A flutter, like a twitching of muscles, struck Noah in his chest. It was the same joking offer Marvin Linquist had made during the war, during one of his rambling stories about fishing. A fish camp, he had called it. Had even suggested Noah’s Ark as a name.

“Sounds good to me,” Noah said.

Taylor sat hunched forward, his legs stretched out, his knees up a bit, his forearms resting on the kneecaps. His fishing pole—a bamboo cane that he found in the back of his store—dangled loosely from his fingertips.

“What did you think about Eleanor Cunningham?” he asked.

The question was one Noah had been expecting. “She’s a nice lady, like you said she was,” he replied.

Taylor rocked his shoulders in agreement. “Yeah, she is.” He made a playful circle with the tip of his pole, causing the float to sway on the water. Then: “She was married to a man who was hard to figure, though. Everybody got along all right with him before he went off to war. He was in college a couple of years and he bragged a lot about being smart, but nobody paid him much attention. Couldn’t farm a lick, but he was a good carpenter and he got a lot of work doing it. After the war, he lost some of his grin. Let his temper get the best of him at times. You always got the feeling he was up to something, and he had all that money, all in new twenties. I used to think it was counterfeit. I heard some talk from Hayesville, that he was up there a lot trying to sell some stuff he brought back from the war. Some jewelry and things like that. Mostly little stuff.”

He shook his head slowly, swiped at a fly, added, “And there was this fellow that used to come up to see him from Atlanta, trying to buy his farm. At least that’s what Boyd said. But that didn’t make much sense. That farm’s not worth much. Got a good house on it, but that’s about all. Anyhow, there was some talk going around that him and Boyd had some business together that they didn’t want people to know about, and there wasn’t nothing to the story about buying land. But there’s always some talk about everything. I never thought much about it until this fellow showed up at my store one day and bought some stuff. Paid me with a new twenty-dollar bill, just like Boyd was always doing. Started me to wondering.”

“I guess it would,” Noah replied in an accommodating way.

“Eleanor say much about how Boyd died?”

“Not much.”

“Guess it’s not something she likes talking about.”

“Probably not.”

“It got called a suicide, since the gun was right there beside him,” Taylor said, “but there’s a lot of questions that never got an-swered.” “That right?” Noah said.

“For one thing, the gun was a luger, that German handgun,” Taylor replied. “Eleanor said she’d never seen it and didn’t know Boyd had it. Nobody else had ever heard him talk about it, and he was always bragging on his guns. And there was the shack. It was pretty tore up inside. Mattress on the floor, stuff from the pie safe on the table—things like that. They put that to rest by saying Boyd must of gone a little crazy before he pulled the trigger. Said it was what happened to some people after the war.”