Louise approached me. I had been surprised by her light step. She walked softly on my creaking wood floors, walked like a dancer, a sure hunter. She never made a sound. “Is something wrong?” she asked. I placed my hand over my heart and braced my chest. I thought of saying a prayer but knew I had already said one just by thinking I should. I had stalled long enough. I felt the importance of what I was about to say welling in me. I didn’t have answers for Louise. I would tell her what I knew, what I had found, and it wasn’t a body but the evidence of death. I didn’t think we’d ever find the body. I kept seeing Stoner and Bart after I had left Yellow Knife. They had beaten him to death. I imagined they cut him up like a fryer and tossed him down the outhouse. From the looks of it they had pulverized him with field rocks. Come spring a good hot sun would lift the stink of him up over the fields, a smell that would bring mice, a few tight-footed coyotes sniffing a circle of stones, and his smell would find me. I knew it would. Come spring Yellow Knife wouldn’t be anything but old stink.

I reached for Louise’s hand and held it to my throat. In my years of service I had learned not to begin news with the statement “I’ve got some bad news.” Saying those words never prepared anyone for what was to follow. Anticipation of bad news never softens the blow. I couldn’t look her in the eye when I told her the hard story. I had to look away. I did not tell her who had killed Yellow Knife. I told her the story as if I had just discovered it. I recounted only the details I had found, not what I had done.

Louise did not cry when I told her. She did not collapse in my arms. She sat down, dry eyed and staring, her hands heavy in her lap. In the mournful silence I could not speak to Louise about all she had been through. She accepted Yellow Knife’s death. I made a pot of coffee and sat down to meet the night.

“I should have gone with him,” she said.

I stood close to her and pressed my hand to the cold window.

“You dying wouldn’t do any good,” I said. “What good would that do?”

“No,” she said. “I never should have left him in the first place. I knew something would happen to him.”

“Something bad was bound to happen,” I said, “the way he lived his life.”