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to wait.
    When he knocked on the door fifteen minutes later she was ready for him, made a face at the car. “Are you lugging a body? Why were you just sitting out there? Think I didn’t recognize the town hearse?”
    He looked at her, sheepish: a clean pink shirt open at the neck, hair around her face, skin lightly freckled and perspiring, though he could still catch the scent of barn. There was an air of excitement about her, of hurry, nervousness maybe. The doughnuts were offered on a cracked blue willow plate, warm and shiny with sugar.
    She sat there, stirring her coffee, waiting for him to speak. She was never one for small talk, even when they went together in high school. They’d dance, just holding on to each other, not saying a word. What happened, anyway? Well, sure. Pete. Pete cutting in on them one day; Pete on the football team; a frat man at the university. How could a scrawny guy in glasses, on the short side, with an out-of-style crewcut, compete? Corn-Pete, the irony of the pun.
    “You’re done in the barn?” he asked, hearing his words hollow against the noise in his chest. “You’re doing the milking yourself with, uh, Pete gone? Jeez, I’m sorry about that, Ruth.” He was embarrassed now that he hadn’t at least called her before this. Not that he hadn’t thought about it a hundred times, just never got up the nerve. The Larocque assault gave the excuse.
    Her face went through a dozen changes, came out bright as sun on a tin roof. “Well, how gone is gone? We don’t know yet. We’re in limbo here. Working our arses off. Tim helps with the milking, though. But Pete wants me to sell. Got any clients want a farm? I heard about some developer ...”
    Her face was flushed after the long speech, the mug trembled in her fingers. They were long fingers. He supposed they’d play a sensitive tune on the cows, he’d read that women got more milk out of a cow than men, there was that affinity.
    Jeez, the feel of a woman’s fingers came on him nights. Horny nights: jerking off and then remembering the bodies down in the basement. He’d never really get used to those bodies—dead, he sometimes felt, like his middle-aged libido. But he couldn’t leave his father alone, a man in his seventies.
    “Farm’s a lot of work,” he said, “with a family, too.” He felt the old outrage. He’d never been crazy about Pete, too full of himself. The kind that never grew up.
    “I didn’t mean to sound off,” she said. “It’s all right, really, things are working out—were till yesterday. Colm, I want to find who did it to them, Lucien and Belle. I can’t wait around for the police. I feel violated myself. Will you help?”
    She took a breath. He smiled at her passion.
    “The police haven’t a clue yet. No witnesses except Lucien and Belle, and Belle unconscious. What can we do, Colm? Who can we talk to?”
    She saw him looking at the window. “Finish your coffee and we’ll go out and find them. Tim’s a madman. Has to get in three hundred trees before it rains, he says. And we’re not done with the sugaring.”
    “Tell about the Larocques,” he said. “Tell me what you know about who worked there, came there, knew them well.”
    She didn’t speak for a minute, bit into a doughnut, stared out the window. The men were stretching a line across the field, attaching it to markers. They were good workers, he saw that. Good workers weren’t usually criminals. Though you never knew.
    “One thing I’ve got to tell you,” she said finally. “It’s Vic’s discovery, I should let him tell you, he’d like that. But you won’t see him till later.”
    He waited, took a swallow of coffee. It was good coffee, strong and flavorful. He was feeling comfortable now.
    “The money,” she explained. “The money they stole, it smelled of barn. Strongly I mean, hand to pocket, fragrant with cow. Kept it down in the seams. I gather it was his bank. I suppose he liked to feel it there, safe.”
    “Hand-y