Part 3
“The south pump quit before I got there,” Daniel said. “We had water backing toward the seed shed. I went to work on that and forgot the trap.”
Nell could still hear the chain sliding against the broken platform. She pressed her bandaged palms flat beneath the table. Across from her, Daniel was watching the edge of his plate.
“When did you remember?”
“That night. Ellis asked. We tried to get in from the west before daylight Tuesday, but the lane was already under water.”
“You thought she was out there?”
“I didn’t know anything was caught. I thought we’d find the whole thing washed into the canal.” He rubbed his forehead. “That’s what I wanted to think.”
Kate set down the sauce jar she had been carrying to the refrigerator. “Did you tell Rachel any of this?”
He shook his head.
Nell pushed back from the table. The chair scraped the floor, and all three of them looked at the mark it left. She had been told six times that day what she should have done, by people who had known about the trap before she even heard the animal.
“You let Ellis do the talking,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Daniel reached for the jar and put it in the refrigerator. Nell nearly shouted at him for moving away, but he came back and sat down.
“I didn’t want more trouble,” he said. “We just got here. I need this work.”
She hated that she understood part of it. She remembered the unanswered calls before they moved, the machinery Daniel repaired for a contractor who never paid the last invoices, her mother opening envelopes with a calculator beside her. At Ellis’s house that first week, her father had laughed over something that wasn’t very funny, and Nell had kept watching because she had almost forgotten how he sounded.
“Are you going to tell?”
“Yes.”
“When I’m asleep?”
He looked at her then. Kate put a hand on the back of his chair but did not speak for him.
“You can be here,” he said. “I’ll call in the morning.”
Nell slept badly. Once she woke with her hands clenched as if she were still holding the line; another time she heard her parents talking in the kitchen and got up before she could decide not to. They were going through the household bills. Kate pulled out a chair for her, but Nell went back to bed.
In the morning Daniel made the call at the table while Nell ate cereal she could barely taste. He told Rachel about Monday, the pump, the promise he had not kept, and his silence during the rescue.
Rachel said the wildlife officer following up on the trap would need the same account. She could not tell Daniel what the review would find. He gave her his number again and checked that he had not missed any earlier calls.
Afterward, he took his boots from beside the door. “I need to tell Ellis what I said.”
Nell waited for the instruction to stay home. Then he asked if she wanted to ride with him.
“Yes.”
“Your mom needs to know where we are.”
He handed Nell the phone. She called Kate at the clinic and told her, while Daniel stood close enough to answer questions but let her finish.
At the farm, Hazel Crowe was trying to persuade a white hen out from behind a stack of empty flowerpots. Hazel was fourteen, with a long braid tucked inside her sweatshirt and a voice Nell usually heard raised over a softball field. Now she crouched without moving and spoke so quietly Nell could not make out the words.
“Don’t come around that side,” Hazel said when she noticed her. “She’ll run under the shed.”
Daniel went toward the open equipment barn. Nell stopped beside the feed bucket and watched the hen emerge one cautious foot at a time. A patch of feathers was missing from its shoulder.
“What happened to her?”
“Same thing that happened to the others. She got away.” Hazel waited until the bird reached her before lifting it against her sweatshirt. “The vet says the skin’s healing. She’s just scared of everything.”
Nell had heard about the poultry losses, but mostly as the reason Ellis was angry at coyotes. Standing beside Hazel, she could see the small empty hutch where the younger birds had been kept. A school agriculture notebook lay on its roof beneath a brick.
“How many?” she asked.
“Eleven.”
“Couldn’t you get more?”
Hazel’s face changed. She adjusted the bird against her body and walked past Nell toward the house.
“Her name is Mabel,” she said. “You can put the bucket by the door.”
Nell looked down and realized she had picked it up without being asked. She carried it where Hazel wanted, taking care not to rattle the handle. When she returned, the older girl was sliding Mabel into a clean dog crate in the mudroom, where a towel covered half the wire.
Nell stayed outside. Through the doorway she could see a sheet of lined paper with the birds’ names, hatch dates, and weights recorded in Hazel’s handwriting. Several names had a single pencil line through them.
Ellis came out of the barn carrying two bottles of water. He handed one to Daniel before asking why he wasn’t at the pump. They had known each other since Daniel worked summers for him as a teenager; Ellis still sometimes called him Danny when a machine finally started, and Daniel still turned toward the sound.
“I spoke to Rachel,” Daniel said.
Ellis unscrewed his water bottle. “About the foot?”
“About the trap. About what I didn’t get done Monday.”
Nell stood beside the mudroom steps while Daniel told him the rest. Ellis listened with the loose bottle cap balanced on one finger. He did not interrupt until Daniel mentioned the officer.
“You might have called me first.”
“We already know what happened.”
“We know a storm tore up half my drainage. We know you were keeping a building from flooding.”
“I told her that too.”
Ellis looked toward the fields. “And now I wait for someone who wasn’t here to decide which part counts.”
“I couldn’t keep leaving my part out.”
“Nobody asked you to.”
Daniel turned the unopened water bottle in his hands. Nell waited for him to remind Ellis about the rent, or the years they had known each other.
“I know,” he said.
Ellis put the cap back on the bottle without drinking. Behind him, Hazel came out of the house and stopped on the steps, still holding the towel she had used for Mabel.
“I want the farm keys,” Ellis said.
Daniel’s shoulders tightened. “For how long?”
“Until I’ve had a chance to think. I’m not sending you back out on my equipment while we’re in the middle of this.”
“I need to know about the hours already worked.”
“You’ll be paid through yesterday. I pay what I owe.”
Nell looked toward their rented house, hidden beyond the windbreak. Ellis followed her gaze, but whatever he might have said remained unsaid. Daniel set the unopened water on the step.
He separated the farm keys from his ring and laid them beside the bottle. The small brass key to their house stayed in his hand…
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