He made a sound that was wordlike, but not a word.

“Whitlow Mayfield made a sign and put it up on a light pole,” she said. “It was in memory of Matthew.”

“That’s—good,” he said.

“I guess you know about his own son getting killed in the war,” she added.

“I heard about it,” he replied.

“I had a long talk with him this afternoon,” she said. “He told me something I didn’t know. He said Boyd wanted to go back to Germany.” She paused, smiled an uncertain smile. “Boyd never said anything to me about it. In fact, he always said he’d never go back over there. I used to tell him there were some places I wanted to see—places like Paris and Rome—and he said if I wanted to go, I’d have to go by myself. I asked Whitlow how he knew, and he said Boyd had talked about it one time when he’d been drinking, and it just came out.”

Another pause. “He and Whitlow were close after the war. Whitlow’s boy, David, and Boyd were in the same unit. They saw each other all the time. David was a few years younger, so they didn’t know each other that much before the war. Just names, I guess. Whitlow used to come by the house to talk to Boyd, but I never listened to what they said. I just assumed it had to do with the war and with Whitlow trying to make some sense of his son’s death. Boyd told me one time that Whitlow was the only man in the valley he felt he could talk to, but two or three months before Boyd took his life, Whitlow stopped coming around and Boyd never said anything else about him.” She paused again, long enough for Noah to wonder if he should say something. Then: “I don’t know why Whitlow decided to say what he did about Boyd today. He just did. It was like it was something he’d been holding inside him for as long as he could, and he had to say it. It’s been a long time since Boyd died. A year ago in August.”

Noah thought of the ammunition box and the envelope of photographs and the stack of twenty-dollar bills and the letter bearing the postmark of August 3. The ammunition box was inside the shack, under the pie safe. He wondered what to say about it, or if he should say anything at all.

“He told me something else,” she said. “He said the man who had been trying to buy the farm had also been in the army with Boyd, but Boyd never mentioned that to me. He acted like he’d never seen him before.”

“Maybe Mr. Mayfield was wrong,” he said.

“I don’t think so. He said Boyd told him all about it, that the two of them had been all the way through the war together. He wanted to know if David had ever mentioned the man in his letters. He also said Boyd was bragging about pulling the wool over the man’s eyes to up the price of the farm. Said Boyd had come up with a story about a granite company looking at the property to open a quarry.”