Glen didn’t respond, but at the sound of her name, Trudy began to thrash. Though she was lithe and strong, it was no use. Glen dwarfed her. His shoulders bunched and his arms tightened until she stopped. She craned her neck to look at Claude. She was crying.

“Make Edgar stop. Please, Claude. Make Edgar stop going in there.”

Claude just nodded. There was nothing to say in reply. He stood and began to cross the yard, mind racing. He didn’t like having to make decisions that way; he needed time to think things through, but he could hardly sit and mull. Yes, he could stop Edgar, knock him down and hold him like Glen was holding Trudy until the fire was so advanced no one could go inside. To Trudy, it would look like he’d saved Edgar from madness, while inside, the bottle would crack and melt, its contents boil in the flames.

Afterward, there would be Glen to account for. The man was blind, his eyes etched globes. It was a testament to Glen’s strength that he was conscious at all, even if half out of his mind with pain. The blindness would overwhelm him later on-all those late-night conversations had left Claude with no doubt about that. When that happened, Claude could insist that Glen, in his grief, had mistaken an innocent consolation over Page’s death for something else entirely, and Trudy might believe that. Glen had, after all, tried to kidnap Edgar. And if that wasn’t damning enough, after Trudy hit Glen he had reverted to this strange wrestling maneuver, moaning and rocking and refusing to release her.

But there would still be Edgar. The boy (it was hard to think of him that way, gray-haired from the quicklime, tall, whip-thin) might make some claims, though any real evidence would long have been dispersed in the clouds. In return, Claude could raise questions of his own. What had happened with Page in the mow, really? With luck, they might find the key to the Impala in Edgar’s pocket, along with several hundred dollars. Would anyone be that surprised to find a runaway preparing to steal a car?

It could work, Claude thought. All he had to do was stop Edgar-save Edgar’s life, in Trudy’s eyes-and wait. Afterward, there would be a sense of release, a new beginning for all of them. The fire, and the reconstruction, would change everything. A turning point.

Claude was walking toward the barn, considering this, when he felt a blunt pressure against his thigh. He looked down. Essay stood before him. She’d pressed her nose into his leg, just above his knee, and his heart began to jangle, because for a moment Claude saw a syringe in the dog’s mouth. But his eyes had been fooled. There was nothing in her mouth. He’d been thinking of the night Edgar played his trick in the kennel. Essay stood in front of him, gaze resolute, mouth agape, eyes glinting and mischievous, as if waiting to see his reaction from that distant night. Was it possible the boy was so single-minded that he’d come back to play this trick again?

All at once, Claude’s certainty wavered. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. It would not work. Not if all it took was the gaze of a dog to make his hands shake and the blood pound in his brain. He was kidding himself. Over and over again he would have to look Gar in the eye just that way.

No, not Gar-Edgar.

Why had he thought that? No sooner had he asked that question than he knew the answer: because Edgar, all softness stripped from his face, lit aslant by the yard light, hair grayed by quicklime, looked too much like his father. Because, carrying the files in his arms, the boy even walked with the same hunched-up step Gar had used cradling pups in and out of the whelping pens. Because some nights Claude couldn’t sleep after the tick of a bug against the bedroom window made him start up in bed, adrenaline flooding his veins, heart leaping so ferociously he’d had to walk it off, and after that he couldn’t lie down. Better to sit facing the night and take sleep that way, if it came at all. And because the look on Essay’s face made him think of the morning he’d glanced up from the sink to discover Edgar outside the window in the apple tree-how, finally, he’d had to turn away.

When Claude looked down again, the dog had slipped away, rejoined one of the packs bounding through the yard. Claude walked to the double doors and entered, stooping. The air was breathable down by his waist, though it reeked in his nostrils and stung his eyes. He could see only a few feet ahead. When he reached the doorway of the workshop he made out the wheelbarrow, askew in the center of the workshop, and Edgar, yanking open the top drawer of a file cabinet, standing upright just long enough to scoop out the drawer’s contents, then ducking again.

Edgar glanced over and spotted Claude in the doorway. He stopped for a moment and they looked at one another. Then Edgar turned and snatched another batch of files from the open drawer. The drawers of the file cabinets nearest the door hung half-open and empty-Edgar had been working from the newest records to the oldest. That explained why he hadn’t already walked into the yard with the bottle in his hand.

Claude stepped past Edgar, to the last filing cabinet. He slid open the top drawer and began scooping armload after armload of records into the wheelbarrow, filling it as fast as he could, though it was already nearly overflowing. Edgar kept working on the bottom drawer of the adjacent file, turning and heaving papers. Some missed the wheelbarrow entirely and scattered toward the doorway. Then Edgar stood, took the handlebars of the wheelbarrow, and disappeared into the smoke.

Edgar

HE COULD HAVE KICKED HIMSELF FOR NOT THINKING OF THE wheelbarrow sooner. It was possible to get everything this way, all of it, the whole history, outside and safe. Working frantically, he’d already pitched the contents of one complete file cabinet into the metal basin of the thing. The smoke in the workshop was bitter and thick, and he dropped to his knees to suck the clear air near the floor.

Now he rose again and plunged his hands into a drawer and turned and dumped an armload of papers. How swiftly his mind was spinning as he worked, how euphoric the sensation of deliverance that beat in him. He felt he’d struck another bargain, just as he had watching the apple trees in the winter, and he worked with great intensity. The part of him that loved order cried out at the wildness of what he was doing, the neat march of generations so quickly scrambled. But he couldn’t stop. He’d meant to throw everything into this one final barrow load, but the papers had already begun to mound over the rim. Much more would just slide and spill as he rolled through the turn into the aisle and would be lost in the smoke.

He had glanced at the workshop door when Claude appeared, crouching low and squinting against the smoke. Claude’s expression was a kind of perfect blankness, or rather, a mélange of expressions, any one of them fleeting and half made and out of registration with the next. Edgar thought that someone else, watching from another viewpoint, might see concern or apprehension there, or fear, or desire, or revulsion. But for Edgar, the result was something incomprehensible, unreadable, committing to nothing and summing to nothing. As it had always been with Claude. Edgar had not in the least forgotten what he’d seen in the mow, or that stream of memory that had passed through him in the rain. He had never had much of a plan for when he returned except to say what he knew was true and keep saying it, without evidence, without proof.

Then, before he had a chance to do anything, Claude was past him and had yanked open the topmost drawer of last file cabinet and begun shoveling armloads of paper into the wheelbarrow. He didn’t say anything or even hold Edgar’s gaze. When Edgar understood what Claude was doing, he turned back to the files and they worked side by side. The wheelbarrow was quickly overfilled. There was no time to explain and no language for it. Edgar just grabbed the wheelbarrow’s handles and ran through doorway. Keeping low enough to breathe clear air was difficult and twice he had to halt to steady the mound of papers.