“You know, it’s really not that far from the house to here,” she said. “I’ve walked it before, but it’s been a long time. I usually just drove the car to the pull-off and came in from there, but there’s a shortcut coming out on the road near the house, and I took it, but I’ll take the path to the pull-off going back, since it’ll be dark before long.” She paused. “I brought along a flashlight—it’s on the porch step—but I think there’ll be enough moonlight without it.” She moved to the table and sat across from him.

Noah could feel her words sticking to his clothing like beggar’s lice. So many words, they seemed to be waiting in line to get into his hearing.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I told you I was a jabber-mouth.” She smiled. “I know it when I’m doing it, but I just can’t seem to stop. It’s like I’ve got a mouth full of Mexican jumping beans and they’re popping out all over the place.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Sometimes, it’s worse than others.”

“I don’t mind it,” he told her, biting into the chicken, thankful for the taste of it.

She breathed in the aroma of the coffee, took a sip from the rim of the cup. “I’ll bet your mother was a good cook,” she said.

“She was,” he replied.

“I can tell because you make good coffee. I read something about it once, in one of those magazine articles about how women can judge if the man of their life learned anything from his mother. It said that if a man made good coffee, he had been taught to make it by a good cook, and would probably be a good cook himself.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “I usually make coffee just by boiling some water and putting in some grounds and letting it set a little bit. But I been using the coffeepot here.”

“It’s good, believe me,” she said, taking another sip and smiling over it. Then she asked, “Are you all right, Noah?”

He nodded. “I’m fine.”

“Taylor was a little worried about you.”

“No reason to be.”

“He said he thought you were blaming yourself for what happened to Matthew.”

He made a little shrug.

“I could say the same thing for myself,” she said. “I thought about it. Did he come down here when I was here, and if he did, how did he do it without me seeing him? I was here for an hour after you left, probably, and when I got back to Howard’s house, they were already looking for him. I might have missed him by a few minutes.”

“I guess he didn’t come down that early,” he said. “Probably in the afternoon, when everybody was looking on the river.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “You’ve got to understand that. I guess everybody in this valley has always known something like that might happen to him, even Howard and Ada and Milton. They’d all been living on hope, waiting on some kind of miracle, but they also knew it was hope that rested on quicksand.”