Chapter 5

Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with the light on, waiting, which meant she had heard the floorboards.

"Junie. What are you-"

Junie put the page on the table and pushed it across.

Della read it standing up. Then she sat down on the floor with her back against the cabinet.

It was dated March 4, nine years back, written in the afternoon. It said the fire in the foaling barn started at a heat lamp that had been moved up against two drums of thinner. It said Dane Kettering had been warned about both, in writing, the January before. It said the night foreman, Owen Pike, did not come on the property until after eleven o'clock and had nothing to do with any of it.

And at the bottom, in the same shaking hand: I AM TAKING THIS TO FERRIS AT EIGHT.

Ferris was the county attorney.

Junie watched her mother's face do something she had never seen it do. First it went still. Then it went careful - the careful she used in other people's houses.

"Where," she said, "did you get this."

"Behind the board."

Her mother read it three more times. Then she got up off the floor, put on her coat, and walked out the kitchen door into the yard with the page in her fist.

Junie went to the window. The yard was white with frost under the barn lights. Her mother stood in the middle of the frozen ruts for a long count of ten, breathing. She looked at the east wing windows, where the lamp was on and the old man was sitting up in his chair.

Then she turned and walked toward the office, where a truck with a silver grille was parked, and the light in the window was still on, and Dane Kettering was still working.

He opened the door before she knocked.

"Della. It's eleven at night."

She held the page up. He looked at it. Then he stepped back and let her in and shut the door, and the two of them stood under the light.

He read it twice. He was good at reading. He had been a bloodstock agent before he ran the farm, and he read contracts the way other men read weather.

Then he did something she didn't expect. He pulled out a chair for her.

"Sit down."

She didn't.

"Okay." He rubbed his jaw. "Okay. Della, I'm going to tell you something and I need you to hear it. My uncle had a stroke in this office. Massive. Right side, speech, the whole thing. For the first three or four months, he wrote things. Notes. Lists. Some of them made sense and some of them didn't." He tapped the page. "This is one of the ones that didn't."

"That's his hand."

"It's his hand." He said it kindly. "It's his hand, and it's a bad page. Look at it. He says Owen wasn't here till eleven. The state proved Owen was here at nine-forty. That was the whole case. He says I was warned about a heat lamp - I was. I was warned about fifty things that winter. So was everybody." He turned the page over and back. "This doesn't free your father. It does the opposite. It puts a confused old man's handwriting in front of a review board and tells them the family has been sitting on it for nine years. That's how your dad dies in Ridgefield."

Della's hands were cold. She could hear the furnace running under the floor.

"Give it to me," Dane said. "I'll take it to Coy in the morning. We'll do this properly. Quiet. Quiet is the only way it works."

She held it out. She was tired, and he was warm, and he had a good face, and eleven months of finding nothing had worn a groove in her.

From the dark of the hall behind her, Junie said, "Mama, he wipes it every night."

Both of them turned.

The girl was standing in the doorway in her pajamas and her jacket with the safety pin, green boots on the wrong feet.

"Every night at six," Junie said. "He wipes a board nobody writes on. Why does he do that?"

Dane's smile stayed exactly where it was. His eyes did not.

Della pulled the page back against her chest.

"Think about your job," Dane said. Still kind. "Think about Junie's school."