“Harry, of course, in a tree, near where the girl went in. It wasn’t fully a body,” Cy said. “Just a tibia and foot hanging in a tree, stick with a boot.”

Though Harry was no longer a cop, he still helped with forensic work throughout the state—lonely femurs found on talus slopes, the bleak final campsite of a runaway, the predictable assumptions that any older grave was a crime scene and any dog’s tooth was a dead child’s incisor.

“What side of the river were you walking?” Cy asked.

He was writing on an already-crumpled map, many colors of ink, initials, notes about density of vegetation. The map moved on Polly, as if the drawing of the river was running off the page. She couldn’t grasp direction, and her face heated up. “East and south,” she said. “From Harvat’s Flats upstream.”

Cy nodded nervously, sympathetically. “How are you feeling, lately?”

“I’m fine,” said Polly, watching the map’s river flow. “How about you?”

“In over my head,” said Cy, who wished Harry was still the sheriff.

That night, Polly made a lovely chili—a 4-H beef shoulder and Chimayo chili powder, good tortillas and the last radishes. She took her time and concentrated, which lessened her new tendency toward the grand fuckup. Through the open window, while she prodded a chunk for tenderness, she could hear the high notes as Merle and Jane argued over blinds. Every morning, to keep the alley cottage cool, Jane would close the windows and draw the shades, and every night she’d raise the blinds and open the windows, and at both times of the day Merle would follow her around the house, making slight adjustments, while never taking on the whole task himself.

This squabble was about whether it was too warm to open up before dinner. The alley house was tiny, with a nice porch facing a small yard with roses. Papa had built it in about 1920 for Jane’s two great-aunts, spinster schoolteachers named Odile and Inge. Now it was fixed up enough to rent to a series of forlorn friends and family, or at least friends and family going through forlorn times.