I usually did after chores, but Gran would need help burying the sheep. Damn that Tyrus.

“I don’t know if I’ll make it tonight. Probably not.”

“Nyle,” Muncie urged. “Whatever you do, don’t mess with Ripley.”

“I will if I want.” But my temper had cooled some.

“You don’t have to go around with me,” Muncie said. “Not if it causes trouble.”

I liked Muncie. Nobody else ever bothered getting to know her. They just looked at her big head, her short arms and legs, and thought they knew everything about her. Sometimes people were mean, like Ripley. I never heard her complain, though it must have galled her.

“I don’t know how you stand by and suffer Ripley’s insults,” I said.

Behind her glasses, she lowered her blue eyes. “I just do.”

I gazed over the rolling autumn fields, speckled with sheep. The mountains rose gently on either side of the valley.

“Ripley can’t tell me who to be friends with,” I said. “I choose my own friends. I don’t give a skunk’s turd what he thinks.”

Muncie nodded.

After she got her wind back, she continued up the hill. Her parents rented one of Gran’s houses, the one high above the back pasture, at the edge of the upper woodlot.

I waited until she waved the all clear. Then I started down my drive, hurrying to get inside and tell Gran about the sheep.

But as I passed the corner of the farmhouse, I stopped.

Something was different.

It was the curtain. The curtain to the back bedroom was closed.

We never closed that curtain, not even last week, right after the accident. We’d shut off the whole house and spent most of our time in the basement, but we hadn’t shut that curtain.

On a normal day I walked past the back bedroom at least a dozen times. The curtain was never drawn. But now it hung across the window, thick and heavy, a nasty shade of green, like a four-day-old bruise.

In our house, that bedroom was the dying room. My mother died there when I was six. And two years ago my grandfather died there. I hated that room.

Backing away from the window, I turned to fill the log carrier with firewood from the shed. Humping the wood across the driveway, I banged on the kitchen door with my elbow. Gran didn’t come to meet me the way she usually did.

I waited, banged again.

Then, shifting my load, I freed my fingers, twisted the doorknob, and let myself in.

Two

I dragged the loaded carrier across the kitchen and dropped the logs into the wood box. They made a clatter like bowling pins and kicked up a cloud of dust. A couple of wood chips skittered across the linoleum floor. I kicked them back under the wood box with my boot.

“Gran?” Lifting the radiation detector from the kitchen table, I swept it across the room. The same level we’d registered all week. Eight days since the accident and always the steady click of a normal reading.