Chapter 18: Thomas Voss's Last Entry

The barn smelled the way it always had — dry timothy, the mineral edge of old wood, something underneath both of those that was just the barn being itself, a smell Mara had stopped noticing at some point in childhood and only noticed now because she was trying to hold onto everything. She had been trying to hold onto everything for six months and two weeks and four days, and she was getting tired of the effort.

She sat in the corner her father used to call the thinking spot, the place where two walls met at an angle that wasn't quite ninety degrees and created a pocket of shadow even at noon. He had kept a three-legged stool there that she used to sit on as a small child while he mended tack, listening to him talk about limestone formations the way other fathers talked about baseball. She could feel the three legs of it under her now, slightly uneven, tilting her just enough to the left that she had to correct for it, which he always said kept you honest.

Through the barn's open side door she could see the porch — Denny sitting on the top step with his back to her, Pryce standing in the yard below him, and the particular distance between them that meant Denny was watching Pryce without making it obvious he was watching Pryce. Gordon had arrived twenty minutes after them in his grandmother's Buick, which he drove in the careful and slightly formal way of someone who had gotten his license from a lenient grandparent six weeks ago and had not yet decided whether to enjoy the freedom or respect the responsibility. He was on the porch now too, sitting in Ruth's chair with his notebook open, which meant he was either taking notes on Pryce or documenting his own thoughts in the way he did when something was bothering him more than he wanted to show.