Susan felt something pulling at her pant leg, and looked down to see the goat nibbling on the dirty hem of her jeans. The goat. Christ. How long had she been asleep? She could feel a sore welt on her face where her cheek had been pressed against the seam of the cushion. “Who is this?” she asked.

“My name is Mrs. Gloria Larson. I don’t sleep well.”

Susan waited.

The line was silent.

“So?” Susan said.

“I like to read the Internet,” the old woman explained. “They have a computer room set up for us here. I go down there at night when I can’t sleep and I read the news. I saw your column on the computer. About the skeleton.”

She was a reader. One of the Herald’s many elderly busybodies. Old people were the only ones who read newspapers anymore—the dead tree kind. At least this one was shuffling into the digital age. “How did you get this number?” Susan asked.

“I called the paper and pressed the numbers for your answering machine and a recording had this number.”

Ian had changed her outgoing voice-mail message. And left her personal cell phone number on it. Dick.

“Mrs. Larson, if you want to write a letter to the editor—”

“You said they found an old skeleton near the slough.” Gloria Larson paused. Something caught in her voice. “A man.”

“Yeah.”

“I was at Vanport,” the woman said. “In 1948. I was there for the flood.”

The photographs from the hospital flashed in Susan’s mind. “Really? I mean, wow. Sorry.”

“That skeleton? That man they found? I think his name was McBee.” She took a breath. “I have to go. Someone’s coming.”

The phone went dead.

“Wait!” Susan said quickly. “Vanport? You think he really died at Vanport?”

But she was talking to herself.

Susan dialed star sixty-nine and got the voice mail for the Mississippi Magnolia Assisted Living Facility.

She looked at the clock. It was four-thirty in the morning. There were bits of plant material scattered all over the living room. Shredded leaves. Petals. Broken pieces of earthenware and glass.

The surviving vases were empty.

The goat had eaten all her flowers.

Chapter 23

CHAPTER

23

When Susan woke up again, she had a headache and was in her bed. The goat had been banished to the back yard. The sun was up, or at least what passed for it these days. Behind the curtains, her bedroom window was a rectangle of gray light. She rolled over and turned on the radio to check on the flooding. They were in for more rain. It was warming up. Snowmelt was fierce. There’d been three more mudslides in the West Hills. Two houses destroyed. Susan switched the station to alternative rock.

Her head hurt.

McBee.