“Ah. Okay. I wanted to be sure I hadn’t overlooked anything in the barn. It just seemed like one of those loose ends, you know? So I went back. I knew it was a stupid thing to do, but I hoped I could just slip in and out without anyone knowing. Chuck came in while I was in there. He got mad at me, and hit me.”

“Hit you?” But she wasn’t surprised, not at all. She’d heard all this from Chuck’s father, no doubt.

“Yeah, he slugged me in the stomach.”

“I imagine you were pretty angry about that.”

“I wasn’t happy.”

“I’ll bet your brother wasn’t happy, either.”

“I’m right here,” Tolliver said. “No, I definitely wasn’t happy. But his dad came in, and the boy just seemed so disturbed, we left.”

“And you didn’t call us to report the whole thing?”

“No, we didn’t. We figured you-all had more important things to be doing.” She knew we hadn’t called. She was just underscoring all the mistakes we’d made. I felt worse and worse. Going back to the barn had been my fault, my bad decision, and if the boy was gone, maybe that was my fault, too.

“So no one knows where he is?” Tolliver asked. “Since when?”

“One of the other counselors from the health center came by, maybe an hour after the incident in the barn, as close as I can make out. This is a close friend of Tom’s, and he wanted to talk to Chuck to see if he could help.” The sheriff made a face. She didn’t believe counseling would make any difference in Chuck’s case, it was clear. “So Tom starts looking for the boy to get him to talk to the counselor, but Chuck wasn’t there. So the counselor insisted Tom call the police. He did, and then he began calling Chuck’s friends. No one had seen the boy.”

“You haven’t had any luck finding someone who saw him around town?”

“No luck. But we thought he might have tried to find you, to finish what he’d started. Or to apologize. With a kid that messed up, who knows what he was going to do.”

Deputy Rob Tidmarsh came in, stomping his feet just like the sheriff had done. “Didn’t see nothing, Sheriff,” he said.

So she’d been distracting us while her minion checked out the property. Well, there was nothing to find, and there was no point getting angry about it. She’d done what she had to do.

“We might need to call our lawyer,” I said.

“I’ve got him on speed dial,” Tolliver said.

“Or maybe,” Rockwell said, overriding our voices, “you found Chuck and decided to punch him back.” She was looking at Tolliver as she said this, as if I were accustomed to sending Tolliver to do my punching.