Chapter 8: Sunday Supper

"I was here all night," I said into the phone. "I was walking the baby on the porch at two."

"I know that," Fern said. "You know that. Nobody at the store knows that."

I hung up.

Gunnar was watching me from the barn door.

"Colt says I crawled back," I said. "Last night. Two a.m. Begging."

"You didn't."

"Thank you, I know."

"No," he said. "I mean I can show them you didn't."

He pointed up at the barn's corner post.

A little camouflage box was strapped to it, facing the house.

"Trail cam," he said. "Coyotes were getting at the calves last spring. It runs all night. Motion and a time stamp."

I stared at it.

Then I laughed so hard I had to sit down on a hay bale.

"What?"

"Colt cut your power line right under a camera, didn't he?"

"That one faces the house. Not the pole."

"Still. Pull the card."

He pulled the card.

At the kitchen table we found it almost immediately.

Two-oh-four a.m., in grainy green night vision: me on the porch in a barn coat and socks.

The baby was on my shoulder, and I was walking back and forth past the window.

Two-nineteen: still walking.

Two-thirty-one: I sat down on the swing with him asleep.

The ridge is twenty minutes from the lodge by truck, and the truck sat in the yard in every frame.

"Sunday supper's tonight," I said.

Gunnar knew exactly what I meant.

"You want me there?"

"I want you to drive. And I want you to stand at the back like you did at the feast."

"Why?"

"Because they laughed at you there too. I want you to see them stop."

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