cupboard open and was reaching up inside the top of it, feeling. Pa sent me to
tell you, only I had the milk run first — I'm sorry, Miss Cade, I come as fast
as —"
4
"Who were they, Jonah. Did you know them?"
"I knowed one." The boy's voice dropped, and in the drop Willa heard his
father's coaching: say it plain, say it once, don't decorate it. "It was Mr.
Coulter's man, the one with the scar through his eyebrow. The one that rides
the bay with the white hind foot. And there was another with a sack, like for
carrying out."
The wall cupboard. The top of the wall cupboard, where a man's hand would
feel along the inside boards for what a searcher would expect to find behind
them — because the notebook was in the wall itself, slid up behind the
cupboard's back panel by her father's hands on the last night he ever spent in
that room, behind a board he had planed to fit so sweetly that Willa herself
had to find the seam by touch, in the dark, by the memory of his fingers
guiding hers. The second notebook. The town book, she called it in her mind.
The one that would be waiting, if she lived, for the day a federal examiner
came to Hays City with clean hands.
But it was the first notebook they had come for — the field book in the desk
drawer — because that was the one Coulter knew existed, the one her father
had been seen carrying, the one whose existence Rube Halloran... no. She did
not think the name. She did not think any name. She made her face into the
face of a schoolteacher whose morning has been interrupted by a piece of
mischief, and she laid the reader down open at page forty-one, and she said,
"Children, you will read to yourselves until the noon hour, and Hettie will
keep the order, and if anyone asks, I have gone to see about a burglary like
any citizen. Pens down. Books open. Jonah — thank you. Sit by the stove
and get your breath. You've done a man's errand and done it properly."
Then she went out into the May morning with her shawl over her arm and
her father's compass, out of old habit, in her pocket, and she walked — did
5
not run; there were windows all along Alder Creek's one street, and some of
them had company eyes behind them — to the schoolhouse first, because she
had to know.
The latch was broken as Jonah had said, the hasp wrenched bright. Inside, the
room had the stunned tidiness of a place searched by men in no hurry. Her
desk drawers sat on the floor in a row, contents stirred but not scattered, and
the wall cupboard stood open, its top shelf emptied onto her desk and set
back again, jar by jar, an eighth of an inch off true. Whoever had done the
reaching had not found the seam in the panel. Her father's carpentry had held.
The notebook in the wall was safe — the second one, the town book, the
insurance.
The first one was not in the desk drawer. It had not been there since
February, because in February Willa had understood — the night Sheriff
Wilkes came to drink coffee in her kitchen and asked, too gently, whether
her father had left any "papers of a professional nature" the company might
wish to purchase for their records — that the field book needed a closer
keeper than furniture. Since February it had lived in an oilskin wrap
wherever Willa was: under her mattress at night, at the bottom of her market
basket in the day, and this morning, because she had woken before dawn and
read the corner table by candlelight the way another woman might read a
letter, it was inside the bodice of her dress, flat against her ribs, where it had
ridden all through the spelling lesson and the rivers of Europe. She stood in
the wrecked quiet of the room and put her hand over it through the cloth and
felt the edges of the pages her father's hand had filled, and beneath the fear,
which was considerable, she felt a colder and more useful thing: certainty.
They had come for it in the open now. A search in daylight, a broken latch, a
boy witness. Whatever patience had governed the winter was finished. The
6
next search would not be of a schoolhouse.
She did not go back to the children. That was the hardest of it, and she did it
in full knowledge of the cost — she would hear Hettie's voice asking about
the fence at the ford in her sleep for a long time — but a schoolroom full of
children was the first place Coulter's men would look for her when the
second notebook failed to appear, and she would not make a shield of them,
not even by accident. She went instead the back way, between the
schoolhouse and the livery fence, through the cottonwoods along the creek
where the street could not see, and she came up behind Liveryman Beck's
stable breathing hard and smelling of horse and warm dust, and old Beck
himself looked once at her face and once at the sky going bruise-colored in
the west and did not ask her a single question. He saddled her mare, the gray
she called Button, with his own hands and buckled the girth twice, the way
men do for riders they expect to need the saddle to hold. "Creek road'll be
soup by dark," he said. "If it's soup you're wanting."
"It's soup I'm wanting, Mr. Beck."
"Them clouds are building over the river since nine o'clock," he said. "Your
daddy would've called it a wet one coming. He had the eye." He did not say
be careful, and she did not say goodbye, and that was the whole of the
farewell Alder Creek gave her, and it was enough, and she was out of the
town by the creek road before anybody thought to watch the livery — except
Jonah, standing small in the stable doorway with his cap still in his fist,