But Vinnie shook his head, finally noticing Sam’s presence. Vinnie was a good person, a defense attorney from a Butte union family, a quiet serial philanderer. Polly wasn’t going to peel his layers of guilt. They were all of them, at the best of times, amusing depressives and alcoholics. High functioning, Harry might add, in a better mood, and Harry was pretending to be cheerful, as if he hadn’t lost someone he thought of as a daughter. He was impressed that Polly had found the hiking boot. Maybe they should start using her on the river, put her in some sort of balloon and drag her overhead.

“I don’t like heights,” said Polly. She pushed the kids outside, out of earshot. It was still light, warm and beautiful; if the helicopter was flying, it was east of town, out of sight and therefore out of Sam’s mind. After Polly gave them ice cream sandwiches, Sam took his book to the hammock, and Helen pushed him from underneath, sometimes poking Sam’s butt through the mesh. Polly dragged an old metal lawn chair onto the grass, ignoring the notebook and script on her lap for the sake of watching the bats. She did this most nights in the summer. She loved imagining what the bats saw, what the ping of a mosquito in an open mouth meant to them. She wondered where they roosted, if they were long-eared myotis or big browns or maybe endangered little browns, how old their pups were, what they’d think during the rodeo fireworks and if they would feel relief when the Fourth of July was over. She wondered if they hated her shrieking children and barking dogs, if they knew she was cuckoo, daffy, buggy, haywire, one watt short of a light.

Behind Polly, inside the open kitchen window, Ned slammed dishes and Harry talked about where they’d look the next day. This was supposed to be his year for building business back up as an archaeologist—teaching part-time at Montana State University, some contract work in Butte, a survey up at the old Poor Farm on Harvat’s Flats, where the county had granted an easement to put in a road to a proposed subdivision and hired Harry to ensure the bulldozers and graders hit nothing problematic. Ariel had worked with him the week before, finding old plats showing the footprint of the burned and razed twenty-room dormitory for the indigent, a graveyard for paupers, farm buildings. But that Thursday, as a grader operated thirty yards from the closest foundation and ten from what should have been the nearest grave in the pauper’s field, it ripped into old pine boards and Harry and Ariel looked down at the many bones of a human hand. Ariel was thrilled—when she and Harry stopped by afterward she showed Polly her field sketches. Harry, carrying the bones in a canning jar, was less excited.