From the Poor Farm, perched between the Absaroka Mountains and the river below, you would have had the best view possible of the town that didn’t want you, the thousands of people who didn’t care, the whole world you didn’t own. The landscape bowed around them in three directions: the river and the Crazy Mountains to the north, Livingston to the west, the Beartooth Mountains and Big Timber to the east. The mountains behind them still had snow, but the lupine and forget-me-nots near the poorhouse’s ruined foundation were giving way to silvery artemisia. From town, the domed flats looked as if they were covered in rich gold grass, but it was really orange lichen on gray rock, the soil blown away in the Depression. There was nothing lush about this place, and almost nothing standing of the buildings that had housed hundreds of unhappy people. Poor farms had been a gentle Victorian response to the extremes of the past, streets and debtors’ prisons. If you had no money and no way of making it, if you were ill and had no relatives to care for you, you were given to the care of the county, which fed you, clothed you, gave you a bed, and did its best to tend to your medical and psychological needs. In practice, this meant a catchall of orphans and withered alcoholics and widows, tubercular miners and paralyzed cowboys, the simpleminded and the harmlessly insane. Once an orphanage opened in Gallatin County, and a mental hospital opened in Warm Springs, it increasingly meant the elderly.

Up close, Harry and Ned and Drake had a vague look, a kind of padding over grief and fatigue, and Polly guessed they’d been smoking. There were shot glasses on the hood of Harry’s truck next to half a bottle of tequila, and Polly poured herself one.

“So,” said Maude. “Show us the problem, darling.”

“I have a surfeit of bodies, Grandma. Dead in the middle of the road.”

He was definitely stoned. “Well, move the road,” said Maude.

“That’s not an option. By contract, I need to relocate them and identify them.”

“Idiocy.”

Harry’s whole life was a fight for exactitude, for something beyond reasonable doubt. He showed them what should be where—the poorhouse proper, barns and an orchard, the potter’s field. He waved an open notebook, and when he put it down, Polly flipped through.

The sight of Ariel’s handwriting was a smack in the head, but as Polly paged, the girl’s handwriting shifted back to Harry’s and growing confusion, question marks and rectangles. Harry, meanwhile, was trying to explain ground-penetrating radar, its uses and its issues on boulder-laden heavy clay. The machine looked a little like a large-wheeled lawn mower. Sam and Merle were fascinated by it, but Maude’s eyes filmed over. Helen had wandered away with some old binoculars and was using them on some ants.