Tala thought of the quilt. Of the girl's eyes, held one beat too long.
"Then we will go back," she said, "and we will read every number until we find her."
Above them, the brass bell of the Foundling Home caught the afternoon sun and threw it back at the town like a wink.
The trouble started with a fever, the way trouble usually does — small, and human, and not her fault.
The woman came to Tala's clinic at dusk, carrying a girl of seven wrapped in a shawl. Tala had set up her practice in the back room of the livery stable, with Jonah's help — a cot, a table, her medicine bag, and a bundle of sage hung over the door. It was not much, but the miners' wives had begun to come, and the Mexican families from the south arroyo, and for two weeks the little room had smelled of yerba buena and hope.
"She's burning up," the woman said. Her name was Mrs. Abernathy, and her hands shook as she laid the child down. "The Home sent her back yesterday — said she was too sick to keep. Said it was a fever."
Tala put her palm to the girl's forehead. The heat coming off the small body was wrong — not the clean fire of fever but something damp and low, like a banked coal. The girl's breathing was shallow. Her skin was pale and sweating. And when Tala lifted one eyelid, the pupil was a pinprick in the lamplight.
Tala bent close and smelled the child's breath.
Opium. Sweet and unmistakable, underneath the sourness of sickness.
"How long has she been like this?" Tala asked.
"Since yesterday morning. They said — Mrs. Quill said she had a fever and needed her mother." Mrs. Abernathy wrung her shawl. "Can you help her? The doctor in town charges two dollars just to open his bag."
Tala worked through the night. She cooled the girl with damp cloths. She brewed willow bark and spooned it between the child's lips drop by drop. She rubbed the small chest with mustard oil and prayed — not to any god in particular, but to the long line of women who had taught her, her mother and her grandmother and all the faceless curanderas before them, whose hands moved through hers when she worked.
At dawn, the girl's breathing slowed. Then it stopped.
Tala sat beside the cot for a long time, the dead child's hand in hers, still warm. She had seen opium kill before — in the mining camps, men who took too much of the black paste to quiet their lungs. This was the same death, wearing a smaller face. The Home had dosed this child for weeks, maybe months — the "medicine to help them sleep" Tomás had described — and sent her home when the dose went wrong, calling it fever.
Mrs. Abernathy's scream brought the neighbors.
Tala tried to explain. She showed them the pinprick pupils, told them about the smell on the child's breath, said the words *opium* and *the Home* in the same sentence. It was a mistake. She knew it the moment the words left her mouth.
"You're saying the Home poisoned her?" Mrs. Abernathy's grief had found a target, and it was closer than a whitewashed house on a hill. "You? With your weeds and your chanting?"
"I am saying — "
"My sister in Tucson wrote me about women like you." A man's voice from the doorway — Mr. Fitch, who owned the dry goods store. "Bruja. That's what they call them down in Mexico. Witch women."
The word moved through the little crowd like a wind through dry grass. *Bruja. Bruja.*
"She killed my baby," Mrs. Abernathy wept. "She put her hands on my baby and now she's dead."
Tala stood in the middle of her clinic with her medicine bag in her hand, and watched two weeks of trust burn down in two minutes. She did not argue. She had learned, in the mining camps, that you cannot out-talk grief. You can only outlast it.
But as the crowd thinned, she saw Reverend Oates across the street, watching. He did not come closer. He just stood there with his hands folded, the way a man stands when a plan is working.
---
Sheriff Boone came to Jonah's wheelwright shop the next morning, and he did not come alone. Two deputies waited by the horses, and Boone stood in the sawdust with his thumbs in his belt and his face arranged into something meant to look like regret.
"Jonah," he said. "We need to talk about your friend."
"She's not my friend, Boone. She's a woman who fixes wagon wheels' worth of people." Jonah kept planing the spoke in his hands. The shavings curled off the blade like wood shavings were supposed to, and his right hand only shook a little. "What do you want?"
"I want you to stop digging." Boone's voice dropped. "You and the curandera. The Home visit. The questions. Victoria Ashford built this town's school and half its church, Jonah. You don't get to tear that down because some Mexican witch — "
"Careful."
" — has a sad story." Boone stepped closer. "I'm saying this as someone who remembers what you used to be. Stop digging, Jonah. Or the past you buried is going to dig itself up and bury you."
Jonah set down the plane. "Is that a threat, Sheriff?"
"It's a weather report." Boone turned to go, then stopped. "Oh — and Dale Freeman was in my office this morning. Cancelled his order for the wagon wheels. Said he doesn't do business with men who run with witches." A pause. "Funny how fast word travels."
After Boone left, Jonah stood in his shop for a long time, looking at the half-finished wheel on the bench. Then he picked up the plane and went back to work, because work was the only prayer he knew.
By noon, two more customers had cancelled. By evening, the street in front of his shop was empty in a way it had never been empty before — not just quiet, but avoided, the way people avoid a house where someone died.