The Cold Ledger: The Orchard

Diesel smoke rolled off the county road and the rented SUV climbed a gravel grade that Cassidy had not known existed an hour ago. Alders crowded the shoulder, their leaves still the pale green of early season, and the windshield caught pollen and grit in equal measure. She downshifted. The transmission ground, then caught.

The Holst place sat where the road bent west toward the ridge, white clapboard farmhouse with a hip roof and a steel chimney, a barn the color of dried blood behind it, and a windbreak of Norway spruces tall enough to blunt the prevailing weather. A mailbox on a leaning post read HOLST in black stencil. Two cats watched from the porch railing, one orange, one gray, both still.

She parked by the milk house and cut the engine. For a moment the only sound was the tick of the manifold cooling and, faintly, the complaint of a pump somewhere in the barn. Then boots on gravel.

Anders Holst came around the corner of the barn carrying a wrench the size of a forearm. He was tall and narrow through the shoulders, the kind of tall that came from working on his feet since he was twelve. His hair was the color of tow, clipped close, and his face carried the particular stillness of a man who had learned to be unhurried because hurrying never changed anything on a dairy. He wore a canvas jacket unbuttoned over a gray sweatshirt, and his hands were black to the second knuckle with grease.

"Mrs. Marsh."

"Cassidy."

"Cassidy." He set the wrench on the ledge of a stock tank and wiped his palms on his jeans. "My sister said you'd come. She said you would not take no for an answer."

"Your sister was right."

He studied her for a moment. His gaze was level and unblinking, the way a man looks at a fencepost he is considering whether to mend or replace.

"The orchard is back behind the stone wall. Fifteen years since anyone walked it proper. Brambles have the run of it now. You sure you want those boots in there?"

She looked down at her city boots. Soft leather, no tread to speak of, a scuff on the left toe from where she had caught them on the sill of her rental. "I'll manage. Can you show me where she used to sit?"

He nodded once, the way men nod in country churches when something has been decided and is not open for further committee. He disappeared into the milk house and came back with a hawthorn walking stick, the handle worn to a pale knob by decades of palms. He offered it to her handle-first.

"The ground is soft past the wall. You will want to probe before you put your weight down. Sinkholes from old root cellars, and the rabbits have undermined the terraces. Walk where I walk."

They crossed the dooryard in silence. A dog appeared from behind the woodpile, an old shepherd with a cloudy left eye, and fell in behind them without ceremony. Past the garden, where neat rows of onions were coming up in green spikes, Anders stopped at a gate that had lost its latch. He held the wire upright while she stepped through.

The collapsed stone wall ran along the contour of the rise like the spine of something long dead. Fieldstones, granite, some of them as broad as a dinner table, shouldered out of the sod where frost had heaved them over decades. Moss filled the gaps. Lichen freckled the exposed faces. Cassidy put a hand on the nearest stone and felt it cold and faintly damp, the chill of something that had not seen sun in years.

Beyond the wall, the orchard climbed the low rise. The trees were old standards, planted on seedling rootstock, their trunks black and twisted into postures that suggested either prayer or argument. Fifteen of them, as Anders had said, still holding leaf. The rest were skeletons, bark sloughing in long strips, branches fingered against the sky. Between them the underbrush had conquered. Bramble, sumac, and a thick mat of wild carrot obscured the ground entirely, and the smell of it was green and a little sour, the vegetal breath of a place left to its own arrangements.

"She read under the Winesap," Anders said. He had not raised his voice. He did not need to. "The one that fell in the storm of oh-eight. Never got around to cutting it up. Too busy. Then it was too late. Then it was history."

Cassidy followed his gaze. The Winesap lay where it had fallen, its root ball exposed like a torn tooth, the trunk canted at thirty degrees with the crown resting on a neighbor's still-standing MacFree. The bark had peeled back in long papery strips. Crevices in the exposed wood had collected decades of leaf litter and, in the smaller pockets, the pale green sprigs of moss.

"May I?"

"Go ahead."

