He remembered Eleanor on the cot, her head resting on the pillow, looking out at the lake with eyes he could not see from the shadows over her face. On the cot, curled as she was, she had seemed like a young girl, not a woman, and he remembered that Shelia Benson had often behaved the same. Curled in a nest of hay, not speaking, a look of daydreaming on her face. With Shelia, he had thought of it as flying away in her mind, going places she had never been, leaving her body behind. He wondered if that was what Eleanor had done, if she had flown away to some memory of her dead husband, and if the trip to the memory and the trip back from it could be taken only in silence. It was possible. He had taken such trips.

He pulled his watch from his pocket and looked at it. It was ten minutes after twelve. The fishing would last until seven and then the feeding would begin. He stood, pushed his watch back into his pocket. He could finish the painting before seven, and then he would be able to leave the valley. He thought of Travis, and the yearning to see him returned in a jolt to his chest.

• • •

At one o’clock, Eleanor returned to Howard Reynolds’s home to check on Ada. Only Joyce Magill was there, keeping watch. Joyce was the older sister of Sarah, a woman of striking prettiness as Sarah had been. Yet, unlike Sarah, Joyce was aggressive and high-spirited. She had never married because, as she proudly and often announced, she had never met a man worthy of the trouble. She had been Matthew’s favorite relative, and he had stayed with her many nights after the death of his mother, being spoiled by her cookie making and her storytelling. In the Valley of Light, Joyce Magill was considered a woman worth pursuing by men—if they had the nerve to do so and if they could withstand her moods when she decided to speak her mind. Whatever she believed in, she believed in it with passion, and would have locked horns with God and Satan both—in the same place and at the same time—to make her point. If she had been Job when God and Satan got to making side bets over the patience of mankind, she would have taken both of them to the woodshed.

Joyce said that Ada and Howard and Milton had gone to the funeral home with the preacher. To pin down the arrangements for Sunday’s burial, she added.

Only a few people had been by the home.

“I think it’s a shame, the way people just drop off the edge of the earth when there’s something going on like the fishing,” she said in her bothered way. “They ought to be here, visiting with Ada and Howard and Milton.”

There was no reason to argue with Joyce. Her mind was set, and it did not matter that Howard and Ada and Milton had all urged Lamar Gathers to go on with Fishing Day.