The Farmhouse

by Chelsea Conradt

Genres: Supernatural suspense; Horror

Synopsis

Every woman who has lived on this farm has died. Emily just moved in. 

When Emily Hauk's mother dies, it's time for her and her husband, Josh, to finally leave San Francisco. A farm in rural Nebraska is everything they want for a fresh start: clear skies, low costs, and distance from the grief back home. 

They should have asked why the farm was for sale. 

Three years ago, a teenage girl went missing from the farm. Soon after, the girl's mother mysteriously died. The deeper Emily digs, the more stories she finds of women with a connection to her new home who've met their own dark ends.

The farmhouse was meant to be Emily's fresh start, but with each passing day, her sanctuary slips further away. The barn seems to move throughout her property, as though chasing her. Her mother's favorite music drifts across the corn. She swears she saw blood in one of the farmhand's trucks. And the screams that wake her are not foxes, no matter how many times her husband says otherwise.

Despite Josh's skepticism, Emily feels the darkness that has seeped into the soil of her farm. And if she wants to claim this place as her own, she'll have to find the truth before whatever watches from the cornfield takes her too.

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Release date: June 17, 2025

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Print pages: 421

Sample

Chapter 1

They’d told me the cornfields carried a current in the summer, but no one said it could pull me under. No one told me I could drown here. In the middle of a field. Alone in a sea of green stalks.

It’d started beneath the summer sunshine, warmth and welcome washing over me. My husband Josh and I were three days in and eighty-seven miles out from our destination: mile marker 116 on Route 136.

The address read like a clue in one of those murder mystery delivery boxes. We’d tackled one early on in our perpetually at-home life, but the grisly nature unnerved Josh. Or maybe he didn’t like that I was really good at solving crime. Probably intimidating to have a potential crime-fighting hero in your home. The destination, though, had zero death, ghosts, or sickly memories for us: a farmhouse.

Our farmhouse.

Even with speed-limit signs that read more as a challenge than a limit, the drive from California to Nebraska was into day three. We’d researched ahead of time, of course, but I wasn’t certain knowing the state was No. 2 in cybersecurity and also the home of Kool-Aid counted as prepared.

My mother would never have let me live down this move, but if she were still alive, I might not have needed the clean slate it provided. I’d grown up between the brightly painted Victorian homes and the sticky punk rock shops of Haight-Ashbury—San Francisco’s best neighborhood, if you had asked my mother.

But then Penelope Wagers had been a paid arbiter of cool for decades. Her voice, sweet and salty, with too little sleep and two sips of liquor, enveloped me.

“Emily, the Bay is in your blood,” she’d say, probably flinging her arms wide like the drama could encompass everything she loved about my hometown. “I raised you with far too much style to waste in a field somewhere.”

Mom had a way of delivering compliments that snuck a jab around back afterward. Style had never been my area. Aesthetic, yes. It’s what made me land in graphic design and not fashion. Even imagining her distaste for my decision didn’t make me miss her less. It’d been six months since she passed—the nice way the hospice workers described the quick decline from thriving fifty-eight-year-old to gone.

She’d liked Josh, but I suspected she would have blamed this move on him. When he’d crashed out after two cups of Mom’s signature eggnog, she’d teased, “He wouldn’t have made it a night on the Haight in the seventies.”

“Good.” I’d lifted a glass in salute to her. “I want a man who thinks I look hot in lounge pants and is happy to snuggle on the couch with me.”

She’d tapped her glass to mine, but her attention flitted to everything in the room that wasn’t me. “All I want is your happiness.”

I needed to quit letting my thoughts, my heart linger in her memory, but all attempts had failed. There was value—and hope—in this journey.

I had to cling to that, to the future. I had Josh, a job I could do from anywhere, and a new life waiting for me whenever our GPS led us to the turn toward the farm. Our new mailbox’s little flag waved hello. This was my path back to happiness, and I was determined not to get lost.

The land here was beautiful. Yellow fields waved from either side of the moving truck, welcoming us to the Heartland. Water towers stretching white or blue in the distance, marking other small towns. Not that I could see much in the way of buildings. The last half dozen towns we’d passed through had populations less than three hundred. There were more people who took 6 a.m. workout classes at Lifetime with me than lived in those entire communities. Nebraska was nothing but glorious space and freedom, and Josh and I deserved them both.

Loose pebbles pelted the underside of the U-Haul. I’d already tapped Josh’s arm a half dozen times to slow down. I’d expected dirt roads, but there was more gravel than anything else on this last stretch to our new home.

