“Yeah.” Sorrow pivoted back to the door. “Okay.”
The barn was about a hundred yards from the house, across the broad expanse of lawn and beyond the tangle of Grandma’s garden. The door was open a crack, a bar of yellow light slanting out. As Sorrow approached there was a rumble from inside: an engine, spluttering.
She pushed the barn door open wider; the wheels on the track loosed a rusty shriek. The barn was stuffy, still hot from the heat of the day, and dust tickled her nose. It had been decades since the building had housed animals, but the scent of hay lingered. Ethan was leaning over the engine of the old green John Deere tractor. He looked up when Sorrow came in.
“Hey.” His Red Sox hat was pushed back and there was a smudge of grease on his forehead.
“Hi,” Sorrow said. “I’ve been commanded to command you to stay for dinner. At least it sounded like a command.”
“It’s that late?” Ethan said. “I, uh, I didn’t realize. I’ve been . . .” He gestured with a wrench, knocking it into the tractor with a loud metal clang. He had the radio on low: an AM sports station. Yankees versus Orioles. Yankees up by two. “Mostly not fixing this.”
“Does it still run? It’s been dying for years.”
Ethan shrugged. “Sort of. I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
He didn’t particularly sound like he wanted company, and Sorrow had delivered her message, so she turned to leave. “Verity says it’s forty-five minutes until the food is . . .”
There was a pile of cardboard boxes just inside the door.
She hadn’t noticed. She had come into the barn to fetch this tool or that a few times since Monday, and she hadn’t ever noticed the boxes just inside the door. The barn was full of junk, had always been full of junk. The floor and stalls and shelves were so packed Sorrow was used to looking over the clutter without seeing it.
Patience. Something in her heart thrummed like a plucked string. Grandma’s handwriting in black marker on brown cardboard. Patience, Patience, Patience.
The boxes were sealed with cracking tape and darkened by water stains at the corners. Something had chewed through the side of one. A mouse, maybe, its entire family too. Patience would have laughed at that, mice living in her clothes like creatures from a fairy tale, nibbling apart the seams to make a nest.
Sorrow stepped around a rusty red wheelbarrow and reached for the top box. The tape came away easily, brittle as ashes. Beneath the cardboard flaps was a bulky gray sweater. Sorrow brushed her fingertips over the fat stitches. It had been Verity’s before Patience claimed it. She would wear it on chilly mornings like a robe; its sleeves were so long they had covered her hands, except for the holes where her thumbs punched through. Sorrow inhaled, yearning for the scents of woodsmoke and cinnamon tea, but she smelled only engine oil and hay.
“Sorrow?” Ethan’s voice, hesitant.
She wasn’t going to search through Patience’s things with an audience. She wasn’t going to search at all, because she wasn’t trying to find anything. A box of matches. A lighter. A helpful note detailing how much she loved starting fires. Sorrow hated that she was even considering it.
She folded the box closed and regarded Ethan thoughtfully. She didn’t know anything about him except that he didn’t like his family and he put up with her mother’s eccentricities. The brief conversations they’d had over the past few days had been about work around the farm, nothing more. If Andi were here she’d be rolling her eyes and dismissing Ethan as too quiet and boring to talk to, but Sorrow thought it more likely he just liked being left alone. That was fine with her. They didn’t need to be friends. All Sorrow wanted was somebody who could answer a question.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Sure,” he said.
“It’s kinda personal.”
“Uh . . .”
“Not personal about you.” Sorrow left the boxes by the door and wound her way through the clutter to stand beside the tractor. “It’s more about my family. That kind of personal.”
Ethan set the wrench down and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Okay.”
“I know we don’t know each other, but I can’t ask Verity or—”
“It’s okay,” he said, laughing a little. “What is it?”
“It’s about my sister. You know what happened to her.”
Ethan leaned against the tractor’s large front tire; the yellow paint on the wheel rim was almost completely rusted away. “Yeah. I do. I remember when it happened.”
“What do you remember about it?”
“Not much,” he said. “Just people talking about it. My aunt and uncle took Cass and Julie out of town for a while because they were so upset. Mostly Julie, I guess. She’s the one who saw it from her window, and she was . . . not okay. She got really quiet after that and never really came back. That’s mostly what I remember.”
“Do people really think . . .” Sorrow swallowed, pressed on. “Do people think Patience started the fires herself?”
A few seconds passed before Ethan answered. “Where did you hear that?”
It wasn’t quite the vehement denial Sorrow had been hoping for. “At the store today.”
“Somebody just came up and said that to you?”
“Well. Not somebody. It was Cassie.”
“Oh, god, of course it was.” Ethan took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair, put it on again. “I should have guessed.”
“Why? Has she said stuff like that before?”
“Not that I’ve ever heard, but she’ll say whatever’s going to stir up the most shit, whether or not it’s true.” Sorrow’s skepticism must have shown on her face, because he added, “The last thing she said to me, right after I started working here a few months ago, was that I was a traitor to our family and should be disowned.”
“That seems . . . extreme,” Sorrow said. “Even for our families.”
“It’s not like we’re close. I don’t care what she says.” But there was a bitter edge to his words, and Sorrow wondered if Cassie had upset him more than he wanted to admit.
“But is Cassie the only one who thinks that? About my sister?” she asked.
“I think most people figure the police were right about what happened,” he said.
“You mean that it was some random drug addict or something.”
“Yeah.”
“But most people isn’t everybody,” Sorrow pressed. “Cassie must have gotten it from somewhere. What about Julie? What does she think?”
“Julie never talks about it,” Ethan said. “Not ever. Cassie probably said it just because she knew it would bother you. And, honestly? If there was any chance my aunt and uncle thought your sister was responsible, the whole world would have heard about it.”
“I guess that’s true,” Sorrow admitted. Mr. and Mrs. Abrams had once called the police because Grandma had been walking too close to the property line; they would never have let something like possible arson go, no matter how tragically it had ended.