“But sometimes that day doesn’t come, and the things you meant to do or say can’t be said or done because the child is no longer there. The vacation was my idea. It seemed like we hadn’t been seeing each other much, not even eating meals at the same time. I thought a few days together would bring us closer as a family. And it had. We’d had two good days together, until we came here.”

Ellen Kowalsky paused for a few moments. The room was so quiet I could hear crickets chirping outside the open windows. Suddenly I realized Ellen Kowalsky wasn’t looking at the back wall. She was looking through it, past the bridge and Bobcat Rock, all the way to that undercut inside Wolf Cliff Falls.

“I can only do one more thing for Ruth, and that is to get her out of the river, because it’s not just her body down there but her soul. That’s what my church has said for hundreds of years—that a person is in purgatory until the body is given Last Rites. My husband, even my priest, say they don’t believe that.”

Ellen Kowalsky lowered her eyes and looked straight at us.

“But what if they’re wrong?”

No one in the room was ready for that statement. The reporters and other outsiders might have written off Ellen Kowalsky’s concern as a bizarre symptom of her grief, but I knew many of the locals, though low-church Protestants, would not dismiss her fear or its premise.

Ellen Kowalsky continued to look at us as she spoke.

“I’ve already tried to bring Ruth out of that place, and I couldn’t do it, at least not by myself. I need the help of Mr. Brennon and his dam. And I need the Forest Service and the rest of the people in this room to support Mr. Brennon. It’s the last thing I can do,” she said, her voice starting to falter. “It’s too late for anything else.”

At that moment not even the most cynical person in the room could have doubted that the loss of her child had broken Ellen Kowalsky, and that she would not begin to heal until her child was buried in earth, not water.

Brennon stood by the chair Ellen Kowalsky sat in. He leaned toward her, his hand on her shoulder. He spoke, and she nodded. Brennon’s facial expression made clear his concern about recovering Ruth was now emotional as well as professional.

Billy turned to me and shook his head. “It’s a done deal,” he said.

Luke knew as well as Billy that he had lost. What restraint he’d had so far disappeared. As soon as Daniel Luckadoo said the meeting was adjourned Luke started to the front, weaving through the people who filled the aisle.