Our new home.

Hope bubbled bright beneath my breastbone. Nebraska was the start of something big. This bumpy road was the kind of precipice that lifted your belly with flashes of future freedom. I’d felt it when I’d left for college. When I’d found a creative job that was distinctly corporate. If you needed graphics for a white paper about accounting or human resources software, or a style guide for your attorney’s website, I was your girl. Going corporate had given me that same tinge of fear, but it turned out health benefits were rad. Being the reliable graphic designer at a behemoth agency meant people only cared enough to tap the party horn icon on Zoom when you announced you were buying a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The specter of my mom tried to resurrect, all effervescence fizzling. Six months wasn’t long enough

to dull the pain of losing her. Would six years? Six decades? Would I be alive in sixty years if my mother died at fifty-eight? Those other moves had been leaping to new adventures, but if I was honest with myself, this time I was fleeing the past.

Plink. Pli-pli-pli-plink. “Those rocks are going to wreck something.”

“It’s a rental.” Josh thrummed his fingers against the steering wheel like the jostling was more massage chair than a puke-over-the-edge boat ride.

My stomach was less convinced.

“Our car is hitched to the back.” Had memory swallowed him too? Or was he simply drinking in the expansive scenery?

Josh swore and slowed the moving truck. “We’re here though.”

A simple white mailbox marked the driveway. We turned onto a dirt road. Dust whirling behind us in the side mirrors. Fields stretched on either side of the path. Green and thick and structured. The road arced hard to the right, revealing our farm.

The house’s exterior was picture-perfect, which made sense since we’d toured over FaceTime. Good to know our Realtor wasn’t working camera angles on us. It was a single-story ranch painted white. Two steps led up to a porch nearly as long as the house. A wooden bench swing hung at one end. Like, the Waltons would be jealous of this style. Not that the house was big enough for a TV family like that. It was only Josh and me, making the three-bedroom setup perfect. One room for us, one for a home office, and one to set up for guests, because eventually people might visit. (Okay, we were putting gym equipment in next to a pull-out couch. But if someone decided to visit, we’d move it.)

“This is good.” Josh slipped his arm around me, my constant home. “Everything you thought?”

endless blue sky surrounding us to the barn. “Did they show us the barn?”

While the house was ready to be submitted to some home and garden magazine, the run-down barn would not be allowed in the background of a two-page spread. The walls were a mishmash of peeling gray and red paint. Darkness speckled the corners and eaves. The window over what I expected was the loft had only one of the four panes of glass still intact. At least the eyesore was a healthy distance from the house.

“There were pictures. Remember, it’s part of the farm?” Josh’s attention locked solely on me. Seven years in, and he could still make me feel like the center of the universe.

“Right. The farmers have access to it.” We weren’t trying to change careers here. I knew exactly shit about gardening or grains or working a tractor. The folks who had sold us the house wanted to keep the fields and tend to them. So we got the house and leased the farmland back to the people who actually knew how to use it.

Josh rolled his shoulders. I pressed my palm to the center of his back and slowly rubbed. We both would feel that car ride tomorrow.

“We can use the barn too, for storage or to park the car when storms hit.”

I squinted at the barn, and my stomach lurched. When had we last eaten? “It’s far from the house.”

“That’s why we’re parking up here, Em.” Josh leaned over and kissed my forehead.

I clambered out of the moving truck and took in a noseful of country air. “You smell that?”

“Clean air?” A dimple flashed in his right cheek.

“I totally thought it was bullshit.”

“You thought people made up fresh air?” He wasn’t even bothering to hold back his laughter.

“I understand air pollution and smog, and that some days it’s gloomy because of selfish, climate-change denying assholes driving big SUVs in rush hour, but I didn’t think it actually smelled different.” I inhaled, saturating myself in the fresh euphoria.

“You’re ridiculous and I love you.” Josh pressed his lips against my forehead once more and then offered me a proper kiss.

I surely smelled like fourteen hours in a moving truck, but Josh wrapped his arms around my back and lifted me. And everything was freedom during that kiss. His body supporting mine—which, God, I’d let him do so much the last year while I tried not to fall apart in grief—but now he held me with only excitement behind his eyes. I slipped my hands up the back of his neck, letting my nails graze him. His smile forced my own. All I cared about now was the clean air in my lungs, the man before me, and our fresh start.

