Chapter 2

"Where did you get this?"

Alva's fist stayed shut around the ring.

The leather cord hung loose from her knuckles.

Gray light came thin through the kitchen window.

The crew had quit chewing.

Tacy set her cup down without a sound.

"From my mother," she said.

"I told your foreman that at the gate."

"Your mother." Alva said it like it tasted wrong.

"Alta Merrow. She passed in August."

"She put it in my hand two days before she died."

Alva turned her fist over and opened it.

The small silver band lay in her palm.

She tipped it until the letters caught the lamp.

E. Deighton to A. Deighton. 1860.

"This is mine," Alva said.

"My husband had it cut the year we were wed."

"His hand's in that letter work. I'd know it blind."

Shay looked from the ring to Tacy and back.

The rest of them looked at their plates.

Tacy did not reach for it.

Her fingers went to the bare place at her collar.

Twenty-four years she'd carried that weight there.

Now it sat in another woman's hand.

"Then you knew my mother," she said.

Alva's eyes came up slow.

"Merrow," she said. "That name's written on a year of letters in my desk."

"I was expecting a widow of fifty, not a girl at my gate."

"She knew yours." Tacy's voice stayed low. "She knew this house."

Alva pressed the band flat against her palm.

"Strangers don't walk up to my gate wearing my ring."

"I'm no stranger. I have proof."

"Show it."

Tacy bent and drew a flat packet from the carpetbag at her feet.

It was tied with twine and soft from handling.

The ink ran in a careful, slanted hand.

"A letter," she said. "My mother wrote it."

"Then open it," Alva said.

"I can't. Not yet."

"Why not?"

"It says so on the fold. It opens when someone in this house knows the child."

"What child?"

"That's the whole of it," Tacy said. "The letter won't name it until someone here does."

Alva stared at the twine.

"Nobody here knows any child."

"Then it stays tied." Tacy set it back in the bag.

A hand near the stove muttered she ought to be put out in the snow.

Shay stood up off the bench.

"Put out where," he said. "Road's been shut since Monday."

"And she's the only one here read that hide right."

He set his hat on the table.

"Somebody's been burning our calves with our own iron, Alva. A year of it."

"The bank sells this place Saturday noon."

"You want to hand them a year of missing stock on top of the land?"

Alva did not answer him.

She was looking at the ring, not the woman.

"I'll earn my keep," Tacy said. "I'll read every hide you've got."

"I'm not asking for the ring back. Keep it till you trust me."

That last line fell wrong into the quiet.

Alva's hand closed slow.

"You don't know what you're holding," she said.

"Then tell me."

Her chair scraped the plank floor.

She crossed to the window and looked out at the white yard.

"The winter my husband died, I lost a child too."

"One day old. A storm like this one, only worse."

"We buried her by the creek in the only box we had."

Her back stayed to the room.

"And I put this ring in with her. On a cord, so she'd have her father's hand near."

She turned around.

"That ground has been closed twenty-four years."

"Nobody's come asking after it in all that time."

"My husband had one brother, Gowan. He's not set foot on this place since the burying, and his name's not spoken in this house."

The stove ticked. The cook stood frozen at the dry sink.

Alva came back and stopped across the table from Tacy.

She held the ring up between two fingers.

"That ring was in the ground," she said. "You took it off a grave."