got the worst of it.

“Your daddy ain’t going to let you go to the Baines’ place,” Ryce says, smiling in a way that lets Annie know she’s a damn fool for saying such a thing. “Your mama ain’t going to allow that either.”

“What makes you think I care what my daddy says? Or my mama?”

“Don’t think you should go to the Baines’ place, that’s all.”

Still holding on to that kerchief, Ryce rolls his bike backward a few feet until he can see around the side of the house. He’ll be wondering if a person can see the Baine place from here, but he won’t be able to. He won’t see it unless he runs up the hill behind the house and past Grandpa’s tobacco barn. From there, he would see the rock fence that separates the two places, and he’d also see the well. And he might see old Cora Baine, the only Baine left, sitting in her rocker, a shotgun cradled in her lap.

It’s only been a week since school let out and Annie last saw Ryce, but already he looks different, bigger, taller, thicker somehow. The neck of his undershirt is stretched from him having used it as a kerchief all morning. He’ll have been tugging it up over his mouth, even chewing on it until it droops and frays. It’s a nasty habit, and his mama will get on him for it when he goes home for supper. And while the neck of that undershirt sags, the rest of it is all the sudden too small. It pulls across his chest and looks to be cutting him under the arms. His jawline has squared off some since school ended, and his nose has sprawled, no longer has the ball on the end that the women of town were all the time tweaking. Or maybe it’s his overgrown hair. Hanging down past his ears, it slims him out in the face, and his skin is darker for having been out in the sun all day every day for a week. Damn it all, Annie looks just the same.

The spark that has nagged at Annie all these days has been like the ache in her legs that Mama calls growing pains or the stings that speckle Annie’s calves when she gets into a patch of nettles. It’s made her irritable, disagreeable, most especially with Ryce Fulkerson. When Annie told Grandma that her yearning felt nothing like a yearning should feel and that she didn’t much like it, Grandma smiled, even laughed. She laughed harder still when Annie said she most certainly did not yearn for Ryce Fulkerson because he was a gosh-darn fool, when what she really wanted to say was that he was a Goddamn fool, but Annie knew better than to curse in front of Grandma. This made Grandma throw her head back and laugh right out loud.

Annie would have stomped away from anyone else who laughed that way, but not Grandma. Grandma’s laugh made Annie want to cry because the yearning and the coming of the lavender and the feeling that something was lurking and not wanting to turn evil like Aunt Juna had stuffed her full and there was no room left. Grandma knew this and stopped her laughing, stroked one hand over Annie’s cheek, and said this is exactly how a yearning should feel.

“I suppose I’ll be going where I please and if I please,” Annie says, and this time she feels the nastiness coming but can’t stop herself from spitting it out. “One thing’s for certain. I damn sure won’t be seeing you down in that well.”

“Course you won’t,” Ryce says. “Lizzy Morris already seen me. Don’t suppose a man can be a husband to two women. Don’t suppose he’d want to.”

At the mention of Lizzy Morris, Annie turns on one bare heel and walks toward the kitchen. Lizzy Morris is one of those girls whose hair is always brushed, pulled back, and tied off with a bow, a Goddamn bow. Isn’t that Lizzy Morris a lovely girl, Mama is all the time saying when they happen upon Lizzy at the café or in church or at the market.

“I figure that’s a good thing then,” Annie turns and says. “Hate to think you’d grow old alone.” Then she marches on toward the house.

“Hey,” Ryce calls out. “Hold up. I brought this for you.”

Annie takes a few steps back toward Ryce. He smells of wet dirt and soggy leaves. Been pulling tobacco from the beds, most likely.

“Thought it might be helpful.” He smiles and nods, urging her to come closer. When she’s within arm’s reach, he gives the crumpled kerchief a shake and something drops in Annie’s palm.

“What on earth is this, Ryce Fulkerson?”

But Annie knows what it is. She knows exactly what it is. She already has the same hidden up in her top drawer just behind her Sunday stockings. It’s the white, shriveled body of a dead frog.

“Not that I think you’ll need it,” Ryce says. “But just in case.”

Annie closes her hand around the chalky body and swivels on that same bare heel. She must have told Ryce about the dead frog; otherwise he’d have never known. Men, boys, don’t have the know-how. He means for her to grind it into a fine white powder and sprinkle it on the head of whatever boy she sees down in that well tonight. The powder of a dead frog will make the boy love her even if he isn’t inclined toward Annie, which is likely because as hard as Annie tries to say her pleases and thank-yous like Mama is all the time insisting on, and as hard as Annie tries to brush her hair and wear clean clothes and smile the way her sister, Caroline, does, and as much as she tries not to look a person straight on with her black eyes because they have a way of frightening folks, most people are still not inclined toward her. This dead frog will make her intended love her despite her being doomed to turn out just like Aunt Juna.

Squeezing her fist as tightly as she can, Annie crushes the small body and lets the bits and pieces drop at her feet.

“I damn sure won’t be coming to your place tonight, Ryce Fulkerson,” she says, then walks up the stairs, across the porch, and inside without looking back.

2

AFTER THE GIRLS of Hayden County look down into the Fulkersons’ well and walk away claiming to have seen the boy they are of a mind to marry, they begin to comb their hair differently, wear an apron when helping their mamas put out supper, fold their laundry without being asked. And they begin to talk about a first kiss.

Some of the girls, in the weeks after having their fates decided, are comforted to know they’ll not be spinsters like that one great-aunt on their daddy’s side or the cousin they see only at Christmas. Those girls, who fool even themselves into believing they saw a face down in that well, will save their first kiss for the boy they’re destined to marry.

