Chapter 7: The Notice

Ansel's POV

I woke to a cold place in the bed where she should have been.

The shirt was gone from the floor, and the front door stood open an inch with a gray line of morning showing through it.

I was up and in my jeans before I had a thought in my head.

She stood on the porch in my shirt with her back to me, very straight, looking at the rail.

"Don't touch it," she said, without turning.

"I'm not going to."

I came out beside her.

The gas can was the red plastic kind that every ranch in the valley kept in the shed.

A paper tag hung off the handle on baling twine.

REMEMBER.

I felt the same thing I had felt five years ago on the ranch road, a drop in the middle of my body, the cold knowledge that I was too late again.

"Somebody stood on this porch while we slept," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"Josu or Iker."

"I'd say Iker," I said.

"Your father wouldn't leave a tag."

She nodded.

She looked very small and very upright in my shirt, with her cropped hair standing up on one side where my hand had been.

I wanted to put my arms around her.

I knew, from the line of her back, that it would be the wrong thing for the next minute.

"I'm going to call the sheriff," I said.

"He'll write nothing."

"He'll write the can down and take it into evidence.

"Then it's on record that somebody put it here."

She turned her head and looked at me.

"You'd file it," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"With your name on it," she said.

"With my name on it," I said.

Something shifted in her face.

I couldn't tell what.

She went inside to dress, and I called the sheriff, and he sent the same young deputy.

The deputy photographed the can on the rail and the tag in his glove and the boot prints in the dust, and he wrote it all down on a form.

He did not ask me a single question.

Afterward I drove to the county substation on the east side with my jaw tight.

I had not meant to do the next thing so early.

I had been going to do it Wednesday, when I had worked out what to say.

But the tag on that can still said REMEMBER behind my eyes.

There was a woman at my grandmother's house with a scar across her left hand.