Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Castle Freeman Jr. is the award-winning author of two previous novels, a story collection, and a collection of essays. A regular contributor to The Old Farmer's Almanac since 1982, he lives in Newfane, Vermont, with his wife, Alice.

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A young woman recently relocated to a tiny Vermont logging town, Lillian is menaced by a mysterious stalker named Blackway. This one man—who kills her cat, forces her boyfriend to flee the state in terror, and silently threatens her very existence—is a force little understood by the local figures to whom she turns for help. Yet, in this spare and powerful tale, Lillian enlists the powerful brute Nate and the curmudgeonly Lester to take the fight to her tormenter as a raggedy quartet of town elders ponders her likely fate. With simple strength and extraordinary force, Go with Me is a riveting modern fable of good provoked to resist evil.

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Go with Me

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Early Risers

Midsummer: The long days begin in bright, rising mist and never end. Their hours stretch, they stretch. They stretch to hold everything you can shove into them; they'll take whatever you've got. Action, no action, good ideas, bad ideas, talk, love, trouble, every kind of lie — they'll hold them all. Work? No. Nobody works any longer. To be sure, they did. The farmers worked. The midsummer days were the best working time of the year for the farmers, but the farmers are gone. They worked, they built, but they're gone. Who's next?

Sheriff Ripley Wingate, an early riser, turned off the road and into the lot behind the courthouse. Not yet seven. The morning fog still hung to the ground, a heavy gray curtain. It shifted, wavered, passed in woolly swags and swirls, parted. Nearly hidden in the mist, in a corner of the lot, another vehicle, a little car, empty.

The sheriff parked his truck in his spot near the court building and walked across the lot to the car, an Escort with its rear window partly broken out and covered with a plastic sheet and tape. He approached the passenger's side and bent to look inside the car. Not empty. A young woman was curled up in the driver's seat, asleep. Her knees were pulled up behind the steering wheel; her head rested against the window. On the passenger's seat beside her was a kitchen knife with a blade maybe four inches long, and in the rear seat a furry bundle the sheriff couldn't quite make out. He tapped lightly on the window.

The sleeping woman opened her eyes. She looked around her, then saw the sheriff at the window. She started. She drew back against her door, watching him. Her right hand went to the little knife on the seat beside her.

"Help you?" Sheriff Wingate asked her.

"I'm waiting for the sheriff," the young woman said.

"What?"

"I'm waiting for the sheriff," the young woman said again, louder, to be heard through the closed windows of the little car.

"I'm the sheriff."

"You are?"

"Why don't you come on inside?" the sheriff said. He nodded toward the courthouse.

The young woman made no move to leave the car, but she leaned across the seat and rolled the passenger's window down a couple of inches.

"You don't have a uniform," she said.

"No," the sheriff said. He straightened and turned to start back to the courthouse.

"How do I know you're the sheriff?"

"I don't know what to tell you," the sheriff said. "You can sit out here long as you want. Maybe another sheriff will come along."

"Wait," said the young woman. She uncurled herself from the seat, opened the door, and stood beside her car. She was tall and wore her brown hair long, very long, in a soft fall that hung down her back past her shoulder blades. The sheriff watched her. She didn't look drunk, she didn't act drunk, she didn't smell drunk. She closed the car door and looked across its roof at him.

"All right," she said.

The sheriff waited for her, letting her go ahead of him.

"You first," said the young woman.

The sheriff shook his head. "I ain't the one with the knife," he said. "You are. You go in front."

"Oh," said the young woman. The kitchen knife lay on the seat of her car. She left it and started toward the courthouse, with the sheriff following her.

In his tiny office in the basement of the courthouse Sheriff Wingate pointed to a chair in front of his desk, and the young woman sat. He let her sit for a minute, let her settle, while he fussed. He started the coffee machine, he tore yesterday's page from his calendar and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. He turned the volume on the radio scanner up, then down. Then he sat behind his desk, facing the young woman.

"What can we do for you?" the sheriff asked her.

"I need help," the young woman said.

"Help with what?"

"He's after me," she said. "A man. He wants to hurt me."

"A man?"

"That's right. He watches me. He follows me. He won't let me alone."

"Blackway," the sheriff said.

"You know about this?"

"I know Blackway," the sheriff said. "Most around here do. Coffee?" He rose and went to the coffee machine.

The young woman shook her head.

The sheriff poured himself a cup of coffee and returned to his chair.

"Blackway's following you?" he asked.

"That's what I said."

"For how long?"

"A week, ten days," the young woman said. "He watches me. Like one time, I was coming out of a lot. He pulled in front of me, cut me off. He just sat there, in that big truck he has. Looking at me. Letting me see him looking at me. Then he went away. He'd done that before. Then he smashed in the window of my car."

"You were there when he did that?" the sheriff asked her. "You saw him?"

"No. It happened at night. I was asleep, the car was parked."

"Anybody else see him, you know about?"

"No."

"So you can't say for sure he did it."

"He did it," the young woman said. "Who else would?"

"Maybe nobody," said the sheriff. "Maybe a lot of people. What else?"

Now the young woman swallowed hard. She looked at the floor, shook her head. She tried to answer, swallowed again.

"Take it easy," said the sheriff.

"Annabelle," the young woman said at last. "He got Annabelle. He came to my place and he got her."

"Annabelle?"

"My cat. He killed her."

The sheriff nodded. "You had her in the backseat," he said.

"Last night," the young woman said. "I found her on my front steps. Her throat was cut. Her head was almost cut off."

"Take it easy," said the sheriff.

The young woman swallowed, looked at the floor. She nodded.

Excerpted from Go with Meby Castle Freeman Copyright © 2009 by Castle Freeman. Excerpted by permission.
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