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"I'm still here."

"Good. I asked Daddy last night and he said I had to ask you nicely." She draws herself up. "Please will you make me a fox pancake? A real one. Daddy's look like mittens."

"They look like a mitten," Carolina agrees gravely. I put a hand over my heart to indicate that I've been wounded. "I'll need a squeeze bottle."

"We have the one for syrup."

"That'll do. And a clean bowl, and a very steady hand." She sets down her mug and rolls her sleeves to the elbow. "Detective, I'll need you to supervise."

I have been making pancakes for six years. I stand at the end of the counter with my coffee and watch Carolina Whitaker pour batter into an old syrup bottle that Faith has rinsed under the tap, tip it over the hot griddle, and draw with a steady wrist and the intent expression of someone working on a very small patient. A rounded head forms, then a pointed snout, then two sharp ears, a long curving tail. She flips it with the spatula in one clean motion. The thing that lands on the plate is, beyond any argument, a fox.

Faith stares at it. "It has a tail."

"It has a proper tail. Every animal has to have its limbs in the right place. It's all anatomy."

"Daddy, look."

"I see it. I'm humbled."

"You should be," says my daughter, and picks up her fork.

By the time Faith has eaten the fox down to the ears and informed Carolina that she'll require a second one, I've wrestled her into her church dress and tights, and my mother's car has pulled up at the curb.

She comes in through the front door without knocking, the way she always has, wearing her good church coat with a pie carrier on her arm. She takes in the kitchen in a single sweep. The griddle and the batter on the counter. Carolina with a streak of flour on her sleeve. I see her face do the thing that means she's decided not to say a word.

"I'm taking this one to church. And then we've got the pie supper to set up, and then she's helping me with supper at my house. I'll bring her back at six."

"Mom, you don't have to..."

"I know I don't." She hands the pie carrier to Faith, who accepts it with the gravity of a pallbearer. Then my mother puts one hand on my arm. In my ear, so quietly that only I can hear it, she says, "Don't stand there like a fence post. You're thirty-seven years old. Go and be an adult."

"Mother."

"I'm only talking." She kisses my cheek, looks past me at Carolina, and smiles with every ounce of warmth she has. "Carolina. It was a pleasure to meet you properly."

"You too, Mrs. Harris."

"Ruth." She takes Faith's hand. "We'll see you both at six."

The front door closes. I hear the sedan start, and pull away from the curb, and fade down the street. The kitchen has gone quiet. The griddle ticks as it cools. On the counter between us, a tiny, cooling puddle of batter sits where Faith dribbled it.

"Well," Carolina says.

"Yeah."

"We have until six."

"We do."

She takes a breath and seems to decide something. "I want to see the barn. In daylight. I want to see it properly before somebody tells me what to do with it."

We take her car. My truck is still at the station where I left it Saturday morning. She drives with both hands on the wheel and the skillet still buckled into the back seat. I sit beside her and look out at the town sliding by. The festival tents folding up on the green. The maples in their last copper. The road climbing up toward Whitaker Hill through orchards gone to bronze.

Neither of us speaks. Her hand comes off the wheel at the first bend, rests on the gearshift between us, and stays there. I put mine over it.

The lane is bright and still. Kieran's cameras are clamped to the porch rail and the corner of the barn, small gray boxes with a green light blinking at the lens. The glass has been swept off the steps. Someone, I think Kieran, has re-hung the brass lantern and laid a tarp over the pieces of the broken shade by the rail. Carolina parks and sits for a moment with the engine ticking, looking at the barn doors through the windshield. Across them, a foot from the top, dried to a dull brick color, stands the word.

She gets out. She walks across the gravel to the doors and stands in front of them with her hands in her pockets. Then she reaches out and touches one of the letters, running two fingers along the edge of the S. She pulls her hand back and rubs her thumb against her finger.