“Who came to his door in the middle of the night?”
“A witness,” Barbara said.
“To the crash?”
“Supposedly.”
She looked at him but then quickly returned her attention to the rain-swept highway.
In the context of what Joe had told her, this recollection seemed by the moment to grow more disturbing to Barbara. Her eyes pinched at the corners, as if she were straining to see not through the downpour but more clearly into the past, and her lips pressed together as she debated whether to say more.
“A witness to the crash,” Joe prompted.
“I can’t remember why, of all places, she went to this ranch house or what she wanted there.”
“She?”
“The woman who claimed to have seen the plane go down.”
“There’s something more,” Joe said.
“Yeah. As I recall… she was a black woman.”
His breath went stale in his lungs, but at last he exhaled and said, “Did she give this rancher her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“If she did, I wonder if he’d remember it.”
At the turnoff from the state route, the entrance road to the ranch was flanked by tall white posts that supported an overhead sign bearing graceful green letters on a white background: LOOSE CHANGE RANCH. Under those three words, in smaller letters and in script: Jeff and Mercy Ealing. The gate stood open.
The oiled-gravel lane was flanked by white ranch fencing that divided the fields into smaller pastures. They passed a big riding ring, exercise yards, and numerous white stables trimmed in green.
Barbara said, “I wasn’t here last year, but one of my people gave me a report on it. Coming back to me now… It’s a horse ranch. They breed and race quarter horses. Also breed and sell some show horses like Arabians, I think.”
The pasture grass, alternately churned by wind and flattened by the pounding rain, was not currently home to any horses. The riding ring and the exercise yards were deserted.
In some of the stables, the top of the Dutch door at each stall was open. Here and there, from the safety of their quarters, horses peered out at the storm. Some were nearly as dark as the spaces in which they stood, but others were pale or dappled.
The large and handsome ranch house, white clapboard with green shutters, framed by groupings of aspens, had the deepest front porch that Joe had ever seen. Under the heavy cape of gloom thrown down by the thunderheads, a yellow glow as welcoming as hearth light filled, many of the windows.
Barbara parked in the driveway turnaround. She and Joe ran through the rain—previously as warm as bath water but now cooler—to the screened porch. The door swung inward with a creak of hinges and the singing of a worn tension spring, sounds so rounded in tone that they were curiously pleasing; they spoke of time passed at a gentle pace, of gracious neglect rather than dilapidation.
The porch furniture was white wicker with green cushions, and ferns cascaded from wrought-iron stands.
The house door stood open, and a man of about sixty, in a black rain slicker, waited to one side on the porch. The weather-thickened skin of his sun-darkened face was well creased and patinaed like the leather of a long-used saddlebag. His blue eyes were as quick and friendly as his smile. He raised his voice to be heard above the drumming of the rain on the roof. “Mornin’. Good day for ducks.”
“Are you Mr. Ealing?” Barbara asked.
“That would be me,” said another man in a black slicker as he appeared in the open doorway.
He was six inches taller and twenty years younger than the man who had commented on the weather. But a life on horseback, in hot sun and dry wind and the nip of winter, had already begun to abrade the smooth hard planes of youth and bless him with a pleasantly worn and appealing face that spoke of deep experience and rural wisdom.
Barbara introduced herself and Joe, implying that she still worked for the Safety Board and that Joe was her associate.
“You poking into that after a whole year?” Ealing asked.