She took the hawthorn stick from him and pushed into the undergrowth. The brambles caught at her sleeves and the backs of her knees. A thorn traced a hot line across the back of her left hand and she hissed softly through her teeth but did not stop. The dog had not followed. Anders had not followed either. He stood at the wall with his arms folded and watched her the way a man watches someone walk out onto a frozen pond.

The ground gave under her boots. Not dangerously, but noticeably, the way a sponge gives, and she understood what he had meant about probing. She set the tip of the stick down before each step and pressed her weight onto it. Three feet ahead. Five. The stick found nothing but the soft resistance of leaf mold and the occasional hard knock of a buried stone.

She stopped where the trunk met the earth. The lean of the tree had created a shallow pocket beneath the exposed roots, a cradle of sorts, sheltered from the rain by the canted wood. Here the leaf litter was thinner, beaten down by weather and time. The soil beneath was a dark, almost black loam, the color of strong coffee.

Cassidy knelt. The damp soaked through the knee of her jeans within seconds, a cold that traveled up her thigh and settled somewhere behind her hip. She set the walking stick vertical and pressed the tip into the soil beside the root ball, the way she had seen archaeologists do in documentaries she had half-watched on late flights. The stick slid in easily, then stopped.

She pulled it back. Probed again. The same resistance. Solid, but not the ring of stone. Something more yielding than rock and more permanent than root.

"Anders."

He was beside her in a moment, having come through the brush without sound. He crouched, his knees popping once, and looked where she was looking.

"What did you hit?"

"I don't know." She brushed leaf litter away with the side of her hand. The soil came up in clumps, darker underneath, and a scent rose from the disturbed earth, the mineral tang of something that had been buried a long time and was not entirely reconciled to its condition. "Hand me that stick."

He passed it to her. She used the blunt end to scrape. The soil was loose enough that progress came quickly. Two inches. Three. The shape began to declare itself. Long. Curved. The color of old ivory that had been left out in weather.

She stopped scraping. She set the stick aside and used her fingers.

The object came free of the soil with the reluctance of something that had been gripping it for a long time. A length of bone, perhaps six inches, heavier than she had expected. The surface was pitted and scored with the fine striations of weathering. At one end the shape narrowed and curved. At the other it was broken clean across, the inner marrow visible as a darker line through the cancellous tissue.

Not a deer. She had grown up in farm country enough to recognize the look of deer bone, and this was not it. Too thick. Too curved. The shape suggested something closer to a forearm, or perhaps a lower leg, but she was not certain enough to say so out loud. She was also not certain enough to put it down.

The orchard was very quiet. No wind in the branches. No birdsong, which struck her now as wrong, because in any other piece of woods on any other day there would have been birds. Somewhere far off, a cow called once and fell silent.

Cassidy turned the bone over in her hands. Dirt flaked from its surface and fell back into the hole she had made. She could feel her own pulse in the pads of her fingers where they pressed against the pitted surface. She could feel Anders looking at her and not at the bone, which meant he had already decided what he thought it was and did not want to see it confirmed.

"Could be an old pig," he said. His voice was level and unhurried. "Maren's father lost hogs out of the upper pasture in the seventies. We found bones in the back forty for years. The coyotes drag them."

"Maybe."

He did not say anything else. He stood, slowly, the way men stand when their knees have begun to bargain with them, and brushed the dirt from his own knees. Then he looked west, toward town, toward the highway she had come in on, and back.

"You going to call Rourke?"

Cassidy set the bone down on the leaf litter beside the hole. She did not wrap it. She did not pick it up again. She sat back on her heels and looked at it the way one looks at a door that has been opened by someone else.

"I am."

"Then I will walk you back to the truck. You can use my land line if your cell does not have a signal out here. It will not."

He held out his hand. She took it and let him pull her to her feet. Her knee protested. The bone lay where she had set it, pale against the dark earth, and the shape of the hole beside the root ball was a small mouth in the ground.

Above them, the broken Winesap creaked once in a gust that touched nothing else in the orchard, and a single blackbird lifted from a high branch and was gone.

