Page 19 of Head Room

“A paper bag?”

“Not the bag.The bag was ours.I put it inside to hold them all together.”

Itindicated one item.Themindicated multiple.Had to choose one to ask my question.“What is it?”

“It’s the book Irene was writing.Pages from it.She never got to finish it.”

“Pages?”I eyed the bag.It matched the height and width of typewriter paper.The depth was less apparent.Maybe two inches?“They survived the fire?”

“I know.It’s like a miracle, isn’t it?Even though different areas got burned worse than others.And the things we saved were all where it wasn’t burned so bad.

“The manuscript was inside the metal box with his medals and things, but we didn’t know that until today.It was too hot to open — too hot to handle.Paul wrapped it in a padded horse blanket he had in the truck to move it.And we left it out to cool off.”

I looked back to the rough square of burnt-out cabin.

Hannah Chaney was right.The damage was irregular.In fact, if I squinted at it from this distance, the pattern seemed suspiciously clear...Although maybe that was an illusion after seeing it through Diana’s camera up above.

“The pages were in the metal box, still, some pages got sort of singed, brittle.They slid around in the box and the edges broke off, like cookies that got too thin, you know?I hoped they’d be better in this bag.”

It was amazing a paper manuscript survived the fire, even in a metal box.A digital copy might have been someplace.Although if it was in a drive, the fire would have taken care of that.In the cloud?But where and how could someone find out which corner of the cloud?

“I heard you were coming here from Otto—”

Her husband’s uncle whose truck I’d passed on the way here.

“—he figured I could get you to take the pages without going into town.”

“Me?”

She nodded.“You’ll know what to do with them.”

“But you were the sergeant’s friend—”

“Not really.Neighbors, and friendly, but his friends were the other ones.The ones he saw a lot.”

“The other ones?”I asked.

“Who live way back.”

Way back?

Her head tip toward the west gave me a better clue.

“In the woods?The forests?”

“Uh-huh.Veterans.”

I’d heard murmurs about a scattering of people living not only off the grid, but nomadically in the far northwestern part of the county.

From the flat and semiarid eastern part of Cottonwood County called the low side, the land rose to the west, more fertile and more tightly folded into ridges and valleys.

This high side of the county was where Tom’s ranch was, with grazing areas for his cattle interspersed with forests as the land stretched toward the mountains.The western-most part was too rugged for grazing.So rugged that on our rides, as he and Tamantha expanded my horseback skills, we observed it as landscape, but didn’t ride into it.

“I guess he understood them,” Hannah said, “because he was a veteran, too.But not one who went into the woods.”

That was the other murmur I’d heard, that these people had sought the forests’ solitude.If you didn’t bother them, they wouldn’t bother you.To my knowledge, no one tested the reverse — that if you bothered them, they’d bother you.

In some locations, that theory might not be tested because of fear and maybe that was a factor for a few here.But my impression was that most people in Cottonwood County followed live and let live.