The Ferrises lived in a single-wide trailer on a rented acre two miles east of Grass Range, set back from the highway behind a windbreak of half-dead caragana. Wade had driven past it a hundred times. He had never once turned in.
He turned in on Saturday morning a little after nine. There was a chain-link fence around a yard of frozen dirt and a plastic slide tipped on its side, and a propane tank on blocks at the end of the trailer with a new yellow fill tag wired to the valve. The white Ford with the green door was parked by the woodpile. Danny was at the woodpile with a splitting maul, and he stopped with it raised when he saw Wade's pickup, and then lowered it slowly and stood there.
Wade got out. He had the flannel shirt and the gloves on the seat beside him, and he left them there for now.
The trailer door opened before he reached the steps. Lynette Ferris stood in it in scrubs with a cardigan over them, a small woman, younger than Claire but looking older, with her hair scraped back and the gray, puffed look under the eyes of somebody who had worked a twelve-hour night shift and not yet gone to bed. Behind her legs, two little girls peered out, one about nine and one about June's age.
"He told me," Lynette said, before Wade could speak. "This morning. I got off at six and he was sitting up at the kitchen table waiting for me. He told me all of it." She looked at Wade with a terrible, level steadiness. "I didn't know. I want you to understand that. I don't care what you think of me, but I want you to know that I didn't know."
"I believe you."
"Kaylee. Rose. Go watch your show." The girls vanished. Lynette came out onto the little wooden landing and pulled the door shut behind her and crossed her arms against the cold. "Are you here to tell me you called the sheriff? Because you can just say it."