The walk back to the farm lane took longer than it should have. Anders set the pace and Cassidy did not push him. She had learned, in her years of showing up at places that did not want her, that you did not push a man whose land had just handed him something he could not put down. The orchard thinned to mowed grass, then to the gravel of the lane, then to the rutted approach where his pickup sat with the driver's door still open from earlier. He gestured toward the porch without looking at her.

"Line is in the kitchen. Black phone on the wall."

"Thank you."

He nodded once and went past her, down the steps, and stood at the corner of the yard where the land tipped toward the creek. He did not go inside. He did not want to be in the house with the question she was about to ask the county. He put his hands in his pockets and watched a tractor on the next ridge moving in slow, purposeful lines.

Cassidy stepped into the kitchen. It smelled of coffee that had been on the burner for hours, of dish soap, of the faint sweet rot that comes from a basket of early apples somebody had set on the counter and forgotten. The phone was an old wall model, cream-colored, with a coiled cord and a dial that turned with a satisfying, mechanical clatter. She picked up the receiver, listened for the dial tone, and dialed the number she had pulled from the back of her grandmother's Rolodex three days ago. It rang four times.

"Rourke."

"This is Cassidy Marsh. I'm at the Holst place on County Four. I need you out here."

A pause. She could hear him shifting the phone against his ear, the creak of his desk chair, the soft pop of a plastic coffee lid.

"Marsh. The journalist."

"Yes."

"What've you got?"

She looked out the kitchen window, past the sink full of clean mugs drying on a towel, past the geranium on the sill, to where Anders stood at the edge of the yard with his back to her. His shoulders were very still.

"A bone in the orchard. Adult human, from what I can see. It's at the root ball of a Winesap that's been pulled down. The ground around it has been disturbed."

"Human, you said."

"Humerus, I think. I haven't moved it more than I had to. There's no clothing. No other remains visible."

Another pause. Longer this time. When he came back his voice had flattened a register, the way a man speaks when the part of his job he likes least is beginning.

"You stay where you are. Don't let anyone near it. I'll be there. Forty minutes, maybe. I'm calling the staties on the way."

"Who from Augusta?"

"Lavoie, probably. He's on rotation. He's a prick, but he's a thorough prick. You stay put."

"I will."

"And Marsh."

"Yes."

"You touch anything else, I'm going to be unhappy about it."

She hung the phone up gently. She did not like the way it felt, that plastic clunk against the cradle. She went back out to the porch and told Anders what she had done, in as few words as she could manage. He nodded at each sentence as if she were confirming an appointment.

"I should put coffee on," he said, and went inside.

She sat on the top step and took out her camera. The light was good, the kind of slanted autumn light that made every line in a landscape read. She took photographs of the lane, of the house, of the view toward town, of the way the wind moved in the orchard, and then she walked the fence line slowly, counting posts, marking in her notebook the GPS coordinates her phone would grudgingly give her if she held it just so. Forty minutes was a long time when you were sitting on a step with a question under a tree. She could not go back down there alone, and she did not want to go back down there with anyone, and she did not want to wait.

She took more pictures of the barn, the silo, the milk room door, the hand-painted Holst Farms sign on the post box. She took a picture of the geranium on the kitchen window from outside. She took a picture of the tire tracks her rental had left in the gravel. When she had exhausted the visible, she went back to the porch and sat.

Anders brought her coffee in a heavy mug. He sat on the porch swing but did not swing it. He looked out at the same view she had photographed and drank without tasting.

"Did she ever talk to you," he said at last, "about the year the well went bad?"

"No."

"She never talked about that year to anyone."

He did not elaborate. The swing ticked faintly in the breeze. A pickup passed on the road below, slowed, did not stop. Cassidy heard the dogs from the next place over begin to bark and then quit.

She finished her coffee. She rinsed the mug in the kitchen and set it on the towel beside the others. The clock on the wall said twenty minutes had passed. She went back outside and began walking the perimeter of the orchard at a slow clip, her camera hanging from her neck. It was something to do. It was also, she told herself, the kind of thing a journalist did. She kept her eyes on the ground.