Other girls, in the weeks after looking in the well, start tugging with one hooked finger as if a noose is wrapped around their necks. They want a first kiss from some other boy. And then another kiss from another boy. They want to stall their future because once they say I do, they know there will be no others.

No matter which path a girl takes, all conversations turn to the first kiss once that half birthday has passed, and the girls who don’t manage a first kiss shortly after staring into that hole are questioned daily. If she’s a pretty girl, the boys loiter nearby, hoping to be the face she saw. They roll their shoulders back, lead with their chests, and open doors for her. If the girl is a homely sort, the boys pay her no mind and get on with their tiresome ways. In the very worst case, as with Emily Anne Tylerson, the boys shove one another into her path in hopes of dooming another fellow to the first kiss.

Annie may not be destined for the treatment that drove Emily Anne to tears, or perhaps she is, but she is certainly bound to be a girl who will draw indifference when she returns to school in the fall. While every boy in the county was tripping over his boots to be Lizzy Morris’s first kiss, not a one of them will care to be Annie’s, and that is something she will not risk. Not the looks of pity, the daily questions, the whispers and giggles behind cupped hands, or the dust in her face when the boys run from her path.

•   •   •

AT EXACTLY 11:15, Annie slides her legs over the edge of the mattress, scoots until her feet touch the floor, and holds her breath, because maybe that will stop the springs from creaking. Twice already, Mama has opened the door, letting in just enough light to see that Annie was flesh and bone and not just a pile of pillows stuffed under her blankets. Each time, Annie drew in deep, full breaths so Mama would believe she was asleep.

For the past month, Mama has been talking about the foolishness of looking into wells. Annie agreed straightaway, and that was a mistake. Mama is always suspicious of Annie being agreeable. Next Mama started offering to drive Annie down to the Fulkersons’ place if she was going to insist on partaking in the tradition. When Annie refused, again saying she thought it was all foolishness, Mama reminded Annie there is a perfectly good well right here on Grandma’s farm. No need even to leave home. But it isn’t a perfectly good well. It dried up years ago, long before Annie, Caroline, Mama, and Daddy moved in with Grandma, and the week they unpacked, Daddy covered it over with plywood and stones. No matter how perfectly good that well might have once been, it doesn’t seem likely a person could see her intended’s reflection in a boarded-over, dried-up well.

But Annie didn’t say any of those things. Instead she told Mama she had no need for looking into Grandma’s well or Ryce Fulkerson’s well or any other well. She wanted Mama, and Daddy too, to believe so they wouldn’t insist on tagging along and asking her which boy she saw or was he handsome and strong. Mostly she didn’t want them coming along because maybe there isn’t a future husband for Annie. Maybe, no matter how hard Annie tries to do as Mama says or make herself out to be just like Caroline, Annie is doomed to an evil nature, and maybe there is no intended for a girl with such a future. But Mama has checked on Annie twice, so it’s clear she had not been convincing.

While Mama would have no part of Annie crossing onto Baine property and would certainly forbid it if she knew Annie was considering such a thing, the know-how is what frightens Mama most. Looking down into a well and seeing one’s intended might be foolishness for the other girls, but it’s something else for people like Annie and Aunt Juna. Annie feels things that aren’t hers to feel. Aunt Juna was the same. Surely, she still is. Everything Annie does smells like, sounds like, looks like, tastes like, something she’s done before, and she has a way of knowing how things will end before their end has come. You have done that before, Mama will sometimes say, or we all knew that dog was going to die or that tree was bound to fall with the next rain. Grandma says this knowing settles in at birth, ripens for fifteen and a half years, and on the day a girl ascends, the know-how is fully grown.

“Thought you might decide not to go.”

The springs in Caroline’s bed and her brass headboard creak as she swings her legs over the edge of the mattress and slides her feet into the cloth slippers that await her at the side of the bed.

“Don’t you switch on that light,” Annie says as she opens her nightstand’s top drawer. “Hush and go back to sleep.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” Caroline says, flipping on the light anyway. “I want to come too. Please, Annie. Let me come too.”

Annie reaches one hand into the drawer. Feeling nothing, she pats the bottom and squeezes her hand inside until her fingers brush against the back panel.

“Looking for this?” Caroline says.

The light Annie had thought was coming from the bedside lamp is instead coming from a long-handled silver flashlight. It’s the same flashlight Annie took from Daddy’s shed earlier in the day.

“Give it,” Annie says.

“Be happy to.” Caroline waves the stream of light across Annie’s face. Even straight out of bed, Caroline’s long, dark hair is smooth as if freshly brushed. All that moving about stirs up the sweet smell that always clings to Caroline—roses, freshly squeezed lemons, and lavender. “You can have this light right now,” she says, “if you take me with you to the Fulkersons’.”

“I can’t do that,” Annie says, looking straight down that funnel of light. She stands, slowly unfolding her legs. The yellow stream follows her.

Once she reaches her full height, a good five inches taller than Caroline, Annie jams her hands in the pockets of her sweater and pulls them out one at a time. In her right hand, she holds one of Grandma’s white utility candles, its wick brand-new, waxy, and white. In her left, she holds three matchsticks she also took from the shed. This is what Mama must mean when she tells Annie to have some pride in her height. Being taller in this particular instance is pleasing.

“Don’t need that flashlight,” Annie says. “These’ll work just fine.”

She lets Caroline get a good look at the candle and matches before shoving them back into her pockets.

“Besides,” Annie says, “I ain’t going to the Fulkersons’ place. Going to the Baines’.”

Annie hadn’t been certain until that moment. She had thought she might try to push aside those rocks and the board Daddy stacked on top of Grandpa’s well. Annie had assumed a girl couldn’t see her intended in a dried-up well, but she does have the know-how after all, and so maybe she could see her intended where others likely could not.