She found Eli after supper, sitting on the back steps with a pencil moving slowly across a page of his school notebook. He had drawn the pasture fence, the creek bend, and the ruined crib from above, marking several lines beside it with arrows. There were muddy footprints beneath his chair. He noticed her looking at the drawing and turned the page halfway over, as if he expected her to complain that he was neglecting homework again.
"About what you told me the other morning," she said. "I shouldn't have snapped at you."
"You were upset." He kept his eyes on the notebook.
"I was. It wasn't your fault." She sat beside him and rested her elbows on her knees. "Tell me exactly what you found. Start at the beginning, not the interesting part."
That request changed his expression. Eli had learned from his sister that being asked for the beginning meant she intended to listen until the end. He explained that he had gone out to repair a loose fence staple after noticing cattle nosing toward an open place in the wire, then watched a pair of barn owls repeatedly skim a narrow stretch behind the corn crib. When he followed their path, he noticed that a rectangle of ground looked slightly lower than the surrounding pasture.
"At first I thought it was an old wagon rut," he said. "But ruts curve where the wagon turns. This doesn't. One side goes straight toward the crib and the other turns a corner."
"You measured it?"
"With my steps. I didn't have the tape." He held up the drawing. "Twelve steps one way, maybe seven the other. And the grass is thin over it, like the dirt isn't very deep."
Callie studied the page. On a farm, unusual ground could mean almost anything: an abandoned drain, an animal burrow, an old well, a collapsed foundation, a place where buried metal had disturbed the soil. She disliked how many of those possibilities were dangerous. Still, the lines on Eli's page were too straight to dismiss as the imagination of a boy who had spent most of his life finding reasons to explore the pasture.
"We go tomorrow after Dutch finishes checking the cattle fence," she said. "No walking on that depression again until we know what's below it. If there's a void, it could give way."
"You think it's a cellar?"
"I think I don't know yet." She gave him back the notebook. "That's why we're going to look."
Dutch came with them the following morning, carrying a shovel, a crowbar, and the disagreeable conviction that somebody was about to make his day longer than it needed to be. He had worked on the farm since Callie's father was a young man, and the old crib offended him on practical grounds. Every year it remained standing was another year somebody might be hurt by it. He had suggested tearing it down so often that Eli could recite the speeches from memory.