She found it by accident. The toe of her boot caught in a shallow depression at the base of a McIntosh, and she stumbled, caught herself on the trunk, and looked down. It was a rectangle, she thought at first, a perfect rectangle of disturbed soil about six feet from the spot under the Winesap, hidden under a thin litter of last year's leaves and the season's first drop. She crouched and brushed at it with the back of her hand. The soil inside the rectangle was darker than the soil around it, and finer, the way soil gets when it has been turned and turned again and packed back down. She ran her finger along one edge. The edge held. She brushed more leaves away. The rectangle was roughly four feet by six. The corners were sharper than any animal would have made them.

She sat back on her heels. She did not touch anything else. She took four photographs from above and two from the side and one of her own hand for scale. She wrote the coordinates in her notebook. She wrote the word "rectangle" and circled it twice. Then she wrote, under it, "second disturbance." Then she went back to the porch and did not say a word to Anders about it, because she did not yet know what it meant, and she had learned long ago that the fastest way to ruin a thing was to say it out loud before it was ready.

The first siren she heard was not a siren. It was the whine of a transmission downshifting on the rise above the Holst mailbox. Then came the second vehicle, and that one did have a light on the dash, a single bar of red pulsing against the windshield. Rourke's cruiser came up the lane first, raising a long pale dust, and behind it, a dark unmarked sedan with state plates and a thin whip antenna. Both vehicles stopped short of the yard. Doors opened. Doors closed.

Rourke was a tall man with a weathered face and a deputy's posture he had never quite shaken. He wore tan and a canvas jacket and a campaign hat he did not need. He nodded to Cassidy on the porch and nodded to Anders, who had risen from the swing but not stepped forward. Rourke's gaze lingered on Anders for a beat longer than protocol required.

"Marsh."

"Sheriff."

"That's him inside?" He tipped his head toward the orchard.

"Down by the Winesaps. I marked the tree. I haven't touched the bone since we spoke."

"Good. Lavoie's right behind me. He's going to want to do this in order."

The second man was already out of the sedan. Walter Lavoie moved like a man who had taken an enormous number of small, careful steps over a long career and intended to take a few more. He was slight, balding, wore a dark suit that had been pressed within the last twenty-four hours, and carried a leather briefcase he set down on the gravel before he approached anyone. He shook Rourke's hand. He did not smile.

"Marsh," he said, and extended his hand to her without quite looking at her face. His grip was dry and brief.

"Detective."

"You found it."

"I found part of it. The orchard is Holst's. He was with me when I uncovered it. He has not gone back down there."

Lavoie's gaze lifted, then, to the porch, and stayed on Anders for a measured three seconds. Anders stood where he had risen, one hand on the porch rail, the other at his side. His face had gone the color of old paper.

"We will wait," Lavoie said, "until I've been down. Then we'll have a conversation with Mr. Holst. Sheriff, the kit is in the trunk."

Rourke opened the trunk. Lavoie went to the briefcase first. He drew out a pair of nitrile gloves and a small field notebook and a camera of his own, which was older and more battered than Cassidy's. He put on the gloves without rushing. He snapped them at the wrist. He gestured toward the orchard with the flat of his hand.

"After you, Ms. Marsh."

She led them down the lane. She could hear Rourke's boots behind her and Lavoie's softer tread, and somewhere above them, the soft, mechanical click of the state detective's camera firing before he had even reached the tree. Anders had not moved from the porch. She did not turn around to look at him again, because looking back was a kind of invitation, and she did not want to invite whatever was happening on his face.

When they reached the Winesap, Lavoie stopped six feet from the bone and stood for a long moment with his hands at his sides. Then he crouched, slowly, the way Cassidy had crouched, and studied the ground first, the hole, and only at the end the bone itself. He did not pick it up. He took photographs from four angles. He took a photograph of the roots. He took a photograph of Cassidy's footprints in the leaf litter.

