"Galloway's going to visit our ex-sheriff," she said, but offered no explanation of Galloway's injuries, nor did Pemberton ask.

Serena paused and looked at the boxes of files stacked in the corner for the coming move.

"We've done well here," Serena said.

AT LEAST THERE ARE MOUNTAINS. THAT WAS what Rachel told herself as she and Jacob left the boarding house and walked up Madison Street. She stepped around a puddle. The rain that had fallen all day continued to fall as evening settled over the city. A gap in the buildings allowed Rachel a glimpse at the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier. She lingered a few moments, took in the vista as she might a mouthful of cold spring water on a hot day.

She remembered the flat vastness of the midwest, particularly a depot in Kearney, Nebraska, where they'd waited two hours to change trains. She had taken Jacob for a walk down the town's one street. The houses quickly thinned out, then only fields of harvested wheat and corn beneath a wide sky. A landscape where no mountains rose to harbor you, give you shelter. She'd wondered how people could live in such a place. How could you not feel that everything, even your own heart, was laid bare?

Rachel walked toward the café where from five to midnight she was paid twenty cents an hour to wash dishes and clean off tables. Mr. and Mrs. Bjorkland let her lay Jacob on a quilt in the kitchen corner, and each night Mrs. Bjorkland gave Rachel big helpings of food to take home. Rachel passed enough destitute men and women on the streets every day to know how lucky she was to have a job, not to be hungry and in rags, especially after being in Seattle less than a month.

A car horn startled her, and she knew if she lived here the rest of her life she'd never get used to the busyness of town life, how something was always coming and going and whatever that something was always had a noise. Not soothing like the sound of a creek or rain on a tin roof or a mourning dove's call, but harsh and grating, no pattern to it, nothing to settle the mind upon. Except in the early morning, those moments before the city waked with all its grime and noise. She could look out the window at the mountains, and their stillness settled inside her like a healing balm.

Rachel crossed the street. On the other side, a policeman with a nightstick walked his beat. Farther down the block, a group of dispirited men lined up outside the Salvation Army building, waiting to go inside for a meal of beans and white bread, a soiled tick mattress to lay on the building's basement floor. A shock of curly red hair caught her eye at the front of the line. Rachel looked closer and saw the tall gangly body, no gray golf cap but the blue and black mackinaw coat. She hoisted Jacob in her arms and walked quickly down the street, but by the time she got there he was already inside. If it was him, because Rachel was already beginning to doubt what her eyes had seen, or thought they'd seen. She considered trying to get inside, but as she stepped closer to the entrance several of the men in line stared hard at her.

"The women's mission is over on Pike Street," a man with his front teeth missing said gruffly.

Rachel looked across the street at the theatre and checked the big clock at the center of the movie marquee, saw she had to leave or be late for work. As she walked back up the sidewalk toward the café, Rachel told herself she was just imagining things. Passing in front of the Esso station, she stepped over a puddle where gas and water swirled together to make an oily rainbow. The rain began to fall harder, and she quickened her pace, made it to the café door just as the bottom of the sky fell out and the rain came so hard she couldn't see the other side of the street.

"Let me hold Jacob for you so you can get your coat off," Mr. Bjorkland said as she came inside.

Mr. Bjorkland and his wife pronounced the child's name with an extra emphasis on the first syllable, as they did Rachel's own name. The names sounded gentler that way, and it seemed right to Rachel for the Bjorklands to speak in such a way, because it fit the kind of people they were.

"Here, to dry off with," Mrs. Bjorkland said, placing a towel on Rachel's shoulder.

Rachel went on into the kitchen and laid Jacob on the quilt. She opened her pocketbook and set the toy train engine beside the child. As she was about to snap shut her pocketbook, Rachel saw the folded piece of paper with a phone number and address. She opened the note and looked at the small precise handwriting you'd not expect from such a man. How much could you feel for someone you'd only spent six or seven hours with, she wondered. You couldn't call it love, but Rachel knew she felt something more than just gratitude. Rachel remembered the week she'd called the number night after night with no answer until, finally, the operator picked up and told Rachel the party she was trying to get in touch with was deceased. She held the note a moment longer and then placed it in a trashcan. She looked at Jacob. After I'm dead, she told herself, at least there'll be one other in the world who knows what Sheriff McDowell done for us.

She changed Jacob and gave him the warm bottle of milk she knew would soon slip from his mouth. Rachel took the cloth apron off the nail on the wall, tied it around her waist. For a moment she paused, feeling the kitchen's warmth, understanding something placid in it. A dry warm place on a cold rainy day and the smell of food and the slow soft breaths of a child drifting toward sleep. A safe harbor, Rachel told herself, and as she spoke those words to herself she remembered Miss Stephens describing Seattle while pointing to the far right side of the classroom's wide bright map.

Mr. Bjorkland came through the swinging doors.

"Get your dishwater ready," he said. "Saturday nights are the worst, so you'll earn your money this evening."

There was a clatter of pots and pans as Mr. Bjorkland readied the kitchen for the first order. Rachel glanced over at Jacob, his eyes already closed. He'd sleep soon, despite the din of pots and pans, the shouted orders and and all the other commotion.

IT WAS SNIPES' CREW WHO CUT THE LAST TREE. When a thirty-foot hickory succumbed to Ross and Henryson's cross-cut saw, the valley and ridges resembled the skinned hide of some huge animal. The men gathered their saws and wedges, the blocks and axes and go-devils. They paused a moment, then walked a winding path down Shanty Mountain. It was late October, and the workers' multi-hued overalls appeared woven from the valley's last leaves.

Once on level ground, the men stopped to rest beside Rough Fork Creek before trudging the mile back to camp. Stewart kneeled beside the stream and raised a handful of water to his lips, spit it out.

"Tastes like mud."

"Used to be this creek held some of the sweetest water in these parts," Ross said. "The chestnut trees that was up at the spring head give it a taste near sweet as honey."

"Soon you won't find one chestnut in these mountains," Henryson noted, "and there'll be nary a drop of water that sweet again."

For a few moments no one spoke. A flock of goldfinches flew into view, their feathers bright against the valley's floor as they winged southward. They swooped low and the flock contracted, perhaps in memory. For a few seconds they appeared suspended there, then the flock expanded like gold cloth unraveling. They circled the valley once before disappearing over Shanty Mountain, their passage through the charred valley as ephemeral as a candle flame waved over an abyss.

"Sheriff McDowell, he was a good man," Stewart said.

Ross nodded. He took out his papers and tobacco and began rolling a cigarette.