Time to go see him, he said in his head.

And I will. Soon.

Tomorrow, I will write him another letter.

Tell him I’m headed back toward Elbert County.

He swallowed a deep, quick breath, taking in the wind, taking in the still-faint scent of paint he had tried to scrub from his hands. Taylor Bowers had praised him for the work, saying he was a natural with a paintbrush in his hands, as good with a paintbrush as with a fishing pole. Had said, “You could make some good money painting, Fish Seller. Most people don’t like doing it.”

Painting was all right, he reasoned. Not as mean as plowing a mule over baked-hard field dirt. Maybe he and Travis could set up a painting business when Travis got out of prison.

He would write to Travis about the painting, he decided.

A soft splash sounded against the bank of the lake. Mr. Fish, he thought. Mr. Fish wondering what had happened to him, wondering why he had not kept his promise.

“Soon enough,” he said in a soft voice. “Soon enough.”

Or maybe it was not the fish. Maybe it was the ghost of Arch Wheeler or Boyd Cunningham stirring up the wind. Arch Wheeler or Boyd Cunningham trying to alert him to something, like gunsmoke war angels warning him of men in hidden places, waiting to kill him.

A shiver rippled across his neck and shoulders, down his back.

THIRTEEN

On the day Boyd Cunningham drove Eleanor to the farmhouse he had purchased as a wedding surprise, he had given up a secret: once, as a boy, he had taken his pocket knife and carved his initials on one of the clapboards at the back of the house. Had carved B C for Boyd Cunningham. Not something large and easy to see. A little cut made with a blade tip, barely visible even close up to it. It was his way of branding the house, he had explained to her, determined that someday he would live there.

It was also a story Eleanor remembered with sadness, having learned the whole of it from Howard Reynolds after Boyd’s death.

The house had been constructed by a man named Joe Manning, whose grandson, Isaac, had been a childhood friend to Boyd. There had been a rumor—a story shared for humor by old men who knew it to be a made-up tale—that Joe Manning had dug up some nuggets of gold when he put down the foundation for the house and that, afterward, long-dead Indians began to appear to him at night, angry over his taking of the gold and turning it into cash. The story said that no one in Joe Manning’s family would ever rest peacefully in the house or would ever again find so much as a pinhead speck of gold. Yet, whoever took up the place after Joe Manning’s family would find enough gold to pave a road from Hayesville to Hiawassee.

It was a story told mainly to poke fun at old Joe Manning’s miserly ways, yet Boyd had let himself believe it as a boy, and in the hardening years between childhood to manhood, he had made a firm vow that he would someday own the place.