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peanuts, as he often does on his way back from school. I don’t know for sure, Sheriff, any more than I know why you came out here acting like I committed some kind of crime. I wasn’t the one who knocked her up.”

“You ought to hush that kind of talk about a nice girl!”

“Maybe yes and maybe no, but this was as much a surprise to me as it was to the Cotteries, and now my boy is gone. They at least know where their daughter is.”

Once again he was stumped. Then he took out a little notebook from his back pocket and jotted something in it. He put it back and asked, “You don’t know for sure that your wife got in touch with your

kid, though—that’s what you’re tel ing me? It’s just a guess?”

“I know he talked a lot about his mother after she left, but then he stopped. And I know he hasn’t shown up at that home where Harlan and his wife stuck Shannon.” And on that score I was as surprised

as Sheriff Jones… but awful y grateful. “Put the two things together, and what do you get?”

“I don’t know,” Jones said, frowning. “I truly don’t. I thought I had this figured out, but I’ve been wrong before, haven’t I? Yes, and wil be again. ‘We are al bound in error,’ that’s what the Book says. But good God, kids make my life hard. If you hear from your son, Wilfred, I’d tel him to get his skinny ass home and stay away from Shannon Cotterie, if he knows where she is. She won’t want to see him,

guarantee you that. Good news is no prairie fire, and we can’t arrest him for stealing his father’s truck.”

“No,” I said grimly, “you’d never get me to press charges on that one.”

“But. ” He raised his finger, which reminded me of Mr. Stoppenhauser at the bank. “Three days ago, in Lyme Biska—not so far from where the rider found your truck—someone held up that grocery and ethyl station on the edge of town. The one with the Blue Bonnet Girl on the roof ? Took 23 dol ars. I got the report sitting on my desk. It was a young fel a dressed in old cowboy clothes, with a

bandanna pul ed up over his mouth and a plainsman hat slouched down over his eyes. The owner’s mother was tending the counter, and the fel a menaced her with some sort of tool. She thought it might

have been a crowbar or a pry-rod, but who knows? She’s pushing 80 and half-blind.”

It was my time to be silent. I was flabbergasted. At last I said, “Henry left from school, Sheriff, and so far as I can remember he was wearing a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers that day. He didn’t take any of his clothes, and in any case he doesn’t have any cowboy clothes, if you mean boots and al . Nor does he have a plainsman’s hat.”

“He could have stolen those things, too, couldn’t he?”

“If you don’t know anything more than what you just said, you ought to stop. I know you’re friends with Harlan—”

“Now, now, this has nothing to do with that.”

It did and we both knew it, but there was no reason to go any farther down that road. Maybe my 80 acres didn’t stack up very high against Harlan Cotterie’s 400, but I was stil a landowner and a

taxpayer, and I wasn’t going to be browbeaten. That was the point I was making, and Sheriff Jones had taken it.

“My son’s not a robber, and he doesn’t threaten women. That’s not how he acts and not the way he was raised.”

Not until just lately, anyway, a voice inside whispered.

“Probably just a drifter looking for a quick payday,” Jones said. “But I felt like I had to bring it up, and so I did. And we don’t know what people might say, do we? Talk gets around. Everybody talks, don’t they? Talk’s cheap. The subject’s closed as far as I’m concerned—let the Lyme County Sheriff worry about what goes on in Lyme Biska, that’s my motto—but you should know that the Omaha police

are keeping an eye on the place where Shannon Cotterie’s at. Just in case your son gets in touch, you know.”

He brushed back his hair, then resettled his hat a final time.

“Maybe he’l come back on his own, no harm done, and we can write this whole thing off as, I don’t know, a bad debt.”

“Fine. Just don’t cal him a bad son, unless you’re wil ing to cal Shannon Cotterie a bad daughter.”

The way his nostrils flared suggested he didn’t like that much, but he didn’t reply to it. What he said was, “If he comes back and says he’s seen his mother, let me know, would you? We’ve got her on

the books as a missing person. Sil y, I know, but the law is the law.”

“I’l do that, of course.”

He nodded and went to his car. Lars had settled behind the wheel. Jones shooed him over—the sheriff was the kind of man who did his own driving. I thought about the young man who’d held up the

store, and tried to tel myself that my Henry would never do such a thing, and even if he were driven to it, he wouldn’t be sly enough to put on clothes he’d stolen out of somebody’s barn or bunkhouse. But Henry was different now, and murderers learn slyness, don’t they? It’s a survival skil . I thought that maybe—