It was not surprising that Whitlow had stayed in his truck, she thought. Someone else’s son was missing, a boy whose mother was waiting for him in heaven.

The way he awoke—sudden, startled—made Noah roll from the cot. He sat, breathing hard, his skin damp with perspiration. Wondered what it was that had snapped him out of sleep.

He stood and walked to the screened door of the porch and let his eyes search the night. Saw nothing.

He thought of Eleanor Cunningham. Could almost sense her.

She had kept her promise to him about cleaning the shack, had even washed down the floors with something that left a scent of wood-air after a rain, and he had found a stack of towels and two washcloths on one of the chairs. On the table, she had left a small bouquet of wildflowers—purple ironweed—in a drinking glass, causing him to remember what she had said about her husband throwing away the same flowers. The wood box for the stove had been filled with broken twigs and limbs. She had also left a note on the table, beside the wildflowers. The note read: I’ll be glad to wash your clothes for you.

The note had made him uncomfortable. He had never had any woman volunteer to wash his clothes—other than his mother—and it made him wonder why she would make such an offer. Marvin Linquist would have said she had snaring him in mind and was doing nothing more than pinning back the claws on the trap. It was impossible to know why women did anything, Marvin had declared, and there’d never been a man to figure it out. “The harder you try, boys, the wronger you bound to be. Most of the time, you do just the opposite of what you’d do if you was by yourself, and you’ll get by.” The men who heard him had all laughed, had all agreed. “It’s not their fault,” Marvin had added, faking a wise look on his face. “It’s just the way the Lord made them. They’s only so much you can do with a short rib.” And the men had laughed even more gleefully.

He wondered why he had thought of Eleanor Cunningham, without reason, out of a dead sleep.

It was almost as though she had left something of her presence in the shack, and had decided to remind him she had been there by jarring him awake. Marvin Linquist had said he could always tell when his wife, or one of his children, had their mind on him. Said it was like a spark made by a spark plug in a new car. Said he could be sleeping, or resting, or just moving ahead on a march, and he would feel a spark strike at his chest and he knew that, back in Kentucky, his wife or one of his children had fixed on a moment with him in it, and had thrown that moment at him with dead aim across thousands of miles of land and ocean.