When he finally released me, we were both breathless. A fresh start indeed.

Our Realtor had left the key out front. A heavy black rubber mat with the bold red N of the University of Nebraska’s Cornhuskers—a logo I’d seen on billboards, in store windows, and on T-shirts at every stop within the state—had been placed before our front door. Its center hid the brass key. The mat was crisp on the white wood of the porch, but the big yellow sunflowers and “Welcome” in looping script on the coir mat I’d brought were far homier. I could move this one to the back entrance. The grooves would be good for cleaning mud off running shoes.

Josh unlocked the door and stepped through first

“It looks huge without furniture.”

“It’s bigger on the inside!” I couldn’t resist the joke.

Josh groaned, continuing to pretend he hated Doctor Who—even if I caught him watching it every time he was sick.

He was right though. Not about the Doctor, but about our new home.

Our apartment in Mission Bay had two bedrooms, eight hundred square feet, and zero space. This house tripled our living area. We had an extra bedroom and a kitchen with counters for days. And the mortgage cost less than half our monthly rent.

“We’re going to have to buy more stuff,” I said, stalking across the oak floors into the empty living room.

“Or we could enjoy the extra white space.”

“White space is useful on a website, but in a home, it just makes it feel cold.”

Josh leaned against the counter marking the entrance to the kitchen. “We don’t need to fill every corner…”

He was talking about my mom’s place. There was a difference between a collector and a hoarder, but where that line landed depended on your personal sensibilities. Josh and I had different barometers. My mom had loved vibrant fabrics and killer music. Decades of producing music will do that to you. Signed music memorabilia covered the walls of her home. Silk screen prints and concert posters and drumheads. She’d repurposed the utensil pot from the kitchen to hold drumsticks from visiting friends. You came, you signed your stick, and dropped it in. It really was a wonder that I didn’t become a drummer.

“I’m not trying to cover our walls immediately,” I muttered.

Josh’s tone softened, as it always did when the memory of my mother or the rawness of my grief clawed its way into our conversations. “

They are awful stark though. These walls.”

“I might have already considered that.” The paint swatches had been on my desk for weeks. Cornflower blues and sunflower yellows. A summer palette to steep our sweet new home in.

“We can get paint tomorrow after I knock out those UK calls.”

Right. We’d taken our time trekking across the Rockies, and Josh had pushed off some sales meetings until tomorrow. Unfortunately, with the time difference, he’d be up before the sun tomorrow. I swiped a hand over my face, like I could clear the sweat of future anxiety. “We need to set up your desk first. Where did we put it in the truck?”

“Calm down, Em. That’s why we have virtual backgrounds.”

“I thought we had them because people wanted to cover up those piles of unfolded laundry when they worked from their bedrooms.”

“Or maybe it’s weird to know you’re in your coworker’s bedroom?”

I snorted. “Now I’m picturing your boss lounging on his bed while talking about a software update.”

“Why did you have to say that? Now I’m going to be thinking of Dennis in his boxers when I talk to him tomorrow.”

“I’m sure he’ll wear a shirt.” My company didn’t have a camera-always-on policy, but I still wore work-y tops in case we had to show our faces. Workwear was now in mullet form. Business on the top, nap-ready on the bottom.

My phone vibrated in my back pocket. “Weather app says it’s going to rain in thirty-four minutes.”

“That’s precise,” Josh deadpanned.

sitting all day and my stomach sour from drinking gas station coffee, but I also did not want to sleep on the floor tonight.

“Bed, at least.” This man read my mind. “And the priority stuff out of the car.”

“You mean everything in the car,” I corrected. We’d put the items we’d need immediately, like the coffee maker and our shower essentials, into the sedan we’d towed behind the U-Haul. I’d also put my mom’s turntable and the most prized records from her collection there. You did not risk those kinds of precious belongings in the black hole that was a twenty-two-foot moving truck.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.” No, he had not.

Someday I’d find the record that converted him into a vinyl enthusiast.

It took us a solid ten minutes to get our bed into the house. The sky darkening by degrees each minute. We didn’t know this house yet. Where to turn, where to step. Moving it was an exercise in Josh smacking his back into doorframes, me getting a mattress plowed against my sternum, and the kind of swearing that would have had the neighbor in 2D doing her damn lean-into-the-hallway judging move. At least we got to fight the fucking thing without an audience. Josh brought in the toiletries and the quickly packed clothes. I’d just carried the last box of records into the house when lightning split the sky.

