Chapter 2

Bex's face was on it.

A school picture. Blue background, the same two braids.

The man in the gray barn coat held the phone so the screen faced him, not her.

Meryl's hand closed on the edge of the counter.

"Don't," Elam said, low.

He wasn't looking at the man. He was looking at her.

"Don't what?"

"Don't turn your head again. He watches what you do."

She hadn't known she'd turned it.

Bex crouched in the gravel.

She gathered the two halves of the bird and pressed them back along the seam.

The wooden pea rattled once inside.

She held the bird against the little pocket on her dress.

Meryl stepped around the counter to block the open lane.

"You're not walking off with a kid and my sister's bird."

Elam went still.

"Your sister," he said.

"Arden Harp. She carved that notch the year she learned. I'd know it blind."

He let a breath out slow.

"I've got a phone," Meryl said. "And a cousin who wears a deputy's badge."

"Not him." Fast. "Not here. You call anybody in a uniform and she's gone before morning."

"Then tell me who she is."

"Not in the open."

He took Meryl's wrist.

He pressed something small and warm into her palm and folded her fingers shut.

The thistle key.

"You know the chest this opens," he said. "In your root cellar. Go read what's inside."

Her thumb found the thistle edge she'd felt a hundred times on the lid.

"I never had a key for that chest."

"She had it. Then she made sure you would."

The man by the lemonade cart folded his map into a neat square.

He started toward them. Not quick. Easy, like a man who owned the night.

Elam lifted Bex onto his hip.

"That's Rolan Haskins," he said, barely a sound. "If he gets her tonight, I don't get her back."

"Who is he to her?"

"Read the chest. Then find me."

"Find you where?"

"North lot. Green Ford, rust on the tailgate."

He bent his head and said something to Bex, too soft to hear.

Then he stepped into the stream of people moving toward the livestock barns.

The gray coat passed Meryl's stand, close enough she caught the smell of cold aftershave.

He didn't slow. His eyes went where Elam had gone.

Meryl stood in the churn of the crowd, the key in one fist and her phone in the other.