The sheriff's deputy who came out to her house on Monday afternoon was polite and young and visibly unsure why he was there.
"Mrs. Schaefer," he said, sitting at her kitchen table. "The dispatcher said you have information about the Krueger fire."
"I do," Ethel said. She slid the green notebook across the table to him, open to October 10. "I'd like you to read this. All of it. Slowly."
He looked at it.
"This is a bird log, ma'am."
"It is," Ethel said. "It's notebook one hundred and nine. The DNR has the first seventy on file in Madison, if you'd like to check my record keeping."
The deputy looked at her. Then he started reading.
He read it twice. The second time, he got out his own notebook and started copying.
When he was done, he sat back in his chair.
"Mrs. Schaefer," he said carefully. "You're telling me you heard Jesse Brandvold's car leave at ten o'clock. Heading west."
"I'm telling you what I wrote down at the time," Ethel said. "Which is not the same thing as what I remember. Memory is no good. That's why I write it down."
"And then at eleven-oh-six, a small engine without lights. Going up the lane to the barn."
"Yes."
"And voices. Young. More than two."
"Teenagers," Ethel said. "I raised three. I know what teenagers sound like at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night in a hayloft." She folded her hands. "So do you, I expect."
The deputy almost smiled.
"And the small engine went back down the lane at eleven thirty-eight," he said. "Fast. Toward the Krueger house."
"Eight minutes before I saw the fire," Ethel said.
The deputy took the notebook with him. He gave her a receipt for it, which she appreciated.
Jesse Brandvold was released from the county jail that night. Not charged. Not yet cleared, either. Ethel heard that from his mother, who came to her door at nine o'clock, crying, and stood on the porch in her coat and could not stop thanking her.
"He was at the gas station in town at ten-fifteen," his mother said. "Buying a sandwich. They have him on the camera. He told the sheriff that. They didn't believe him at first." She wiped her eyes. "He stopped at Gary's on the way to ask for his pay one more time. Gary said no. That was all."
"I know," Ethel said. "I heard it."
But the gas can still bothered her.
She sat on her porch the next night with her thermos and her notebook, listening to the owls, and she thought about it.
A gas can in the ashes. The fire marshal had made a lot of it. But a dairy farm has gas cans in every building. For the tractors. For the mowers. For the four-wheeler.
The four-wheeler.
A small engine. No lights. Up the lane and back down to the house.
Gary Krueger had a son. Brody. He was seventeen, a senior at the high school, a big, good-natured, handsome boy who played linebacker on the football team. He drove the Kruegers' four-wheeler all over the farm.
And Saturday, October 10, had been homecoming.
Ethel did not call the sheriff about that. She thought about it for a long time, sitting on the porch in the dark. Then she did something else.
On Wednesday afternoon, she put on her good coat and her church hat and walked a quarter mile down Town Line Road, slowly, with her cane, to the Krueger place.
The barn was a black hole in the ground with a stone foundation sticking up around it like broken teeth. The cows were in a borrowed shed. Gary was in town, at the insurance office.
Brody Krueger was in the machine shed, alone, working on the four-wheeler.
He looked up when she came in. His face went white.
"Mrs. Schaefer," he said.
"Brody," Ethel said.
She sat down on an overturned feed bucket by the door. It took her a while. Brody did not move. He stood beside the four-wheeler with a wrench in his hand.
"I've been sitting on my porch counting owls since before your father was born," Ethel said quietly. "Every night. From nine until midnight. I write down everything I hear." She paused. "Everything, Brody."
The boy did not say anything.
"I heard you and your friends in that hayloft," Ethel said. "After the dance. I heard the radio. I heard the laughing. I heard a bottle break. And I heard you come down the lane on this four-wheeler, fast, with your lights off, eight minutes before the fire." She looked at him steadily. "And Jesse Brandvold spent two nights in jail for it."
Brody Krueger sat down on the floor of the machine shed.
He put his face in his hands. He was seventeen. He was a linebacker. He cried like a little boy.
"It was an accident," he said. "I swear to God, Mrs. Schaefer. Somebody brought cigarettes. Somebody knocked over a lantern. We tried to put it out with our coats. We couldn't. It went up so fast." He was shaking. "We ran. I was so scared. And then the next day, the whole town was saying it was Jesse. And Dad was saying it. And I didn't say anything. I let them."
Ethel did not say anything for a while.
"Brody," she said finally. "Jesse Brandvold walks past my house every morning at five-thirty in the dark, on his way to milk your father's cows. For four months. He has never once been late, whatever your father says. I write it down." She leaned forward on her cane. "He came home from a hard place, and he has been trying harder than anybody in this township. And for three days, this whole town has been calling him a druggie and an arsonist. Because you were scared."
Brody looked up at her. His face was wet.
"What do I do?" he whispered.
"You tell your father," Ethel said. "Tonight. And then you tell the sheriff. And then you go down the road and you tell Jesse Brandvold to his face." She stood up slowly. "It will be the hardest thing you ever do. And you'll be a better man for it the rest of your life."
He told them that night. All of them.
The fire was ruled an accident. Not one of the boys was charged. Ethel was glad about that. The insurance paid for a new barn. Brody Krueger spent the rest of the fall and all winter working on it with the carpenters, every day after school, for nothing.
Gary Krueger drove down the road to the Brandvold place on Thursday morning and stood on the porch with his cap in his hands. Ethel did not hear what he said. But Jesse went back to work at the Krueger dairy the next Monday, at a raise.
The new barn went up in the spring. Steel, not wood. It was not as beautiful as the old one.
On the night it was finished, in May, Ethel Schaefer sat on her porch in Harold's wool coat with her thermos and notebook number one hundred and ten, listening to the barred owl in the marsh.
At five-thirty the next morning, she heard footsteps on Town Line Road.
She wrote it down.
5:31. Jesse B. walking E to Krueger's. On time. Whistling.