She went to the barn and saw he’d been using the spade and knew what for and went out into the woods and dug up not the gold but one of the mason jars of rolled banknotes, money as much hers as his, and she left the hole dug up with the empty jar beside it and went back into the house and buried the roll down into her underclothing. She did not want the gold. She knew she could leave it here and it would stay here. She might live to old age away and Jamie marry some woman and raise children and die and she knew the tea canister of gold pieces would stay right where it was until the canister rotted away in the ground and there would only be the ancient thick wafers of buttery gold lying out there unknown in the leaf-mold. It was better than a bank. It was better than taking it with her.

Then she was done and meant to walk right out the door with the valise and up the sand track to the highway. Instead she sat at the kitchen table. The summer smell of kitchen garbage, fetid dishes in the sink. The odor of decaying wallpaper paste. She recalled the morning she’d left Saint-Camille with her mother. The trains south where there was no choice but to go. The lawyer McCarson. Edgar Sloane was no McCarson. And who precisely had her mother thought McCarson was that morning they set off on those southern trains into another country? The balm of sun and river water gone now and only the ache of sex left, her thighs stretched and her breasts tender within their coverings. Her mother died, finally. She’d become a whore and life had whored upon her. Joey knew the difference between them was that her mother considered herself accidental. As if life had conspired against her more so than anyone else. Not fate but some abuse from God. Some way she’d abused her God and He’d responded in kind. A grand fearsome kind her mother thought she deserved. When all it was, Joey believed, was every one has good and bad to them but no one is willing to face the bad head-on and take it as part of themselves. There might be that bravery somewhere. She might have it. She might have a little. Edgar Sloane might have it. He was precise, focused, nerved-up and steady. A man in his fifties. Perhaps it was that. His confidence came off him like aftershave. But it remained that he was on vacation. And there was only the one way to know him otherwise.