He looked at her, startled, and then he laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh, and it was a good sound, short and rough and surprised at itself, and it went out across the frozen creek and came back to them off the far bank.
In Corbel she went first to Mr. Hurd.
He was a small, bald, careful man who did carpentry when nobody was dying and undertaking when somebody was, and he received her in the back of his shop among the planed boards with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and his face slowly going the color of the sawdust as she talked. When she came to the hand he took the spectacles off altogether and sat down on a sawhorse.
"I wrapped those hands myself," he said. "Both of them. I never looked close. The burns were so bad, Mrs. Hale. I thought it was a kindness not to look."
"It was a kindness," she said. "I'm not here to blame you. I'm here because it'll need to be opened in the spring, and I want you to be the one to do it, and I want you to know before the whole town does."
He looked at Tallis, who stood by the door with his hat in his hands.
"Your brother?"
"Yes, sir."
Mr. Hurd was quiet for a while. Then he said, "I'll build him a proper box. Oak, not pine. No charge," and got up and went to the window and stood looking out at the street with his back to them, and they let themselves out.