Page 32 of The River We Remember

“Sure, I guess. Thank you.”

The girl opened the door, and Brody followed Garnet inside. He made several trips carrying boxes filled with enough prepared dishes to feed the whole Quinn clan and their hired men for a week. On the final trip, he found that Marta Quinn had come downstairs herself. She was sitting beside Garnet on the living room sofa. She still had on the black dress she’d worn to the funeral home. Garnet held both of the widow’s hands in her own and leaned toward her in a compassionate way.

“Whatever you need, Marta,” Garnet was saying. “We’re all here for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you need help with the house?”

“No. The girls are good.”

“J.P., does he need a hand around the farm?”

“No, we have men.”

“All right.”

Brody put the final box on the table in the kitchen, where Colleen was already busy finding room in the refrigerator.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“There’s a lot,” Colleen said.

“You know how folks are.”

Which was, Brody thought in retrospect, an odd thing to say to the girl. How would she know how folks are when you’ve lost a father? It had never happened to her before.

But she said, “Yes,” as if she understood perfectly and the kindness of these rural women was something for which she was, in fact, grateful.

Brody returned to the living room, where the two women were in deep conversation. Garnet had buried both her parents and a brother and knew firsthand about death and its aftermath. Marta seemed intensely interested in her perspective. Brody excused himself to go find Graff.

“Don’t go far, Brody,” Garnet said. “We’ll be leaving shortly.”

He wanted to tell her that they would leave when he was done, because Graff’s presence had changed the nature of his visit, but he said only “I’ll be around.”

The barn, an enormous structure painted white, stood on a rise fifty yards from the house, along with the other outbuildings and grain silos. The barn’s lower level had been dug into the hillside. It contained feeding troughs and opened onto the large cattle yard behind the barn. The main level, above, contained a number of stalls that had once been occupied by draft horses but now held various implements. Above that was a great loft stacked with bales of hay. Except for its enormous size, the structure was little different from most barns Brody had been in.

As he climbed the dirt lane, he caught the dry scent of hay and the underlying smell of manure. Just inside the broad, open doorway, he found Graff standing beside a John Deere tractor, talking with Noah Bluestone. The two men stopped their conversation when Brody appeared.

“Hey, Connie,” Brody said.

“Sheriff,” Graff replied in a formal way. Which signaled to Brody that what was going on between the men in that barn was all business.

“Afternoon, Noah,” Brody said.

“Sheriff,” Bluestone responded.

“I thought Jimmy fired you,” Brody said.

“Mrs. Quinn asked me back. Said they could use an extra hand, especially now.”

Noah Bluestone was not particularly big—a full head shorter than both Brody and Graff—but what there was of him was all hard bone and thick muscle and tough sinew. His hair was panther black, short-cropped. His dark face was the legacy of both his long days in the sun and the Sioux blood that ran through every one of his capillaries. His eyes were heavy-lidded, so that he looked at the world through slits behind which mostly darkness showed. He was a difficult man to read.

“Mind telling me why Jimmy let you go?” Brody said.

“I just finished explaining that to your deputy,” he said.

“How about explaining it to me.”