Chapter 1

The little girl set a small wooden bird on Meryl's fry-bread counter.

Honey-colored oak, egg-sized, a chipped notch in the tail.

Meryl's sister had carved that notch the year she learned, and her sister had been gone three years without ever once mentioning a child.

"It's pretty," Meryl said, because her hands had gone still in the flour.

The girl nodded, solemn, two little braids.

"Mama said it only sings for safe people."

She shook it once.

A wooden pea rattled inside, soft, the way it always had.

Meryl knew that rattle.

She'd heard it a hundred times across a kitchen table.

"Where'd you get the bird, sweetheart?"

A man stepped up behind the girl before she could answer.

Sunburned, dusty work shirt, a green backpack on one shoulder.

He put a hand on the girl's head, gentle.

"We should go, Bex."

"Uncle Elam, the lady likes my bird."

Meryl came around the counter, wiping her hands on the apron.

"Did you make it?" she asked him.

"It was my wife's," he said. "She passed."

But the notch was wrong for a stranger's wife.

The notch was Arden's first bad cut, the one she never sanded out.

"Your wife carve the pea inside too?" Meryl said.

He didn't answer that.

He reached for the girl's hand instead.

"Bex, come on."

The girl turned to go, and the bird slid off the counter.

It hit the gravel and split along a seam Meryl didn't know it had.

Something small and bright rolled out and stopped against her shoe.

A brass key.

Flat handle, shaped like a wild thistle.

Meryl stared at it.

She had a cedar chest in her root cellar with a thistle carved on the lid.

She'd never had the key for it.

Arden took the key the spring she left.

"That's hers," the man said, too fast, and bent for it.

His hand closed over it in the gravel.

Meryl looked at the little girl again.

The braids. The dark eyes. Five years old, give or take.

Arden had been gone three.

The girl had been born before that.

"Who's her mother?" Meryl asked.

The man straightened up. He didn't answer.

"We really have to go," he said.

Then Meryl felt it, the way you feel someone staring.

A man stood by the lemonade cart, ten feet off.

Gray barn coat, pale eyes, a folded fair map in one hand.

He was holding up his phone, thumb moving on the glass.

Meryl followed his eyes to the girl, then back to the screen.

Then he lowered the phone.

The screen tipped through the lane lights on its way down.

A bright blue field, and a small dark head inside it.

Bex's face was on it.