Almost nothing in life pissed Polly off more than not being part of a perceived secret, but everyone else rolled with it and ignored her until she came around. Jane sat quietly with Maude while the others opened wine, worked on stream diversion, took turns with Maude’s binoculars. By the time Polly pulled the tinfoil off the lasagna, thirty layers in the end, the whole thing a miracle of salt and fat and flavor, Maude was talking about her cousins and gambling, about the trip to New York for Papa’s tribute in the fall, about everything but death. They ate their delicious unpicnic-like meal, Maude picking all the anchovies out of the salad, Ned and Harry scavenging them. They sat with the tables perpendicular to the river so that they could all see both water and trees, swallows from the facing cliff diving for insects. Jane kept looking downstream at the bridge and the narrow road, and Merle switched their plates so that she would face west, instead of in the direction of Asta’s death.

After they ate, Maude showed them the stone foundation of the ranch house. There were parties here, in a bunkhouse farther downstream, whenever the elder Suttons were away. If the police came, there was the city-county divide to cite at the first bridge, and the family bridge, gone soon after the house burned in the fifties, had been easily blocked. Before World War II, there’d been a warren of roads over on this now-abandoned south side of the river, more ranches, lost towns, Prohibition liquor drops and stills, the operating Poor Farm. They played cards and Maude’s stories grew more baroque. Drake encouraged her, but everyone else did, too, and Jane kept her temper.

Helen pulled on Polly’s hand. “When are we going to look?” whispered Helen.

So Polly filled her glass and they took off with Ned, doing their best to find happier things. A den for an otter or a mink, owl pellets with whole skeletons, quartz pebbles, petrified wood. They showed Helen a car body, an Oldsmobile from 1930 or so, and then Polly put her to work drawing another map, this one on a patch of fine, flat sand.

“What did Maude say in the car?” she asked Ned.

“She said that everything she looks at here, every hill or road, is a dead person.”

Everyone had a core of hell and doubt and sorrow. Polly wanted to drink more, or much, much less. Helen drew and the wet dogs lay next to them, panting. A couple floated by and Polly could hear giggling before they came into sight, unfurling and possibly en déshabillé. It would have been lovely and funny if she didn’t think of Ariel.