"I am going to call Augusta," he said, to no one in particular. "They will send a medical examiner out. Probably tomorrow morning. The site needs to be secured. I want a perimeter tape at thirty feet. Sheriff, can you do that?"

"I can."

"Do it now. Then I want a statement from Ms. Marsh and a statement from Mr. Holst. Separately."

He stood and looked back up the slope toward the house. Anders was a thin figure against the pale clapboard, motionless.

"Your Mr. Holst is not going to enjoy the next week," Lavoie said, in the same flat, careful tone.

"He's not my Mr. Holst."

"No," Lavoie said. "But you are the one who's going to write about him."

The Harborview's lobby was empty when Cassidy pushed through the front door at quarter past nine. She had left Lavoie at the orchard, still photographing, still measuring, still speaking into his phone in the careful French-Canadian cadence of a man building a case one fact at a time. Rourke had driven her back in the cruiser without conversation, the radio murmuring weather warnings for the next county. She had walked up the stairs to her room, sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, and not turned on the lamp.

Now she stood in the lobby with her coat still on and her boots still laced, because the alternative was sitting alone with the image of that bone curled against the Winesap's roots, and she was not, yet, ready for that.

The front desk was unattended. The bell on the counter had a handwritten sign taped above it: RING FOR SERVICE. She did not ring. She walked instead to the small parlor off the lobby, where a gas fire had been laid in the grate but not lit, and two wing chairs faced each other across a low table. The room smelled of lemon oil and the faint, sweet rot of old wood. Through the bay window, Main Street was a black mirror with the streetlamps doubled in it.

She sat. She unzipped her coat. She put her hands between her knees.

The teacup was already on the table when she looked up.

It was a thin porcelain cup, white with a blue rim, set on a saucer beside a small pot covered with a knitted cozy. There was no note. There was no card. Cassidy stared at it for a long moment, then at the doorway.

Greta Lindstrom was standing in the parlor's entrance the way she had stood at the library desk for forty years: square, contained, her hands folded at the waist of a gray cardigan. Her silver hair was pulled back in the same low knot she had worn that morning. Her face held no expression Cassidy could name.

"I did not want to disturb you at the door," Greta said. Her voice was low and even, with the faint rounded vowels of someone who had learned English as a second language and never quite trusted it. "I thought you would come in here."

"How did you know I would come in here?"

"I have watched people come in here for many years. They come in here when they do not want to be seen from the street."

Cassidy did not answer. She looked at the teacup again. Steam was rising from the spout of the pot in a thin, curling line.

"Sit down, Mrs. Lindstrom."

"I have been sitting down all day. I would prefer to stand, if you do not mind." Greta moved to the nearer wing chair but did not sit. She rested one hand on its back. "The tea is from the pot Mrs. Henning keeps on the sideboard for guests. It is not very good tea. But it is hot."

Cassidy poured. The liquid in the cup was the color of weak apple juice and smelled of bergamot that had been stored too long in the open. She drank anyway, because Greta was watching her, and because her throat had been dry since the orchard.

"You found something today," Greta said. It was not a question.

"I found something today."

"At the Winesap."

Cassidy looked up. Greta's face had not changed. Her pale eyes, set deep in their hollows, were fixed on Cassidy with the steady, unblinking focus of someone who had spent decades reading people across a desk.

"I cannot discuss an open investigation," Cassidy said.

"No. You cannot." Greta nodded, once. "I am not asking you to discuss it. I am telling you what I know, and you will do what you do with what you know. That has always been the arrangement in towns like this one. People tell you things. You decide what to do with them."

The gas fire popped in the grate. Somewhere upstairs, a television murmured. The radiator under the bay window ticked twice and went quiet.

"Mr. Lavoie is a careful man," Greta said. "I knew his father. I did not know Walter well. He was a quiet boy. He read books in the library, but he did not take them out. He preferred to read them where they lived."

Cassidy said nothing. She held the cup in both hands and let the warmth soak into her palms.

