Behind that page, six years of other pages. Names. Places. Notes. She turned to the last blank page, dipped her pen, and wrote by lantern light:
*Río Verde, August 1879 — H-17 — a boy who hums my daughter's song. Paloma's song is still alive.*
She pressed her palm flat over the wet ink, the way she had once pressed it over Paloma's forehead to check for fever. Outside, the rain steadied into a hush, and the mountains stood dark against the stars.
Six years she had carried the names. Tonight, for the first time, a name had reached back.
Jonah Mercer had been truing the same wheel for an hour, and the wheel knew it.
It stood on the stand in the middle of his shop — a fourteen-spoke wagon wheel of white oak, half-built, the felloes still pale and raw — and every time he set a spoke, his right hand betrayed him. The tremor came up through the old wound in his shoulder like weather: a fine, uncontrollable shiver that turned a true seating into a near miss. He would stop, grip the workbench with his left hand until the knuckles went white, wait for the shaking to pass, and begin again.
The shop smelled of oak shavings and linseed oil and hot iron from the forge in the corner. It was a good smell. It was an honest smell. Wood did not lie to a man. You cut it, you steamed it, you bent it, and it either held the road or it didn't. Jonah had spent forty-five years learning the difference between things that held and things that didn't, and the last four had taught him that the list was shorter than he'd thought.
He was reaching for the spoke shave when the door's bell jangled, and the woman from the livery yard stepped in out of the morning glare with a cracked cart wheel balanced on her hip like it weighed nothing.
"Señor Mercer," she said. "Your wheelwright's sign is the only one in town, so I hope your work is as good as your advertising."
Jonah set down the shave. "It's cracked through the felloe. I can see that from here."
"Then your eyes are as good as your sign." She leaned the wheel against the bench. "Ceniza — my mule — has opinions about cracked felloes. She expressed them at dawn."
Up close she was younger than he'd taken her for in the stable yard, or older — it was hard to tell. Thirty-four, maybe. A graying braid, eyes the color of river water, and hands that kept moving even at rest: checking the edge of his workbench, brushing a curl of oak shaving off the wheel's rim, coming to rest at last folded over her medicine bag. Healer's hands. Steady as stone.
"What happened to your shoulder?" she asked.
Jonah went still. "My sign doesn't advertise conversation."
"No," she agreed. "It doesn't." She turned the cracked wheel slowly, examining it. "The bone in your shoulder set wrong. An old bullet wound, I'd guess. The ball went through the muscle and chipped the joint, and whoever dug it out was in a hurry. That's why your hand shakes — the nerve never forgave the healing."
Every word landed like a hammer tap. "You got all that from watching me pick up a tool?"
"I got it from watching you favor the arm for ten minutes." She met his eyes without flinching. "I can ease it. Not cure it — the bone's done what it's done. But there's a poultice, and exercises. The tremor would lessen."
"I fix wheels," Jonah said. "I don't need fixing."
"Everyone says that." She smiled, and it changed her whole face, and for a second he saw the girl she must have been before the dust got into her. "It's almost never true."
She paid for the wheel in advance — coin counted out carefully, no haggling — and said she'd be back in three days. At the door she paused, reached into her bag, and set a small muslin pouch on the doorstep.
"For the pain," she said, "not for the pride."
The bell jangled. She was gone, and the shop seemed louder in the quiet she left behind — the forge ticking as it cooled, a spoke settling in the rack.
Jonah stared at the pouch for a long time. Then he did what any sensible man would do: he left it exactly where it was, went back to the fourteen-spoke wheel, and worked until the light failed.
He dreamed that night, for the first time in months.
It was always the same arroyo. Spring of 1875. He'd been Ashford Cattle & Rail's railroad detective then — good pay, a badge that opened doors, a Winchester and a warrant book and the company's full confidence. A girl, ten years old, had run from the Foundling Home outside Río Verde, and Mrs. Quill herself had asked for him by name. "She's confused, Mr. Mercer. She doesn't understand how fortunate she is."
He'd tracked the girl for three days along the rail grade, reading her sign the way he'd been taught: a crushed weed here, a pebble turned there. He found her at dusk in a dry arroyo, huddled over a tiny fire she'd built with stolen matches, a kitchen knife clutched in her fist like a sword. She'd looked up at him — and he would remember that look on his deathbed — and she hadn't cried. She hadn't begged. She'd just looked at him the way a person looks at a locked door: no hope in it, and no surprise either.
He'd taken her wrist and dragged her back. It was the job. It was always the job, until one day, a month later, watching another child loaded into another wagon while a clerk checked names off a manifest, he'd understood with a terrible clarity that the job was the thing he'd been running from his whole life, and he'd turned in his badge and bought the wheelwright shop with his savings and told himself that wood was honest.
In the dream, the arroyo was exactly as he remembered it. The girl looked up. But this time — this was new, this had never happened before — she opened her mouth, and in a clear child's voice she said: