“I need to sleep,” he whispered brokenly. “Please, God, let me sleep.”
Sarah had led him upstairs, took him into the shower and soaped him from head to toe, then toweled him off and took him to bed. There in the silent darkness she had kissed him and loved him, and then held him while he drifted off.
He slept for twelve hours without dreaming and didn’t even wake when Sarah slid out of the bed to go and take care of the kids. When he did wake, he didn’t open his eyes, didn’t even move for another few hours; he just lay there and thought about how the last month had been for him a slow descent into hell and since Ruger had come to town the pace was picking up. Even without the manhunt and all of the hurt to the people he cared about Terry was reasonably sure that he would be insane or dead by Halloween.
The whole thing had begun to spin around him when the crop blight started back in July as Pine Deep’s first wave of corn crops came due for harvest. Hack Jeffers reported an outbreak of gray leaf blight on half his crop, and by the end of that week four other farmers had reported crop infestations. The following week it was eighteen, and from then on it was an accelerating downward spiral. Not just gray leaf, but a variety of blights ranging from Stewart’s bacterial leaf blight to northern corn leaf blight, and in the following weeks there were reported cases of stalk rot, gibberella, fusarium, and diplodia ear rot diseases. By the first week of September there were widespread cases of maize dwarf mosaic and maize chlorotic mosaic, as well as armies of weevils, root worms, and stalk borers of all kinds. One of the farmers who had been hit the hardest, Jacob Troutman, had said to him, “If I was a superstitious man, Terry, I’d think this town was cursed. We have more plagues than Egypt ever saw during Moses’ time.”
Teams of specialists were brought in from private and government agencies to try and salvage some of this year’s crop, or to prevent the diseases from returning next season, but the trend was downhill. As mayor of a town whose income is half based on farming, Terry knew that leaf blight diseases could be found in almost any field, but to have so many different kinds of diseases and so many aggressive species of crop-destroying insects present in one town was beyond his knowledge, and apparently beyond the experts that were brought in from all over the country. Nor was it just the corn crop that was dying—the pumpkins, peaches, apples, and tomatoes were equally spoiled. Only two major crops were untouched: garlic—which made up about 5 percent of the town’s agriculture—and the holly farms north of town. In a season of strangeness there were things that stood out as stranger still, such as the fact that a handful of farms, including Henry Guthrie’s place, showed no sign of the plague at all, and that made no sense; and if a solution could not be found, then most of the farms would fail. That meant bankruptcy and financial ruin for many of Terry’s friends. Every single farm in town was owned by a family that had worked the land for generations. No one was starting new farms in town, and the youngest farm in Pine Deep was over sixty years old. To destroy those farms would be to destroy the history of the town. To Terry it felt like murder.
As he was struggling with the blight on one hand he had to use the other to manage the town’s other major industry, Halloween. October put the nonagricultural half of Pine Deep into the black. The better restaurants—meaning the ones that the owners claimed were haunted—were all booked through November 1. Craft stores, like the Crow’s Nest, made a mint on costumes and spooky decorations. Terry himself owned the nation’s largest Haunted Hayride attraction, into which he’d sunk a half million dollars of expansion money just before the blight hit.