"You should know about Erling Holst," Greta said. "If you do not already know."

"I know the name."

"You know the name. You do not know what it carries." Greta moved her hand from the chair back and folded it with the other at her waist again. "Erling was Maren's father. He was a good man, in the way that good men in this county are good. He went to church. He did not drink. He paid his taxes early because he did not like the postmistress to have to wait on him. He had a small dairy, twelve cows, on the lower road past the orchard. He sold it in eighty-six to Anders and moved into the bungalow on Birch."

Cassidy remembered the bungalow. It had been passed on the drive in, a small brown house with aluminum siding and a concrete goose on the lawn.

"He kept bees," Greta said. "After the dairy. He had twelve hives behind the bungalow, and he sold honey at the farmers' market in the summers. He read books about the Vikings. He was not a foolish man."

She paused. The radiator ticked again.

"After Maren disappeared, Erling changed. I do not mean he wept in public. He was not a man who wept in public. But he began to walk. Every evening, after the bees were settled, he walked out to the orchard. He did not go in. He stood at the fence line and looked in. Then he walked home. Sometimes I would see him from my kitchen window, going past, and then coming back, and the light would be different, but he would be the same."

"What was he looking for?"

"He was looking for his daughter. He did not say that to me. He said that to the minister. The minister told my sister, and my sister told me, because my sister could not keep a thing like that inside her without bursting." Greta's mouth tightened, briefly. "He told the minister he was certain Maren had been taken by someone in town. Not a stranger. Someone local. Someone who had known the family. Someone who had known the orchard, because Maren had been seen there, and she had not been seen leaving it."

Cassidy set her cup down on the saucer. The china clicked against itself, a small, bright sound.

"He went to the sheriff," Greta said. "Sheriff at the time was Dale's father, Ed Rourke. Ed listened. Ed took notes. Ed came out to the orchard with Erling one afternoon in the fall of eighty-three and walked the rows with him. They did not find anything. There was nothing to find. Or there was something to find, and Ed did not see it, which is a different thing."

"And Erling kept going back."

"Every evening, for years. In the rain. In the snow. He wore a path along the fence line that you could still see in eighty-nine when the county widened the road. He would stand at the same place and look in at the same trees. I do not know which tree he was looking at. He never said. Perhaps he did not know. Perhaps he only knew the direction."

Cassidy thought of the Winesap. Of the hole dug into the roots. Of Lavoie saying, with his careful emphasis, that the disturbance was recent.

"He became convinced," Greta said. "Convinced is not the right word. He became certain. There is a difference. Convinced can be argued away. Certain cannot. He was certain that someone in this town had taken his daughter. He was certain that someone in this town had buried her. He was certain that the orchard was the place, or near the place, because that was where she had last been seen, and a man who has lost a child will not accept that a thing can simply cease. A thing must be somewhere. A thing must have a location."

"Did he confront anyone?"

"No. That was not Erling's way. He was not a man who confronted. He was a man who watched. He watched people in the grocery store. He watched people at the post office. He watched people at church on Sundays, and I think he began to see something in their faces, or he thought he did. The minister spoke to him about it. The minister said he could not keep on this way. The minister said he needed to lay it down."

"And did he?"

"He had a heart attack in March of ninety-four." Greta's voice did not change. "He was in the bungalow. He had been in the orchard that afternoon. He had walked home in the cold, and he had sat in his chair by the window, and he had not eaten his supper, and his heart had stopped. Anders found him in the morning. He was fifty-eight years old."

The fire popped again. Cassidy realized she was holding her breath and let it out slowly through her nose.

"The orchard was officially abandoned in ninety-five," Greta said. "The Holsts stopped farming it after Erling died. The trees were old. The market for apples had gone to Washington state. There was no reason to keep it up. The barn was taken down. The fence rotted. The town forgot about it, the way towns forget about things that have become inconvenient."

She looked at Cassidy. Her pale eyes were very still.

