So Shall the Tree Grow by Ninie Hammon

Author:Ninie Hammon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone

Chapter Twenty-One

It was evening. Sherry Lynn imagined she could hear the sound of the tractor out in a field, getting louder and louder and louder, then softer and softer and softer after it turned at the end of the row and went the other way. Like somebody was cutting wheat. It wasn’t real, though. She knew there was no wheat growing at Land’s End, or any other crop for that matter. Her son Drew raised thoroughbred horses.

Drew. That’s who the young man was who’d told her she had pulled up all the tomato plants. Her own son, Drew. She hadn’t, of course. Why would she uproot tomato plants? She loved tomatoes.

She could still hear the tractor, though. She knew it wasn’t real, but she could still hear it. Wasn’t that an odd thing. The auditory image had been burned into her brain during the years she was married to Tim Brand and lived on his farm on Crocker Pike, raising his three rowdy sons. They hadn’t had much during those years. Lived in an old frame house on his family farm, with Tim growing corn, tobacco and breeding black angus cattle. It had been a far cry from the life she’d lived in the beautiful mansion with the roaring lions out front — that had surveillance cameras in their mouths, but nobody knew that part. The other end of the spectrum. Riches to rags, they’d call it.

Even though she sat with the air conditioner blowing cold air right into her face, she still felt hot. Flushed hot. She’d got Drew to install it in her bedroom because the central air conditioning didn’t proper cool the top of the house. The way the heat rose in late August — one frying-pan day following another — she hadn’t been able to sleep at night, couldn’t seem to get cool enough.

Sherry Lynn couldn’t cool off now, either, but it wasn’t about August heat or central air conditioning. She was hot on the inside now.

She hadn’t turned on the light in the room, just sat there in the shadows with the cold wind in her flushed face, feeling the chill of her wet clothes stick to her skin as the sweat slowly evaporated.

Growing weed.

Righteous Weed.

Those two words touched so many hot buttons within Sherry Lynn that she felt like she was being electrocuted. Like she was being shocked all over, lying on a wire mattress some psychopath had attached wires to so he could use it to torture his victims.

The words had pulled out the stops, collapsed a dam she didn’t even know was there until it wasn’t anymore. All the pain and misery had come flooding down the hillside and covered her up, got up to her chin, was about to drown her.

Awful images. Nightmare images.

They were like still photographs, illuminated by those flashbulbs you used to buy for small cameras, the little square ones that produced a brief light so bright you couldn’t see afterwards.

Click-click.

Walking back into her mansion, empty, after she had been released from jail.

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