He turned back to his painting, listened to the murmur of voices and believed there was something changed in the sound of them.

In a few minutes, the side door opened and Taylor stepped out onto the stoop and called up to him, “Noah, can you come down for a minute?”

Noah placed his brush across the top of the paint bucket, which he had secured to the ladder with a piece of wire, letting it dangle from one of the rungs. He made his way down the ladder, careful not to jiggle the bucket. On the ground, he saw Howard standing beside Taylor, his body slumped under the great bulk of his weight, the black of his eye patch cutting deep into the red of his face.

“Howard’s out looking for his grandson,” Taylor said. “He was wondering if you might of seen him this morning on your way to the store.”

“Don’t know exactly when he left, but it must have been pretty early,” Howard added. “Me and my wife was watching out for a neighbor, and we didn’t notice he was gone. He’s got too big to keep up with all the time. We figured he must of been playing out around the barn, but when I went to find him, he weren’t nowhere around.”

“No sir, I didn’t see him,” Noah said. He thought of Eleanor telling him that Beatrice Cunningham was at the Reynolds home, and he wondered if the boy could have followed Eleanor. Wondered, too, if he should say anything about Eleanor being at the shack, and decided against it. If the boy had been near the lake, he would have seen him, and maybe Eleanor did not want it known she had gone to the shack after leaving the old woman at the Reynolds home. Maybe she wanted to keep that part of her life to herself. In small places, anything could make gossip.

A look of worry clouded Howard’s face. His body rocked. Perspiration beaded across his wide forehead, made a bubble line over his eye patch. “Not like the boy to just take off,” he said. “He used to follow his daddy down the road when his daddy went off to work, but he always come straight back. That was before his daddy went up to Tennessee to work on a road crew.”

“Maybe he went down to the school to play,” Taylor suggested.

“I drove by there,” Howard told him. “Didn’t see nobody.”

“What about the river?” Taylor asked. “He had a good time yesterday, watching Noah fish. If I remember right, he said he was going to catch a fish and give it to Noah.”

Howard bobbed his head. “What Peavo and Moody said, too. But he’s been told not to go off to the river without somebody being with him.”

“Why don’t we go down there and look,” Taylor said. “We can get Peavo and Moody and some of the others to help us.”

“They said they would,” Howard mumbled. Then: “I guess we better.” He looked away. “I sure hope it’s not where he headed. He don’t know how to swim.”