"I have not forgotten about it. I never forgot about it. I have lived in this town for seventy-three years. I know what this town knows and what it pretends not to know. I have always believed Maren was buried close to home. Not in another county. Not in another state. Close to home. In the place she was last seen. In the place her father walked to every night for ten years, because he knew, the way a father knows, that his child was there."

Cassidy's hands had gone cold around the teacup again. She set it down.

"You are saying the town knew."

"I am saying the town knew." Greta folded her hands tighter at her waist. "I am saying the town knew, and the town did nothing. I am saying that is what towns do. They protect themselves. They protect their own. They decide what is true and what is not true, and they enforce that decision on anyone who tries to argue with it."

"And you did not argue."

"I argued." Greta's voice thinned, almost imperceptibly. "I argued in my own way. I kept records. I kept the newspaper clippings. I kept the photographs from the search parties. I kept the letter Erling wrote to the state police in eighty-seven, asking them to reopen the case, and the letter they wrote back, which was a form letter, and which I also kept. I kept all of it, and I kept my mouth shut, because a woman alone in this town in eighty-seven could not do more than that without losing her position and her house and her place at the library desk."

She unfolded one hand and pressed it briefly against her chest, over her sternum, as if testing for something.

"You have come back here," she said. "You have come back, and you have found something, and Mr. Lavoie has come with his camera and his tape, and the sheriff has come with his cruiser, and there are people now who did not used to be here. That is different. That is a thing that has not happened before."

"Yes."

"Then I am telling you to be careful." Greta's voice dropped, so that Cassidy had to lean forward slightly to hear it. "I am telling you to be careful whose name you speak aloud. I am telling you that there are people in this town who have lived with this for thirty years, and they have arranged their lives around it, and they will not thank you for moving the furniture."

Cassidy looked at her for a long moment. The parlor was very quiet. The fire had burned down to a low blue flame along the logs.

"Are you afraid, Mrs. Lindstrom?"

"I am seventy-six years old," Greta said. "I am not afraid for myself. I am afraid for what happens when a thing like this is opened. I have seen it before. I saw it in seventy-two, when they found what was in the quarry. The town did not recover from that for a generation. The children of the men who were involved are still here. The grandchildren are still here. They work at the feed store. They work at the bank. They coach the baseball team. They will not be kind to you, Ms. Marsh. They will be very polite, and they will not be kind."

She straightened. She smoothed the front of her cardigan with both hands.

"You should sleep," she said. "Tomorrow will be a long day. Mr. Lavoie will want to speak with you again. The sheriff will want to speak with you. There will be people at the orchard you have not met yet, from the state police, from the county. They will want things from you that you may not want to give. You should rest."

She turned toward the doorway.

"Mrs. Lindstrom," Cassidy said.

Greta stopped. She did not turn back.

"Who do you think?"

The parlor was silent. The fire popped once more and settled. The radiator ticked. Outside, a truck passed on Main Street, its headlights sliding across the bay window and away.

"There is a man," Greta said, to the doorframe, "who was very young in eighty-two. He is no longer young. He lives on the same road as the orchard. He was seen that summer, by people who have since left this town, in a place where he should not have been. I do not have proof. I have never had proof. I have only had the way he looked at Erling in church, and the way Erling looked back."

She paused.

"That is not a thing you can print."

"No."

"But it is a thing you should know."

She walked out of the parlor. Her footsteps were soft on the carpet, and then on the hardwood of the lobby, and then there was the small click of the front door, and then nothing.

Cassidy sat in the wing chair with her hands around a teacup that had gone cold. The gas fire burned low. The streetlamp outside threw a long pale bar across the carpet and stopped at the toe of her boot.

She thought about Erling Holst walking the fence line in the rain. She thought about the bone curled against the roots of a Winesap tree that had outlived him by thirty years. She thought about a man who had been very young in eighty-two, who lived on the same road, who had been seen in a place he should not have been.

She thought about the way Anders had not moved from the porch.

She finished the tea. It was cold and bitter. She set the cup on the saucer, stood, and turned off the lamp on her way up the stairs.