Part 4
“I want her to go back,” Nora said.
The words left an empty place behind them. Lena did not praise her. She told Nora when the next medical update would come and promised to return the scarf once the young wolf no longer needed it.
Rachel set the phone on the tray. “You didn’t even have to think.”
“I did my thinking before I answered.”
“You hid it well.”
There was enough of Cal in the remark to make them both smile, though Rachel’s vanished first. Neither woman tried to hold the smile after it was gone.
Nora spent a second night in the hospital. The following afternoon, Lena came by carrying a clear plastic bag. Inside lay the red scarf, damp from washing and cut cleanly through six inches of fringe where the clinic staff had removed it without pulling the injured leg.
“She ate after we took this out,” Lena said. “The narrow strip we discussed is sealed at the center. The rest has been washed.”
Nora accepted the bag. Through the plastic she could see the wandering rows and one narrow band where Rachel had changed yarn in the middle of a stitch.
Rachel stared at it. “You wore that up there?”
“I usually do when it snows.”
“I thought it was in Toby’s cedar chest.”
The old name altered the room. Nora laid the bag across her lap.
Rachel had knitted the scarf during the winter Toby’s leukemia returned. She had worked on it in waiting rooms because counting stitches gave her hands a task that did not require hope. On the night he died, the half-finished scarf had been folded beneath her coat. She completed it months later and gave it to Nora without a card, and Nora had never asked whether it was meant as a gift or a place to put the hours neither of them knew how to carry.
“It was in the chest,” Nora said. “I took it out after your dad died.”
Rachel touched the sealed plastic, then withdrew her fingers. “I thought you kept everything exactly where he left it.”
“Most things.”
“His boots are still by the mudroom door.”
“They aren’t hurting anybody.”
Rachel’s expression tightened, but she let the argument go. That restraint was new, or perhaps Nora had simply failed to notice it before.
Tom arrived at the ranch three days later, after Rachel had driven Nora home and spent an afternoon moving rugs, installing a shower rail, and trying not to call those acts evidence. The storm had broken branches across the lane. Tom had already cut them and stacked the wood before he knocked.
He stood on the porch holding Nora’s hickory stick. A steel sleeve now covered the crack near its base.
“It won’t win any beauty contest,” he said. “It’ll hold.”
Nora opened the screen door but not the inner one. “Cal said the same about your welds.”
Tom glanced toward the upper meadow. He looked older than he had four nights earlier, though perhaps she had never seen him without the easy certainty that his place in her life was secure.
“Morrow took my rifles while they sort it out,” he said. “Game warden took the traps. I gave them a statement.”
“Why did you set them?”
“Lost five lambs in six weeks.”
“To wolves?”
“Two were confirmed. Three were mostly gone.”
“So you guessed.”
His eyes hardened. “I called the state. I hung lights. I brought the band in every night until they started breaking fences from being crowded. Compensation covers a dead lamb on paper, months later. It doesn’t keep a ranch going.”
Nora knew all of that. Tom’s daughter and grandson depended on the ranch. She had watched him sleep in the lambing shed during April freezes and carry a weak ewe inside his coat. He was not careless with every life, which made the steel at Willow Draw harder to fit into the man she knew.
“You crossed my fence,” she said.
“The pack was working the creek. I thought if I caught one—”
“A pup.”
“I didn’t know there were pups that far down.”
“You knew there were wolves.”
Tom looked at the cane in his hands. Meltwater from the steel sleeve darkened the porch board. “Yes.”
He passed it through the narrow opening. Nora took it and felt the added weight of the sleeve.
“The investigators will ask whether you had permission to be on my land,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’ll tell them the truth.”
“I didn’t come to ask different.”
They stood with the screen between them. A week earlier Nora would have reached for the history that made this easier: Tom plowing the road after Cal’s funeral, Tom finding the leak beneath her kitchen in January, Tom leading the search team into a storm after she had ignored good sense and her daughter. She owed him thanks for each of those things, and she would still tell the investigator exactly where he had crossed her fence.
Tom rubbed his beard. “You shut off that locator because Rachel got on your nerves.”
“I never turned it on.”
“That line didn’t improve with practice.” He met her eyes. “You walked up there alone with the ridge disappearing. If I’d done that, Cal would’ve called me a fool before he put on his coat to come get me.”
“That has nothing to do with your traps.”
“No. It doesn’t clean up what I did.” Tom’s voice dropped. “But don’t hide behind me so you can skip your own part.”
Nora felt Rachel go still in the kitchen behind her. She opened her mouth, found nothing that did not sound like an excuse, and closed it.
Tom stepped off the porch. “State says they may need the upper meadow clear of stock if they try to put that young wolf back. You’ll have a decision to make.”
“So will you.”
“I already made mine. That’s why we’re standing here.”
He walked to his truck without asking forgiveness. Nora watched him drive away, the repaired cane heavy in her hand.
Rachel came to the doorway. “Was he wrong about you?” Nora looked at the satellite locator still boxed on the kitchen table. “No,” she said. “Tomorrow we call somebody who knows how to install that thing…”
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