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“Really? The cops pulled my records. They saw I was arrested once before, for hacking a computer system down in L.A. They took me in for questioning and it got scary. They said if I didn’t want a felony charge, I’d have to give up names.”

The wind cuts like diamonds.

“Names?”

“In the movement. Don’t worry. I didn’t.”

A pause. They believe me.

“You should have seen her last night, Julius, when she jumped into the middle of the horses to save poor Lillian. You were so determined, Darcy. I was so proud of you! You were utterly selfless,” Megan says. “You have a calling for this work.”

We stand in silence in the shifting air. A big, fat, hairy tumbleweed gets stuck against the fence of the high school, where two kids are lighting cigarettes.

I hope they don’t set that thing on fire.

Dick Stone is watching me. I squint at his face in the billowy light but catch only the tail end of the look in his eyes, like the whisper of a closing door.

He knows.

“Could I crash with you guys? Just for a couple of days?”

“Stay as long as you like,” Megan says.

“I hate to ask. This wasn’t the game plan.” My eyes are watering from the wind and an insane euphoria.

“She can share a room with Sara,” Megan’s telling Stone.

“I have skills,” I offer, although not too fast. “This thing isn’t over. Not until we free the horses for good.”

“See?” says Megan.

Dick Stone doesn’t answer. He doesn’t argue, but he doesn’t agree, either, just squeezes Megan’s shoulder and fishes around in the big square pocket of the woolen Navajo jacket for the keys to the white truck. I pretend not to glimpse the butt of the Colt.

Patience. It’s important in our line of work.

PART THREE

Sixteen

It is a common American farmhouse, with a wraparound porch supported by spindle posts and decorated with carvings of Victorian lacework—the kind of house a young man rolling off a freight train from Missouri in 1898 would have said looked just like home. For a hundred years, it has survived searing valley summers and the creeping moisture of the winter with the worn-down crankiness of an arthritic farmer’s wife.

Waiting on the front steps beside Darcy DeGuzman’s knapsack, I am trying to make friends with the house, now that I have come to stay, but it keeps shrugging me off with discomforting distractions: rotted floorboards, sinks rusting in the weeds, a pen with two goats and the three surviving ducks, a lidded cardboard box on the porch with mysterious scratching inside.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Megan tells me, lots of faraway places were starting to look like home, because factory-made houses could be sent across the country on the railroads. Megan’s grandfather did not have to crawl very far down the tracks to find a hog operation in the Willamette Valley remarkably like the one he’d just blown off in Jefferson City, Missouri. After a few thousand miles and a broken leg sustained in the decisive leap off the boxcar in which he had stolen a ride, this simple two-story homestead must have seemed like heaven to the boy when the farmer who owned the land pulled him from a ditch, dehydrated, two days later. At age fourteen, Megan’s grandfather apprenticed himself to the farmer on the spot, in the hope—like many of us have—that one day he would get back exactly what he had left behind.

That is how Megan’s family came to own the place, and why it is a sanctuary to this day. Because of the kindness of that anonymous farmer, Megan believes this land is blessed, and she will not refuse shelter to animals or humans in need. That is the history anyway. The story she tells. Knowing that she and Dick Stone have shared a secret life on this overgrown, isolated property, undisturbed all these years, suggests another reason to hold on to Grandpa’s goods.

The scratching in the box is making me edgy. Carefully, I open the lid, to discover half a dozen abandoned baby rabbits. I lift one out, holding the warm, soft body in my cupped hands as we share a wordless consolation.

It’s sad in this world without a mom.

A white pickup