Harvestland

ONE

Riggsboro, Iowa

October 29, 1994

A cold wind swept through town like a flood. Autumn leaves danced. Naked tree limbs quivered.

Winter was coming. Charlee could feel it even now as she worked up a decent sweat, riding her bike through the neighborhoods looking for a hidden street called Sleepy Hollow.

Though it was a long and winding road, you could pass it without realizing, shrouded as it was most of the year behind the lush green of tall oak trees, vines and ivy that clung to fences, bushy hedges that lined the sidewalks.

This time of year the amber-burned leaves would have the street blanketed. And come winter, snow would take over and bury it all.

Charlee knew she had seen the road before. She could picture the green street sign which itself always seemed obscured, be it by shadow play or the surrounding flora. But whenever she gave it some thought, she could never place where in town it actually was, as elusive in her mind as it was in real life.

For a long time she had it confused with South Hollow Drive, a street on her side of town she could actually give directions to, that she had been on several times and could name a few kids from school who lived there. When she was younger she used to mistakenly call that street Sleepy Hollow, thinking about the story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman.

She stopped calling it that when her mother actually insisted on it, one day when she was eight or nine. "No, Charlee, South Hollow. Sleepy Hollow's a different street, a little, well...a little farther away. So don't call it that."

Thinking back on it Charlee saw it as a silly reason for a parent to get upset, hardly worth the exchanged glances her mother and father shared as they all sat at breakfast. But she made no more mistakes after that and since then had only vague memories of times she had passed by in a car or on her bike.

All this came back when she had seen the address that her friend had written for her just yesterday in school. 7 Sleepy Hollow Drive, scrawled in Alison's bubbly girlish handwriting, the 'i' actually dotted with a heart.

This afternoon Charlee had gotten out her bike and left a note for her parents saying where she'd be, why she'd be there, when she'd be home, and a phone number where she could be reached—always the demand of the wardens. Before leaving she opened up a map of the town and spent several minutes looking at it before she found Sleepy Hollow, lost in labyrinthine suburbia, a winding road in a neighborhood across town called the Valley.

Riggsboro was a valley town in general, nestled in the heart of Poweshiek County hill country. It lay lower in elevation than the rest of the county, but its outskirts had more hills than the whole of this flat state. And despite the flooding that rampaged through town every spring, Riggsboro thrived. It was one of the fastest growing towns in the county behind Grinnell and Montezuma. A powerful development company had owned all the real estate in Riggsboro for generations, and they were ever-expanding.

The actual Valley neighborhood itself was the lowest part of town, and the most protected, surrounded by the highest floodwalls—steep levees built out of earth by the Army Corps of Engineers to prevent the rise of river water that raged outside its shores during the spring storms.

Charlee biked over to the Valley in about twenty minutes, the map grasped in her hand and pressed hard against the handle. She liked the exercise she got from the bike but at the same time was looking forward to when she could get her learner's permit, then a license, maybe save up some money for her own ride.