"Lucas told you where I was?" she asked.

"You'd rather Amos Rackley get to you first?"

"He's not all bad."

"Are you in contact with him?"

"I take whatever help people offer me. I don't have a lot of choices right now."

I sat down on the step below her and removed my hat. A family was grilling sausages on the cement porch of the cottage next door and smoke drifted through the tree limbs overhead.

"You going to let Dr. Voss go down for Lamar Ellison's murder?" I asked.

The surface of the lake shimmered with blades of light.

"Ellison told you something in the tavern the night he died. Something you couldn't deal with," I said.

She paused before she spoke, as though she were about to explain someone's twisted mentality to herself rather than to me. "He said he was sorry about my little brother. His words were, 'I didn't know the kid was gonna get snuffed. I thought they'd turn him loose after a while. There's some real sick guys in the D.C. area, though.'"

I turned around. Her eyes looked like washed coal, bright and hard and filled with injury and an unrelieved anger that would probably never find release. "Ellison kidnapped your little brother?" I said. "He sold him to a deviate. On the East Coast. Him and some others."

"Who?"

"I don't know. Lamar was incoherent. When he finally stopped babbling he didn't know what he'd said."

"You followed him home?" I asked. She rose from the steps and squatted down by the prayer circle and began rolling up the strips of red and black cloth that intersected at the trunk of the birch tree.

"I thought I could find an answer. But there's no answer. I read that book you told me about, Black Elk Speaks. You know the ending. For Indians the Tree of Life is dead," she said.

"You listen to me, Sue Lynn. The right lawyer can get you off. Ellison was a sonofabitch and deserved what he got."

"I'm not going to say any more."

"You have to. Doc's going on trial for what you did."

"Somebody else was there. You leave me alone."

"Say again?"

"A guy was in the shadows. Outside Lamar's house."

"What guy?"

"I didn't stop to chat. But he could have saved Lamar's life and he didn't. Get that look off your face, Mr. Holland. Who hated Lamar as much as I did? Tell Lucas good-bye for me."

"Doc?" I said.

She bundled the strips of black and red cloth under one arm and went inside the cottage and dead-bolted the door behind her.

I USED a pay phone on the highway and called the sheriff at his home.

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine killed Ellison," I said.

"How do you know?"

"I just talked with her. She's hiding out on Swan Lake."

"She confessed to you?"

"Not exactly."

"Here we go again."

"Pick her up, Sheriff. I'll give you the directions."

"It's Sunday. On Monday I'll think about it. In the meantime, try to enjoy life. Give the rest of us a break."

When I got back to Doc's, he and Maisey were raking manure out of the barn and shoveling it into a wheelbarrow and hauling it to a compost heap by his vegetable garden. Doc was bare-chested and sweaty and had tied back his long hair with a blue polka dot bandanna.

I walked out to the horse lot and leaned on the top rail of the fence and watched the two of them work. Maisey kept smiling at me, as though I were being remiss in not helping them. I hated what I was about to say.

"Got something on your mind?" Doc asked.

"Yeah, if you can take a little walk with me," I replied.

"Maisey's a big girl," he said.

"This one's private, Doc."

"We got no secrets here," he said.

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine torched Lamar Ellison. There was a guy outside Ellison's house when she did it," I said.

Doc paused with his hands propped on the inverted end of the rake and gave me a measured stare.

"No kidding?" he said.

"That's what the lady said."

"Maybe that'll help us at the trial," Doc said.

"Could be. Was it you?" I said.

He brushed at his nose and watched a hawk up in a tree not far from Lucas's tent.

"I saw that Witherspoon boy while you were gone. Out yonder in the trees," Doc said.

"Did you turn around on the road and go back to Ellison's place that night?" I asked.

"I guess you got to ask questions like that. Even though they might sorely disappoint an old friend. Well, the answer is-" he said.

But he didn't get to finish his sentence. Maisey threw down her rake in the dust and walked toward me with both her fists clenched, saying to her father, "Don't you answer that question." Then she turned her outrage on me.

"You listen, Billy Bob Holland. Don't you ever question my father's honor. He's your friend, so you by God had better act like it," she said.

I took off my hat and hit a horsefly with it.

"I can understand your sentiments, Maisey," I said.

"No, you don't. No matter how all this turns out, no one is ever going to question this family's integrity again," she said.

I raised my hands.

"You won't hear it from me," I said.

"You got that right," she said, and tossed back her hair and walked to the house.

Doc grinned at me.

"You look a little windblown," he said. "I need to put you on the stand, Doc. That's not a problem, is it?"

"Not for me. What do you reckon Witherspoon was doing around here?" he said.

Later, I asked Lucas to take a walk with me along the water's edge, through the trees, to a pool where you could see the shadows of trout hanging in the current just above the pebbles on the bottom. Under the canopy the ground and boulders and tree trunks were suffused with a cool green light and a tea-colored spring leaked down the lichen into the river.

"Sue Lynn has probably taken off. She wanted me to tell you good-bye," I said.

"Took off where? What for?"

"She killed that biker, Lamar Ellison."

The color drained out of his face. He stopped and picked up a pine cone and flung it at the stream and watched it float down the riffle and disappear under a beaver dam.

"She told you that?" he said.

"More or less."

He kicked at the softness of the ground with his boot. It was one he had worked on oil rigs with, steel-toed, scuffed, laced through metal eyelets with leather thongs. The whites of his eyes were filmed now.

"She didn't leave no note or anything?" he said.

"She's scared. Go easy on her, Lucas. Ellison murdered her little brother."

"Then he had it coming. Why's she letting Doc go down for it?"

I knew words could not lessen his anger or ease his sense of betrayal. Eventually he would forgive Sue Lynn, not at once, not by a conscious choice or arriving at a philosophical moment, but instead one day he would look back through the inverted telescope of time and see her as being possessed of the same moral frailties as himself and hence, in memory, an acceptable part of his life again.

But that day would be a long time coming and these are notions you cannot impart to someone younger than yourself, particularly when the individual is your son.

"What if I take you and Doc and Maisey to the Indian powwow in Arlee?" I said.

"I'm going up to the Swan and find Sue Lynn."

"She's caught air, bud."

He kicked a toadstool into a pulpy spray.

"I'm going to her uncle's and get the dog. I bet she didn't even take the dog," he said.

I walked back to Doc's alone.

I went INTO the barn and took down Doc's ax from between two nails and ripped stumps out of the pasture and weeded Doc's vegetable garden and sprinkled all his flowers and curried his horses and swept the stalls and hauled a truckload of trash down to the dump and buried it with a shovel and generally wore myself out, but I could not think my way out of the problems that seemed to beset me from every direction.