It took her a second to realize he was joking. “Umm, no. I just like the phone. Not a big fan of technology. I have a wood-burning stove back home, actually.” She wasn’t sure why she’d volunteered this last part. But for some reason it seemed to prompt a ghost of a smile on Agent Sawyer’s normally dour lips.

“I see,” he said.

They drifted off into silence again, and Ilse did her best not to shoot glances in his direction. A strange case study, Agent Tom Sawyer. Named, it seemed, after a character from a novel. A novel written by an author who’d hidden his name. Samuel Clemens to Mark Twain.

Not too unlike Hilda Mueller to Ilse Beck.

Maybe the two of them had something in common after all. However small though it was.

“There we are,” Sawyer murmured, nodding through the windshield to an old, dead field a second before the GPS chirped, Arriving at destination on your left.

Sawyer piloted the vehicle smoothly onto the dirt road, past the broken, dusty field. The car jolted and bumped. A branch had fallen, forcing Sawyer to veer off into the dirt and then back onto the road, kicking up a cloud of dust which wafted to meet the gray, glaring skies.

In the distance, through the dust and past the low-hanging, arching boughs, withered much in the same way as the surrounding fields, a creepy scene confronted them.

A vacant, abandoned farm. The fields were tell-tale, but the rusted, overgrown tractor and combine added to the desolate scene. Old farm equipment piled against the side of a large, red barn. Ilse glanced at the photograph in her hand, then tracing a finger, she pointed off behind an overgrown patch of forest.

“The old shack should be back there,” she murmured in a faint voice, feeling a chill rise along her spine.

The trees seemed larger, darker than they had from the main road. Now, as they trundled along toward the old barn, and the weathered farmhouse on the flat land, facing the dead field and the abandoned farm apparatus, Ilse could feel her mind flitting, sifting through the basement of her memories. Her fingers gripped each other, hard, and she swallowed, shivering against the rising thoughts.

Agent Sawyer glanced at her. “You okay?” he said, quietly, his voice oddly gentle and gruff at the same time.

“Fine,” she murmured. “The shack should be just past there.”

No movement from the farmhouse. A flutter of birds who’d hidden out behind the rusted tractor scattered toward the sky as they drew nearer. A crackling, cracking sound arose from old sticks and dried boughs across the road as the sedan moved closer to their target.

Suddenly, a loud bang. Then the car jolted to the left.

Ilse yelped, but Sawyer cursed, slamming a hand to the top of the wheel and immediately bringing the car to the side of the road and throwing on the brake.

“What was that?” Ilse demanded, her heart pounding as she glanced around, her eyes on the farmhouse, tracing to the barn, then back to the very edge of a weathered, but hidden building behind the overgrowth.