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“Ass end of nowhere, ain’t it?” Stu asks, getting out of the car and blinking in the sunlight.

Harper removes her shades. “Yeah, she likes her solitude.”

“I’ll say.”

“Well, hello.” Ida appears in the doorway. “You coming in? Or you want to sit outside?”

“Why don’t we enjoy some of this sunshine?” Harper says, remembering how hot it was in the house.

They sit out on the porch, on chairs Ida pulls from around the side of the house. She offers them both a cool drink, but they decline.

“You come to talk about last night?”

“Yes, but there was something else, too. I wanted to know if you’d take a ride with me to Wisher’s Pond.”

Ida looks away, to the road where the heat creates a haze over the baked ground. “Figured as much. I knew it was only a matter of time.”

“Are you willing to do it?” Harper asks her.

Ida looks at Stu. “Only if he’ll do something first.”

“Me?” Stu asks.

“Yeah,” Ida says. “I can’t help you two no further if you don’t believe me. I’ve spent too long hiding my gift to have it doubted. There have been too many unbelievers in my life.”

“What do you want?”

“Give me your hand, sugar,” Ida tells him.

Reluctantly, he places his hand in hers. Ida closes her eyes. A minute stretches out, the two detectives all too aware of the sounds around them. The distant cars. Crickets in the grass. Somewhere far off, a crop duster’s engine as it turns in the sky, leaving a trail of white smoke on the fields.

Then the sounds seem to fade. The air around them grows heavy.

Ida’s eyes open slowly. Stu cannot look away from her big dark pupils. From the intensity of her glare. “Your daddy used to buy you those sherbets. Lemon ones. On the ride over, you bought yourself and Detective Harper a lemonade. The kind comes in a plastic cup with a lid, filled with crushed ice. Mint leaves on the top. You told her it reminded you of the sherbets your daddy used to buy.”

Stu tries to move his hand, to pull it back, but Ida’s grip tightens just enough to let him know she’s serious, that he has to hear the rest.

“When he died, you found yourself walking through the town. You went into a little store there and got yourself a big old bag of those sherbets. Out in the park, there’s a little river, and a bridge going over it. You sat on a bench near one side of that bridge, crying like you hadn’t done in years, like a hurt child. All you could think about was your poor old man, six feet in the dirt. Everything you could’ve said to him, but didn’t get a chance to.”

“That’s enough,” Stu says. He tries to get his hand free, to move, to do something to break the spell, but he can’t pull his hand from hers; he can’t look away; he can’t stop listening to her soft voice reveal the workings of his own heart.

Ida sighs. Her thumb works on the back of his hand, rubbing it gently, soothingly. A single tear rolls down her cheek, and Stu watches it fall to the porch, where it makes a puddle in the dust that covers the boards.

“You and your wife couldn’t have kids. But you tried. God knows you wanted them kids, but they just wouldn’t come. She blamed you. Little did she know just how much you wanted a kid all your own, to buy them lemon sherbets. To take on a long walk and tell ’em ’bout your daddy. Your missus never got that, sugar. She ain’t never got that at all.”

Ida lets go of his hand and he gets up, trying to get off the porch to hide his face, wet with tears. Harper starts to go after him but Ida shakes her head. “Let him have some space.”

Stu stands with his back to them. The wind churns up from somewhere, blowing his tie out behind him.

“We got a name for the girl,” Harper says, eyes still on Stu.

“I was right,” Ida says. “Weren’t I?”

“Yes.”

She nods, her voice grave. “Like I said.”

“Have you ever been to the scene of your mother’s murder?”

“No.”

“I thought it might stir something up, something new you might’ve forgotten from . . . well, you know . . .”

“Don’t need no convincing. I’ll do it,” Ida says. “But don’t be expecting some kind of revelation, sugar. In my experience, there’s only what there is, and what there ain’t.”

Beyond the shores of Hope’s Peak, North Carolina, evil waits as his next victim approaches. He’ll make her a princess like the others…

Detective Jane Harper can’t shake the image of the young woman discovered in a field—eyes closed, a crown of woven vines on her head. She expects macabre murders like this in her native San Francisco, not here. Jane and her partner, Stu, vow to catch the killer, but in this town, that’s easier said than done. The police department is in the grips of a wide-reaching scandal that could topple the entire force, and Jane and Stu face a series of dead ends. Until they meet Ida Lane.

Ida knows too well the evil that lurks in the cornfields. Tortured by her mother’s murder years before, Ida is paralyzed by the fear that she could be next. As the killer grows bolder, Jane must persuade Ida to use her remarkable gifts to help in the investigation. It?’ a decision that brings them closer to the killer…maybe too close.