Outside, it was still dark and the light of the table lamp inside the shack gave off a dull, yellowish glow. He had tried to go back to sleep after awakening to find Eleanor gone, but had not been able to.

He wrapped the money in the newspaper and put it back into the ammunition box. Before he left, he would take it to Eleanor’s home and leave it on the porch, he thought, or he would leave it in the shack for her to find when she came back to get the bedding and the towels.

It would be best to take it to her home, he decided. No telling who might show up at the lake, still curious to see the spot where Matthew had died. She had said she would go back to Howard and Ada Reynolds’s home in the morning. It would be easy enough to hide out in the tree line until she left, and then he could put the ammunition box on the porch where she would find it.

He took a school tablet and a broken-point pencil he used for writing to Travis from his knapsack. Trimmed the pencil sharp with his knife, and sat at the table and labored to write a note to leave with the money.

The note said:

I found this under the house where the pillar broke. I didn’t take none of the money.

He signed it Noah.

He placed the note on top of the wrapped bundle of money and closed the box, and then he made a small fire in the stove and burned the photographs and the letter from Garland Hood. He had thought of finding Taylor and giving the photographs and the letter to him, but had decided against it. There was no reason. What had happened was over, except for the talk—the guessing about the money and the rumors of a girl in Germany waiting for Boyd—and the talk would never end. It was better to keep the talk as it was, without adding to it. Let Eleanor have her good thoughts about her husband, even if the truth of it was different.

He remembered the kiss she had given him, could still sense it. Wondered if she had kissed him again as he slept, before leaving him.

Maybe.

The thought of it was good.

He made coffee and took a cup to the lake, near the dam, and watched the light of morning ease its way into the trees. It was his favorite time of day, or night-day. Color coming out of dark. Nightsounds fading. The air cool and sweet. Smell of trees and grass and, from the lake, water.

A mockingbird made a stolen song.

He would miss the lake and the shack, he thought.

The mockingbird changed songs.

He turned to look at the shack, imagined himself living there. With Travis, maybe. Travis would like the valley.

A tightness came to his throat, thinking of Travis, and a wave of heat ran through his body. It was time to leave. He turned his cup to empty the rest of his coffee, then began his walk back to the shack. At the lake’s edge, he paused. Near the dam, beneath the overhang of limbs where he had found Matthew’s body, he saw a swaying of water, and he knew the fish was there, restlessly waiting.