“You gonna tell us about Eleanor Cunningham?” Moody asked in a voice that stayed among the three of them.

“What about her?” Taylor answered.

Moody and Peavo made glances at one another, the glances carried on grins.

“Well, good Lord, Taylor, she didn’t come down here at the start to see how me and Moody was doing,” Peavo said.

“Wasn’t down here for me neither,” Taylor said defensively.

“Looked that way to me,” Peavo said with teasing.

“Did me, too,” Moody agreed. He snickered like a boy.

“Well, you seeing things,” Taylor argued. “I saw her walking up and down the river all morning, and she seemed to be talking to a lot of people.”

“You gonna make a great ghost when you die,” Moody said.

“Why’s that?” Taylor asked.

“You so easy to see through,” Moody told him.

Taylor shook his head, but did not respond, and the three men fished in silence, gazing at the water. The sleepy heat of the day swam around them, clung to their clothes, made their eyes heavy. Even in the shade, where Peavo had staked their fishing spot, the air was thick and still.

And in the silence, Taylor wondered if Eleanor could be using the day to announce that her mourning was over. It had seemed that way earlier. Not by her dress or by the look she wore, other than something being different about her hair. She had seemed tired, and he knew she was, spending so much time at the Reynolds home. Yet, there had been something relaxed about her, something that seemed to say she had finally made her peace with Boyd’s death.

Or, maybe he was just seeing something he had a wish for.

Fooling himself.

It took time to get over the loss of someone, even if that person had not died. His divorce was proof of it. He had mourned the leaving of his wife for almost two years before he could make little jokes about it, and even now there were times when he had the need to call her name about something concerning the house they had shared.

“You got a bite,” Peavo said suddenly.

Taylor watched his bobber swim over the surface of the water, saw it dive out of sight.

The fish was a bream, a large one. From mouth-tip to tail, eight or nine inches, he judged. A full, round body.

“I swear, that’s the biggest fish I ever saw you catch,” Moody said.

“Where’s Littleberry?” Peavo asked with a hoot.

In mid-afternoon, Eleanor went to the school to help prepare for the cooking. Unlike Joyce Magill, it was a task she enjoyed. A break in the monotony of days tripping over days. And there were other women to talk to—or to listen to. She liked the listening more than the talking, for she knew she would hear stories that could have been set in type and sealed between the hard covers of a book. Somewhere she had read that great stories were those begun with a single, dark seed of gossip, planted in the hotbed of a moist tongue, sprouted to life in whispers that had been fertilized by imagination.