My stomach rumbled moments before thunder cracked hard enough to rattle our new windows. “Are they supposed to shake like that?”

My even-keeled husband didn’t even flinch. “I think so? I could call Realtor Rita, but we’re in a ‘you bought it’ situation, babe.”

I shook my head and stalked toward our kitchen. The shush of rain cocooning us in our new haven. I yanked open the fridge out of habit. It was empty save a bottle of champagne, two flutes, and a note card.

“Who leaves a note in the refrigerator?”

I lifted the chilled bottle and smiled at its orange label. “Don’t care if they leave the note duct-taped to the door, if they leave Veuve Clicquot.”

I passed the bottle and flutes to Josh and opened the envelope. “It’s Rita’s ‘welcome to Nebraska’ note. She says she hopes the farm fills our hearts with love and…”

“Hmm?”

“She thought she should remind us the back bedroom would make a perfect nursery.”

“Do women usually have baby fever for other women?”

“Not in my circle.” Not that I’d had more than a forty-five-minute Zoom happy hour with my friends in…God, years.

“It’s the thought that counts?” Josh was already uncorking the fizzy deliciousness.

I didn’t need anyone thinking about tiny humans for me. This place was supposed to free me from pressures. I shook away the slight and focused on the immediate issue. “You know we have no food here.”

“We have the cooler out in the truck.”

Ah, yes, our road food. “That’s not a meal.”

“Snack now. When the storm dies down, we can figure out real food.”

As if to prove his point, my stomach whined and the thunder rumbled in unison. “Fine, but you’re going out there for the cooler.”

effervescence could match the anticipation of all of this. Josh ran to the U-Haul and returned with our half-full cooler and a soaked shirt. Shucking his shoes and divesting his T-shirt at the door, he brought me the minimal container of food.

I began pulling the options out. Three varieties of chips (shared), beef jerky (shared), sunflower seeds (his), grapes (mine), protein bars (mine, but would share upon request), one apple (mine), and candied pecans (his).

“Give me five minutes, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Josh shook his head like a puppy, splattering me with frigid drops. “I’m going to grab a towel.”

With the bubbly in the background, I pulled together the most absurd charcuterie board of my life. My husband beamed at the sight though. “Only my Emily could take filling station finds and make a spread like this.”

We snacked, drank the entire bottle of champagne, and rechristened our bed. We did not go back into the rain. We did not walk our property that night at all. We didn’t even lock our doors.

Was this my life now? Carefree sex and fancy booze? Not bad, Nebraska. Not bad.

Chapter 2

The next few weeks found Josh and me acclimating to our new rural life and reacquainting with one another. Our open-spaces freedom allowed us both to breathe and really settle into our quirks in a way that could only come with no neighbors for miles. It wasn’t merely me getting high on smogless wonder air; it was the lack of pressure this place put upon us. I painted the living room the color of a morning sunrise and the kitchen Pantone 16–4031 TPG (Cornflower Blue), which I’m putting my money on being the next color of the year. Josh mounted floating shelves in the hallway and loaded them up with Lego brick models of spaceships from Star Wars. We hung abstract art from our favorite Bay Area artists in the living room.

Our secrets, our thoughts, our lives belonged solely to us here. No nosy neighbors listened through thin walls or rifled through deliveries piled out front to get another voyeuristic peek into our lives. Every time a sympathy plant arrived—why had everyone sent succulents instead of flowers? Had they thought I couldn’t cultivate a single rose?—2D would find an excuse to repeat her condolences. If I never had to hear “I’m so sorry for your loss” again, I’d die a happy woman. Then they could be sorry for someone else’s loss. My mom would have hated the grief fest. She’d requested we play “Bohemian Rhapsody” at her funeral. The confusion on the pastor’s face would have had her in stitches for days. I’d picked Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah.” His sandpaper vocals buffered my heart that day more than any “we’re thinking of you” cactus ever would.

Memories swirled in my mind as I lay in the diffused darkness next to Josh. The ceiling fan whirred softly overhead. Wetness collected in the corners of my eyes. Attempting to go back to sleep was pointless. Thinking of the funeral meant I’d fuel nightmares now. I tapped my phone screen. Only four minutes until the alarm. Not bad. Josh snored by my side. Swiping tears from my face, I snuck out of bed.

