She touched her hair in the way that made her seem nervous; then she added, “It sounds so much like Boyd, I don’t doubt the story at all. I told you he’d changed when he came back from the war, but he was always a dreamer and a little bit of a con artist, I’m sorry to say. It’s something I learned after we were married. He liked coming up with little stories that sounded like the truth, but had no truth at all in them. Conning people. That’s all it was. He thought it was funny. Sad thing is, he was the one who was always getting conned.” She laughed softly, a hollow laugh. “He bought our farm because he believed it had gold on it.”

“Gold?” he said.

“It’s an old story, but that’s all it was—just a story. Boyd wanted it to be true, that’s all.”

Noah offered a puzzled look.

“But it did start me thinking about Boyd’s death,” she said. “The man who wanted the farm was here, talking to him, the same day he killed himself.”

“He was?” Noah said.

“Yes,” she answered. “He showed up early in the morning, right after breakfast. Boyd was mad about it. They talked outside for a little while and the man left and Boyd said that was the last we’d see of him.” She turned on the cot to face him. “I’d forgotten all about that until Whitlow told me the story about a quarry.”

Noah made a small movement with his head, shifted in his chair.

“I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon,” she said. “I always wondered about the way Boyd died. It wasn’t like him to take his own life. Not at all. Maybe Garland Hood had something to do with it.”

Noah looked up, surprised. “Who did you say?”

“Garland Hood,” she answered. “That was the man’s name. Maybe he thought if Boyd wasn’t around, I’d be glad to sell just to get away from everything.”

“Maybe,” he said. He thought of the letter in the ammunition box, signed by a man named Garland. The letter told a different story about everything.

“And maybe it’s just my imagination taking over,” she said, “but I’ll never know the answer. Garland Hood was killed in a car wreck a few months after Boyd died. I found his name and phone number on a piece of paper Boyd had, and I called to see if he was still interested in the place. Whoever it was that answered the phone—his wife, I guess—told me about the accident. She said she’d never heard of Boyd, and she’d never heard her husband talk about buying any land, but it could have been possible. He was a traveling insurance man, she said, and she only saw him on weekends most of the time.”

She turned her shoulders to him. Her face was in the mix of shadow and moonlight. “Do you remember when I told you about the girl Boyd met over there, the one at the concentration camp?”