So the police began to ask him more questions.

Thomas, too, had seen fires, smelled smoke in the war, and the odor made him remember, all these years later, being pushed out of the copter by the sad man who sent most of them down to hell and to their sure deaths. He had heard about Ruth; Aurora had gone to his house to cry that she was afraid her daughter would be arrested. “Ruth’s too smart to start a fire during the drought.” He calmed her with his words.

Everyone knew Ruth worshiped the forest and she had cried as she watched the smoke rising over it and the way the air above the heat moved as if a mirage of water.

Dick Russell knocks on the door of Aurora’s house.

Ruth has been crying. It’s unusual for her. But lately she’s restless. She paces at times. She cleans her face before she goes to the door. He notices anyway.

“Do you ever eat?” he asks.

She thinks he is implying that she is too thin.

“Well, how about dinner tonight? I’ll pick you up at seven.” He smiles. Randall is younger than Ruth. He is a mixed-blood and clean-cut. He wears his hair short and his clothes are fresh. In his mind, she is not a suspect.

She looks at him. She hasn’t thought of him as a friend. “Okay, sure.” She’s uncomfortable with the idea, but she needs an ally. “I’ll see you then.”

Like Ruth, he knows the horsetail and how it is used for arthritis, the oldest of plants on earth. Silica its makeup.

Russell has gone along with the sheriff. He’s Indian. He wants to know about Marco. He wants to know about the whale. Even though he is already in trouble for raising problems and his job is on the line for getting involved in Indian affairs. There’s enough evidence, says his boss, who believes himself the salt of the earth, but they still believe Ruth is a perpetrator of some sort. That’s what they call it. Not a culprit. A perp.

Ruth no longer sleeps, but she does go out with the Forest Service man. At dinner there is too much silence.

Before he left, the new man in town told Al, “Hold my room. I’m paid. I’ll be back soon.” So Al and his wife keep the room with the leaky ceiling open for him, although Al calls in a few friends to come over and look at the water in the ceiling and the water dripping into the large bucket. “Look, it’s a one-floor building. A flat place with asphalt out in front,” he says. But they also notice the pieces of polished glass and bits of shell on the dresser, the creased jeans on the hanger. One Catholic thinks they should call in the archbishop from over in Arcata. Al says, “No way. I’m having a hard enough time just keeping the floor dry, even with the buckets there. All I need is a bunch of miracle-seekers from Rome. I been putting the water on the plants outside.” The plants, nevertheless, are still wilted in the unusual sunlight. “Besides, he’s paid up.”