Ozone and earth tangled in the air. Even inside the house. The farm came alive in the rain. The storms were primarily an afternoon event, with purple skies and big fat drops that plinked with satisfaction against the porch. But this time, the shushing of water over our roof had lulled me to sleep. I yanked on my leggings and a neon pink sports bra. The high-visibility outfit had been useful in the city—necessary to not get knocked over or flattened—but here I realized I actually just thought it was cute. How funny was that? The cows a couple miles west seemed to moo more when I wore pink. Not that I was doing it for the cow calls.

Laced up, activity tracking on, I sprinted out the front door. Clapclapclap. The screen door’s goodbye was so satisfying. Like it applauded my escape. The green tops of the cornfield swayed a hello too. God, how is this mine? I started across our yard. The dirt path that was our driveway was sticky, making me really lift my feet with every step. A little extra quad action today wasn’t a bad thing. I savored the musky soil with every breath and focused on my feet hitting the ground, planting myself with one step after another.

I would be sown in the soils too. I would grow here again.

to decide about Mom’s house. We were out of probate. Did we want to liquidate? Did we want to keep everything? Josh and I had moved here saying we were selling the house, but I hadn’t done shit about making that happen. The house I could part with. Its creaky fourth step, its drafty window in the dining room, the drops of emerald paint on the carpet in the living room from the time Mom and I painted the whole downstairs in jewel tones to make it feel like a 1920s speakeasy—it could all go. My eyes burned. I ran faster. I’d outrun the memories before. If my body worked hard enough to hurt, it could burn right on through grief.

My watch buzzed on my wrist. I glanced down, confirming I was already moving into the orange heart rate zone. It was too soon to be there, but I couldn’t care about that today. I charged toward the runner’s abyss. That chasm where my heart and lungs collided, and lactic acid seared my legs and my ass. It was easier to reach that point on our farm, where I didn’t have to look at the city my mother had loved or her house or her things. That was the piece that killed me. Those possessions. I exhaled hard, forcing myself to breathe deeply. The house could go. We couldn’t afford to keep it. We’d bought this new life instead. The Madonna, Sabbath, and Queen records were with me, but what treasures she’d stored in her room, in the attic, I didn’t know. Would it matter? Would I want to keep them? Would I be happier if I never knew they existed, and some random person purchased them at a sale while I sprinted past cornstalks?

I swiped the wetness from my cheeks. Pumped my arms. Ran faster. I neared the barn and slowed. How was I only now getting here? My legs were hot. I looked at my watch. Eleven minutes? Our barn was a three-minute run from the house. I turned back. My cute farmhouse was there, with its white wood siding and two-seat porch swing and fuchsia pansies cuddled up by the yellow daylilies in their flower bed. It was far though, too far. Like I was looking through a paper towel tube, pretending it was a telescope. I shook myself. A protein shake or at least a latte this morning might have been wise. I lowered my head, wiggled my shoes in the squishy soil. When I looked up again, the house was bigger.

Closer.

Where it should be.

I trudged forward, the mud suddenly turning to sludge and clinging to me, slowing me. Maybe that was why it had taken me so long to get to the barn? Fire licked my calves, but only the fields mattered. Once I was on the path between two crops, I could be lost. The good kind of lost. I could run, sear away these thoughts, and be as alone as if I were adrift on the Pacific. No people. No land. Just endless waves of green. Those plants didn’t judge me; they didn’t watch me; they didn’t give me a “How are you doing today, Em? No, really. You can tell me.” They swayed with soft comforting nonsense and left me alone.

Only I wasn’t alone.

I ran harder and faster. The soil was better packed here from frequent passes by the farmers’ trucks and tractors, and my footfalls clapped again. I needed to order some new trail shoes but, first, to stop my brain. I ran until my lungs hurt, until my legs wobbled, and, finally, my stomach flipped. The berm marking the side of the road acted as a rest area. If I’d taken the other path, my reprieve would have included cows. I hoped they didn’t miss me too badly. When I thought I’d avoided another upchuck, I began the journey back home. 

slower than my usual, but not enough to mean much. I showered, ate a bagel, and got ready for work. (Let’s be real. I just put on a cute sweater and turned on the “touch up my appearance” filter on Zoom. They didn’t need to know I’d switched from running leggings to workday leggings.)

***

Josh brought me a latte around nine thirty. I was on a daily stand-up call for a big launch, but my work on the project was already complete. I toggled off my camera and kissed him thank-you.

“Your meetings back-to-back today?” he asked. His hair was still damp from the shower. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been capable of sleeping in. ...