Chapter 4: The Barn on the Ridge

The lien letter had a signature at the bottom.

Pearl Stauffer, in blue ink, dated March 9th.

I held it up to the clinic window and read her name three times.

Pearl wrote her P with a loop at the top and a tail that curled back under itself.

This P had no tail.

"It's fake," I told the owner. "She never signed this."

"Then you'll prove it," she said, and put her hand on mine. "Go see the land, Lainey. Take the afternoon."

I drove up Cedar Grade for the first time since the fire.

The road was black, and so were the trees on both sides.

At the top, where the farmhouse had stood for ninety years, there was a square of ash and a brick chimney.

The barn behind it had not burned.

It stood at the edge of the old sunflower field with its red paint blistered, and a pair of bluebirds sat on the roof.

I got out and stood in the ash with my keys in my fist.

A pickup came up the road behind me.

"I followed you," Kurt said, getting out. "Sorry. I'm not stalking you. I just didn't want you up here alone the first time."

"That's what a stalker says."

"I brought a generator."

I looked at the bed of his truck.

It held a generator, a camp stove, a cot, a cooler, and a bag of ice.

"You were going to say you were passing by," I said.

"Yes. Then I saw you looking at the chimney."

He lifted the generator down without asking and carried it to the barn.

Upstairs over the seed room there was a one-room apartment where Pearl used to sleep during harvest.

It had a bed, a table, and her blue enamel kettle still hanging on a nail.

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