ONLY RUBY KNEW about the stranger in the barn.
It was the dogs who had first given him away. She’d been watching from her bedroom window as they danced at the double-doored entrance, bounding in and then out again amid a small cloud of dust. They were a cowardly duo, a pair of oversized brown mutts that seemed perpetually startled by the mob of barn cats in their midst. But Ruby had begun to get up anyway, in case it turned out to be something worse—a garter snake or a rat. And when she saw them suddenly dart away, streaking back up the drive and toward the house, she pressed her face closer to the window just in time to see a man walk out of the barn.
He yawned and stretched, tilting his face toward the paling sky, then moved casually out into the open as if he were waking up in his own bedroom rather than the McDuffs’ crumbling barn. He was tall, perhaps the tallest person Ruby had ever seen, with long legs that seemed to account for an unusually large percentage of his body, giving him an overall storklike impression, which wasn’t helped by the length of his nose. There was something in his manner that she found unsettling, an air of confidence, like he was somehow entitled to be there.
Ruby knew she should probably yell for Mom and Dad, or at least wake Simon, who was still asleep in his room next door. But even so, she remained frozen on the edge of her bed, unable to move from the window.
As she watched, the man pulled a hat from his back pocket—a raggedy gray thing that barely held its shape—and placed it carefully on his head. He wore dark pants and a blue shirt with buttons that glinted in the sun, which seemed to Ruby an outfit better suited for an office than for stowing away in someone’s hayloft. He thumped a hand against his chest as if to give himself a kick start, then yawned once more before turning to walk purposefully up the drive.