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found it. I didn’t want him to think I saw all that money. There were safety pins, the coat was heavy, like he kept more than showed. Then, then I was afraid—”
    “Afraid of what?” She clasped her knees. She saw how thin Vic was. He’d been losing weight and she was only just aware of it. She was too busy, she was a terrible mother, she couldn’t keep up with farm and family. The fear of losing her children crept over her again and she held out a finger to touch Vic. But he shrank away.
    “Afraid he’d remember he put the pipe in there. Did they take the money?”
    “I’m afraid so. I’m afraid that’s what they were after. The police didn’t find any money in the house, or the barn. The thieves must have looked there. Unless he banked it. Colm Hanna says he’ll find out tomorrow, though I doubt it.”
    She remembered Lucien’s anxiety about the coat. “And Vic, Mr. Hanna is coming here in the morning. He wants to help us find out who hurt the Larocques. Maybe we could have a talk.”
    “Me, too?” said Vic, locking his fingers together till the knuckles turned to bone.
    “You should tell him what you just told me.”
    “Why?” The word was almost a shriek. “He’ll think I was the one took it. I was in Cub Scouts last night. Down to the town hall. I’d never take his money, you know that!”
    She put out a hand and squeezed his shoulder. The child was getting paranoid. “Of course he wouldn’t think you did. We just want you to try and remember if you might have seen anyone around his house. Anyone who didn’t belong.”
    Vic frowned. “I don’t know if I did. I’ll try and think.”
    “If you know anything, it will help, Vic. We want to find who did it. It’s important we find out. We don’t want any more victims. The Charlebois barn—”
    He glanced up at the urgency in her voice, blinked. He’d been blinking a lot lately, she’d noticed. She stroked his hair, pulled him close, and this time he let her. “Now get in your pjs. We’ll need you for extra chores in the morning. We all have to pitch in.”
    “I remember thinking,” he said, yanking his pajamas from under his pillow, “I wouldn’t want money like that in my pocket. All smelling of cows. They’d never let me in the games, ever, Billy Marsh, Garth Unsworth, that gang. They don’t have cows where they come from.”
    “Garth Unsworth’s mother has sheep, Emily told me so.”
    “They don’t smell like cows. Not as bad.”
    “They do, you get a barn full of them. You tell that to Garth Unsworth.”
    She sighed, patted the boy’s shaggy head, went to the door. Vic liked to undress in privacy.
    “All reeking of cows?” she said aloud as she shut the door.
    “That money? Reeking of cows?” she repeated as she went down the hall to her room.
     

Chapter Three
     
    It was an average farm, for these parts anyway, the farmhouse in need of paint, the two cement-block stave silos with WILLMARTH SONS in peeling letters, the barn sturdy, painted red. Farmers kept up their barns before their houses, Colm knew that from his work in real estate. The land had a bluish cast, like it was about to grass. Decent soil, he supposed. Not the rich loamy black soil the settlers found when they walked up into the Republic of Vermont in the 1700s, but good earth nonetheless.
    He put his father’s black wagon in park—the Body Wagon, his father called it, making a joke of everything, you had to do that in the mortuary profession. The old Horizon refused to start, clutch or something—Colm wasn’t a machine man, more of a random-abstract, he called himself, frankly. And here was Ruth now, coming out of the barn: handsome woman, wide hipped, in mud-spattered jeans, baggy sweater that couldn’t hide her heavy breasts, chestnut hair in a flyaway bun. He was early, she’d want to change probably before breakfast. He knew barns: a cow slaps its tail and you’re hit with a sloppy joe sandwich, urine and dung.
    He hunched down in the seat