Ned was up and getting ready to go on the river again but Polly stayed in bed for another few minutes before morning sounds chased her downstairs: a flicker mistaking their metal furnace exhaust for an aspen with larvae, a neighbor whacking weeds at dawn, and the helicopter on one of its last scheduled tours. She was so tired she saw crackles of light in the corners of her eyes, and her brain felt grainy. She chugged coffee, rebuilding some sort of agenda as she shuffled around in an old nightgown, recoiling a little from the floor she hadn’t swept, the dog hair, garden dirt, the stickiness of old spilled box juice. She found her previous day’s list on her mounded desk and searched for something to cross out, then added:

swimming lessons

go looking

food for Delgados and Maude’s picnic

argue with Jane

She added sauces, etc. to restaurant and an exclamation mark to her previous cleaning line, then scribbled:

get Maude

deal with Graham

In the yard, a flash of color caught her eye. At 7 a.m., Merle was drinking coffee in the chilly sunlight, reading while wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the house to wake. Having reached a plateau of boredom, he’d decided to fill their house with bookshelves. He was already measuring walls when they left him with the children to meet the search boats.

On day four, the machinery of drowning still included the helicopter and the county boat, a dozen rafts and drift boats and a dog team from Flathead County. A Yellowstone County crew arrived with a big motorized craft to give the Park County teams a break. Harry didn’t much like them; bad blood from a case years ago, reawakened by a comment about Ariel becoming Yellowstone County’s problem soon, anyway.

Polly, dropping Ned off at the Carter’s Bridge take-out, happened to hear this. She was standing off to the side, studying the high, cave-dappled rock face on the east side of the river. If she watched for long enough, she would see something move, or something watching back. That much rock felt like the ocean, filled with invisibilities—something lived within every crack. The night before, a huge black Mordor-style cloud had opened up above the upper valley and Yellowstone Park. The river would rise and turn an opaque milky brown again, and Ariel’s body might be lifted and dropped by this new surge. Some riverbanks would have to be searched again.

Ned swung a leg into Harry’s boat, and she felt a blast of tenderness.

“What are you going to do before the shit hits the fan?” he asked.

The shit included cleaning and Maude’s late-morning flight. The next day Polly would prep at the restaurant for the first time in months because everyone wanted parade day off, and then it would be Maude all the time for the rodeo, the picnic, the party.