They returned to the shoulder around nine-thirty. The traffic came in long violent bursts, and the passing trucks made the guardrail tremble. Harvey parked at a safe distance behind the place the silver sedan had stood. He gave Audrey one flashlight, kept the second, and instructed her to remain off the traffic side of the guardrail wherever possible.
"You search the ditch," he said. "I'll take the slope. White paper catches differently than grass after dark."
They found fast-food wrappers, a broken hubcap, plastic cups, and a child's mitten half-buried in grit. Audrey called each discovery aloud as if reporting evidence to a court reporter. Harvey answered with dry observations about the care people took to discard things they would never think to retrieve. After twenty minutes Audrey's arm began to throb, and the flashlight trembled in her hand.
"Maybe we ought to go," she said. "Mama wouldn't want you out here on the side of a highway."
"Your mama would've made me search ten more minutes," Harvey replied. "I'm only asking for five."
Headlights appeared farther back on the shoulder. A dark sedan stopped without opening a door, its high beams illuminating a patch of thistles beyond the guardrail. Harvey shielded his eyes and called a greeting. Nobody answered. After a few seconds the car eased into the highway traffic and vanished, leaving the weeds black again.
"Well," Harvey said quietly, "that was unusual."
Audrey swept her flashlight toward the place the other vehicle had illuminated. A white shape hung from a thorn almost at the bottom of the ditch. She stepped carefully through the grass and reached it with both hands. The paper had been crushed, soaked, and opened slightly by the rain, but the blue letters were still visible.
Ten years. Counted twice. Mama.
She sank onto one knee. For a moment she could not speak, and the highway faded into a deep distant rushing that sounded almost like the river near her childhood home. She could imagine Willa's fingers closing the envelope, turning it over, and writing those six words while the church kitchen smelled of pound cake.
"Mr. Harvey," she said at last, "I found her."
Harvey appeared beside her, then stopped and bent toward a glint near the gravel. He reached down with the cautious precision of someone lifting something breakable and opened his palm. Audrey's earring lay there, crushed along one side but still intact at the clasp. She held both recovered objects against her chest until the need to cry passed into something quieter.
"A jeweler can bring that back," Harvey said. "Miss Agnes at church has repaired my wedding band twice."
"She can't take the mark all the way out."
"Maybe she shouldn't."
The black ribbon on mile marker seventy-four lifted in the wind. Audrey stared at it and then at the empty stretch where the dark sedan had stopped. Somebody had known exactly where they needed to look, or had watched them searching and chosen not to speak. She could not decide which possibility troubled her more.