The new rancher sat on the exam table with a dish towel wrapped around his bleeding hand, and when Dr. Agnes Halloran asked his name and date of birth, he said, "Thomas Rourke. March 3, 1962."
Agnes was writing it on the clipboard. Her pen stopped.
She had held the Coleman lantern, at sixteen, while her father delivered Thomas Rourke on March 3, 1962, in the back bedroom of the Rourke ranch house during a blizzard.
And in July of 1980, she had signed his death certificate.
She did not say anything. She was eighty, and she had been a country doctor in Cutthroat Park, Colorado, for fifty-two years, and she had learned a long time ago that the first thing you say in a moment like that is usually the wrong thing.
She unwrapped the towel. A deep cut across the palm, clean, from a fencing tool. It would need eight stitches.
"Barbed wire?" she asked.
"Fence stretcher slipped," the man said. "My own fault. I was in a hurry."
"Ranchers always are," Agnes said. "Hold still. This will sting."
He was about sixty-three, tall and lean, with gray in his beard and the kind of hands that had worked cattle for a long time. He had bought the old Rourke place in September, a section of hay meadow and timber at the head of the valley that had sat empty since Ellen Rourke went into the nursing home in Fairplay in 2019.
The valley had talked about it. Some people thought he must be a cousin. Agnes had not paid much attention.
She was paying attention now.
She stitched the cut, eight neat knots, and while she worked, she looked at him.
Tommy Rourke had had red hair and a gap between his front teeth. This man's beard was gray, but there was no red in it, and never had been. His teeth were even. His eyes were brown. Tommy's had been blue, like his mother's.
"There," Agnes said, tying off the last stitch. "Keep it dry. Come back in ten days, and I'll take them out."
"Thank you, Doctor."
"Mr. Rourke," Agnes said. "Are you any relation to Ellen Rourke? Up at the care home in Fairplay?"
The man went very still on the exam table.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because I've known Ellen for sixty-five years," Agnes said. "And I'd like to know who's living in her house."
He did not answer. He thanked her again, paid in cash at the front desk, and left.
Agnes stood at the clinic window and watched his pickup go down the valley road toward the head of the creek. Oregon plates. A dog in the passenger seat.
Then she went into the back room, unlocked the old wooden filing cabinet where she kept the records from before the clinic went to computers, and pulled out a manila folder with a name on the tab in her father's handwriting from 1962.
Rourke, Thomas Edward.
She sat at her desk with the folder and read it all again, though she remembered most of it.
Measles at five. A broken collarbone at eleven, from a horse. And then the last page. July 19, 1980. Drowning, Antero Reservoir. Body recovered July 20. Cause of death: drowning, accidental. Signed: A. Halloran, M.D.
She remembered that day. The whole valley remembered it. Tommy Rourke, eighteen years old, had gone out on the reservoir in his father's rowboat to fish, and a thunderstorm had come over the mountains the way they do in July, fast and black. The boat came back to shore on its own the next morning. Tommy came back later.
Ellen Rourke had sat in this same clinic, in the chair by the window, and held Agnes's hand for an hour without saying a word.
Agnes had one more folder in that drawer that she had not thought about in a long time.
She pulled it out now, almost without deciding to.
Kehoe, Daniel James.
Danny Kehoe had been Tommy Rourke's best friend. They were the same age, born the same spring. Danny's father ran a sawmill at the bottom of the valley and drank. Danny's mother had left in 1970.
Agnes turned the pages. She did not have to read them. She remembered.
A cut lip at eight. A broken finger at ten. A burn on the forearm at thirteen, a long, straight burn, the kind a stove door does not make. And in the spring of 1979, a broken left forearm, both bones, which she had set herself in this clinic at midnight, while Danny sat on the exam table with his jaw clenched and told her he had fallen off the hay wagon.
She had not believed him. She had called the county. The county had sent a man out once.
In August of 1980, a month after Tommy drowned, Danny Kehoe had disappeared. He was eighteen. His father said he had run off to the oil fields in Wyoming. The valley never heard from him again.
Agnes closed the folder.
The deputy came on Thursday.
He was Agnes's grandnephew, Brian, twenty-nine. He came into the clinic at lunchtime, took off his hat, and sat down in the chair by the window.
"Aunt Agnes," he said. "I need to ask you something about a patient. You can tell me to mind my own business."
"Ask."
"The man who bought the Rourke place. Tom Rourke. His name came up on a check when he registered his truck with the county. The state says the Social Security number he's using belongs to a Thomas Rourke who died in this county in 1980." Brian turned his hat in his hands. "You signed the death certificate."
"I did."
"So who is he?"
Agnes looked out the window, up the valley toward the head of the creek, where she could just see the roof of the old Rourke barn under the snow.
"I don't know yet," she said. "But I intend to find out before you do."
Brian sighed. "Aunt Agnes, the sheriff wants him brought in. Monday morning. If he doesn't come in on his own, I've got to go up there and get him."
The man came back to the clinic on Saturday, two days early, to have his stitches looked at.
Agnes was alone. She let him in, sat him on the exam table, and unwrapped the bandage. The cut was healing clean.
"Push up your left sleeve," she said.
He looked at her.
"Please," Agnes said. "Humor an old woman."
Slowly, he pushed up the sleeve of his flannel shirt.
On the inside of his left forearm, faded white with forty-seven years, was a long, straight burn scar. And when Agnes laid her fingers along the bones of his forearm, the way she had at midnight in the spring of 1979, she could feel it under the skin. A small, hard ridge on both bones, halfway between the wrist and the elbow, where a break had healed.
She knew that ridge. She had set it herself.
Agnes took her hand away. She looked up into the man's brown eyes.
"Hello, Danny," she said.