Then one says, “How long have you been starting fires?”

She laughs.

“How long have you been lighting fires?” the man repeats. He has a mustache. She looks at his eyes. He is serious.

“We light one every year for our basket grasses. They need fire to grow. Why?”

Then she realizes the men are trying to get her for starting the fire. She thinks, perhaps there is no end to the anger, the hatred, for telling the truth about the whale, for calling the paper, for talking and protesting. “We didn’t light one this year because of the drought.”

Dick Russell says nothing to the sheriff because the feds are going to be called in and he wants to know what’s going on here. He wants the feds. Later he’ll bring out his evidence.

Aurora has been listening. “She hasn’t been out there. I can vouch for her. I’m her alibi.”

“You’re her mother.” The sheriff is cold. He looks Ruth up and down. For signs, for feet with ash.

Russell knows Ruth didn’t do it because he knows the forest and the land. It was burned in a place where those grasses wouldn’t grow, so after the sheriff leaves, he orders an investigation of his own. And later the old people will tell the Fire Extinguisher that Ruth had been with them, sleeping on the little pile of blankets they had made for her.

Dick Russell, the one who listens to the questioning, looks at the few baskets they have left. He studies them. “Do you mind if I take one of these? I’ll bring it back.”

“Do I have any choice?” Aurora is worried. It’s an older basket. It has memories and she hears songs in it.

The phone rings. It’s about the injured boy.

“It’s for you.” Ruth hands it to the Russell.

Dick Russell already knows about the boy with the burns. He’d already received a call. But he’d known it wasn’t Ruth even before he heard about General. The plants she wanted didn’t grow there. The young men hadn’t figured on that. Then Dwight had said he’d driven past on his way out of town and seen her going into the forest. Russell knows the timing is wrong. Dwight must have lied about being at his sister’s in town.

And General is in the hospital, the burn in the shape of his shirt, a flammable fabric, but General doesn’t feel lucky and later Michael David would tell on him, each of them putting all the blame on the other. A few days later, Michael went to Dwight to get paid. Cash, so they couldn’t trace it. But he was followed by the police.

As it turned out, Ruth had been over at the place of the once-white houses, Fire Extinguisher tells Russell when he goes to pick her up with his dune buggy a few days later.

But then General, in so much pain, confessed and Michael was picked up, though he wouldn’t turn in Dwight. Michael couldn’t have been smart enough or honest enough because he hardly knew right from wrong. His mother had been a heavy drinker and Michael smelled like alcohol at his birth; the whole town knew it. He wasn’t held in jail for very long; instead, he was sent to stay with his grandmother. Threatened by Dwight if he told, he kept silent about the money. He also believed he would be a great whaler soon, and he told that to the police in order to impress them. But not long after that the grandmother called the police and said her grandson just bought a new boom box and running shoes, and she didn’t know where he got the money.