BEFORE SHE SAW THE LATE MORNING LIGHT, Rachel had felt it, the sun's heat and brightness lying full on her closed eyelids. She heard Jacob's steady breaths and something, something not remembered in those first moments of waking, caused her to know the importance of his breaths, that he was breathing. She reached her arms around the child, pressed him closer. He made a soft complaint, but his breath soon soothed into the calmness of sleep. It all came back to her then-the sheriff at the cabin door, a dress and shoes quickly pulled on and a carpetbag stuffed with what Jacob would need. Maybe nothing, just a rusty, the sheriff had told her, but he didn't want to take a chance. He'd brought her to the boarding house, given her and Jacob his own room for the night. Rachel had listened to the grandfather clock in the hallway chime the hours toward dawn, unable to sleep until first light filtered through the window and Jacob had whimpered and she'd suckled him. Only then did she fall asleep.

Now, in the early afternoon, she and Jacob were in the back seat of Sheriff McDowell's police car, heading down what was little more than a skid trail along Deep Creek. They made another turn, the road now nothing more than a winding gap between trees. Sapling branches raked the car's sides, the seat springs creaking and bobbing beneath her and Jacob. The road made a sharp final bend and then was simply gone. Nothing but a stand of maple trees, a foot-wide path leading into them. The sheriff backed up and turned the car around to face the way they'd come. He cut off the engine but did not make a move to get out. Rachel had no idea where they were. When she'd asked the sheriff where they were going, the only words she'd spoken since his landlady had brought her and Jacob to the courthouse, he'd just answered somewhere safe. The sheriff looked in the rearview mirror, met her eyes.

"You'll be staying down here a few hours with a man named Kephart. You can trust him."

"It could have been just a rusty somebody was playing, couldn't it, like you said?"

The sheriff turned and placed his arm on the seat.

"Adeline Jenkins was murdered last night. I think the folks who killed her thought she could tell them where you and that child were."

The car's metal and cloth upholstery seemed to thin and lighten, the seat beneath her and Jacob seeping away, a sense of weightlessness like the moment between the rise and fall on a rope swing. She pressed Jacob tighter, closed her eyes for a few moments, opened them.

"You mean the Widow?" Rachel said, saying it that way because if it was a question it could still, for a few moments longer, be a question and not a confirmation.

"Yes," McDowell said.

"Who would do such a thing?"

"Serena Pemberton and a man who works for her named Galloway. You know who he is, don't you?"

"Yes sir."

Jacob squirmed in her lap. Rachel looked down and saw his eyes were open.

"Mr. Pemberton…," Rachel said, and could think of no more words to follow.

"He wasn't up there, I know that," the sheriff said. "I'm not even sure he knew what they were going to do."

McDowell let his gaze settle on Jacob.

"I've got my own ideas about why she'd do this, but I'd be interested in yours."

"I think it's because I could give him the one thing that she couldn't," Rachel said.

The sheriff gave a nod so slight it seemed to Rachel more an acknowledgment that he'd heard her than a sign of agreement. He turned back around, seemingly lost in his own musings. Somewhere in the trees Rachel heard a yellowhammer tapping at a tree. It started up, then paused, then started again, like someone knocking on a door and waiting for a response.

"You're sure she's dead?" Rachel said, "not just hurt bad?"

"She's dead."

They did not speak for a few moments. Jacob fussed again but when Rachel checked his swaddling it was dry.

"If he's hungry I can get out and give you some privacy," Sheriff McDowell said.

"It's too soon for him to be hungry. He's just put out because I forgot to bring him some play-pretties."

"We'll stay here a couple more minutes," McDowell said, checking his watch, "just to be sure we weren't followed. Then we can walk down to Kephart's place. It's not far."

Jacob fussed some more, and she took the sugar teat from the carpetbag, put it in his mouth. The child calmed, a soft kissing sound as he worked the cheesecloth and sugar between his gums.

"What it was that happened," Rachel asked. "They done it to her in her house?"

"Yes."

Rachel thought about Widow Jenkins, how the old woman had loved this child in her arms. As far as Rachel knew, the one other person in the world who loved him. She thought of the old woman in her chair by the hearth, knitting or just watching the fire and hearing a knock on the door and probably thinking it could only be Rachel, thinking that maybe Jacob had the flux or a fever and Rachel needed her help.

"They had no cause to kill her," Rachel said, as much to herself as to Sheriff McDowell.

"No, they didn't," the sheriff replied, and reached for his door handle. "We can go now."

McDowell carried the carpetbag and Rachel carried the child. The trail was steep and narrow, and she watched for roots that could send her and Jacob sprawling. Purple-tinged pokeberry clustered beside the path, the berries shiny-dark as water beetles. Come the first frost, Rachel knew the stems would sag and the berries wither. Where will me and this young one be then, she wondered. They crossed a weathered plank that wobbled over a tight rush of whitewater, and the land leveled out.

The cabin was small but well built, the wattle and clay daubing packed with care between the hand-hewn logs, not so different from her and Jacob's cabin. A drift of smoke rose from the corbelled chimney, the door partway open.

"Kephart," the sheriff said, addressing not just the cabin but the nearby woods.

A man Rachel guessed to be in his late sixties appeared in the doorway. He wore denim breeches and a wrinkled chambray work shirt. His gallouses were unstrapped from his shoulders, and a gray stubble showed he hadn't shaved in several days. The skin below his eyes was puffy and jaundiced looking, the eyes themselves bloodshot. Rachel knew from being around her father what that meant.

"I need a favor," Sheriff McDowell said, and nodded toward Rachel and Jacob. "They need to stay here, maybe just till this evening, maybe till morning."

Kephart looked not at Rachel but at the child, who'd fallen back asleep. His tan weathered face revealed neither pleasure nor irritation as he nodded and said all right. Sheriff McDowell stepped onto the porch and set the carpetbag down, turned and looked at Rachel.

"I'll get back soon as I can," he said, and walked down the trail and soon disappeared.

"I have a bed you can lay him on if you like," Kephart said after an awkward minute had passed.

Kephart's voice sounded different from any she'd heard before. Flatter, leveled out as if every word had been sanded to a smooth sameness. Rachel wondered where he was from.

"Thank you," Rachel said and followed him into the cabin. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but then she saw the bed in the back corner. Rachel laid the child on the bed and opened the carpetbag, removed first Jacob's bottle and then the pins and clean swaddlings. Shadows cloaked the cabin's corners, and Rachel knew that even had the two oil lamps been lit shadows would remain, like a root cellar where so much dark had gathered for so long it could never be gotten completely rid of.

"When's the last time you two ate?' Kephart asked.

"I fed him near noon."

"And you?"

It took Rachel a few moments to remember.