He walked the railroad track until it made a right turn and crossed the river, and then he followed the road to the pull-off leading to the lake. The sun was still high against the trees and the day’s heat was still thick in the air, even in the woods.

It would be a hot night, he thought, as windless as the day had been, and he believed the next day would be the same. Not a good day for traveling, but it did not matter. He had finished with the painting and there was nothing else to keep him in the valley except for Hoke Moore’s fish and in the morning, before leaving, he would catch the fish. For Hoke Moore and for Matthew Reynolds and for himself, he would catch the fish. Yet, it was not the fish that had stayed in his thinking during the day. Travis had. Travis. It was like a voice that had been calling out to him for a long time, but had not been able to reach him because of the winding about he had been doing for almost two years.

Maybe the voice had found him because he had stayed for a week and a day in the Valley of Light.

And he remembered something once said by his mother to his father: “I told you about that yesterday. You just now hearing it?” And his father, looking puzzled, had answered, “They must of been slow words.”

There was a shine across the surface of the lake. The water was as still as water in a cup.

He knew the bass was deep down in the stream bed, where the water was cool. Deep down, moving as little as possible. Waiting out the day. He stood for a moment at the lakeside and watched for movement, but saw none, and he wondered if the day’s heat had cut down on the catches at the fishing contest. Some, he reasoned. Mostly because the fishermen would not be patient enough to let their lines stay in one place. They would be like jittery children, yanking up their hooks, dropping them again a few inches away, hoping the new place would be better. Sometimes he wondered if people knew that fish could swim.

He went into the shack, stepping without thinking on the sag at the doorsill, and the flooring made a little creaking cry.

The cry made him remember that he had said he would look at the pillar under the shack.

Eleanor had said it was not necessary, but he had given his word—or at least enough of it to matter—and he went back outside the shack and kneeled and peered underneath the porch. There was still enough light to see easily and he started a slow crawl toward the area of the sag, deliberately making enough noise to chase off any snakes or rats or spiders that might have decided to rest in the fine, cool sand that rain always left under houses. It was a natural fear for him, crawling in close spaces. The same kind of fear some people had for heights or for fast driving or for knives—for anything, he suspected. Travis was different, though. Travis had loved crawling under the house, or into burrowed-out caves of hay in the barn loft, or into sunken holes where trees had fallen in the woods. Once Travis had hidden a stuffed animal under the house, a gift from his first-grade schoolteacher. The animal was a brown bear with soft thread eyes. Travis had said he threw it away into the creek because other boys had teased him about it, but Noah had watched him from a hidden place behind one of the pillars and knew the truth. Travis would take the bear and hold it and stare at it and touch it with his fingertips, and then he would put it away again, wrapping it in a fertilizer sack.