Now, at the brim of a paved road with a yellow double line, as twin beams prick a gray fog wall, she utters her first syllables.

“Hup-hup-schnell,” she tells the horse, and they clatter at a new pace across asphalt, feeling its fervent yesterday breath.

Past the ditch they disappear into high corn and turn toward a dome of thinner sky that suggests an awakening town.

The dome dissolves as they approach. She hups the horse across a soybean field, through a tangle of shoved-up earth and shoved-downed trees, through a broken fence, across a small empty parking lot behind a cinder-block building, and around to the front of a store called Liquor City.

She dismounts. The horse wheezes beneath him. She aims the shotgun butt and with a blow to the window’s geometric center she obliterates the Liquor City emblem. An alarm starts to bray as she clips jutting shards from the window frame. She gathers her dress and steps in. She walks up an aisle sweeping the gun barrel along a shelf of bottles, scattering the floor with broken glass and a spreading pool of alcohol. She grabs a bottle as she rounds the aisle and comes back the other way drinking from it, leaving wreckage in her wake.

She hands the bottle up to him.

It tastes like fire.

Then she climbs back inside his arms.

“Hup-hup,” she tells the sagging horse. “Schnell.”

CHAPTER 35

“Circle back over the pond! Hurry!”

“This old bug-smasher can’t go over seventy-five knots! With this spray tank under me, she gets wonky if I tilt her more than thirty degrees! Hang on!”

She yelled at Rhino: “I need someone heading toward Liberty Hill and the quarry pond!”

“The log on Bender’s GPS indicates he been near there for several hours. But I can’t raise him.”

“Just get someone moving!”

The plane wallowed so wide north, then so far east, that they passed over the borders of Vernon and Richland counties.

“Deputy rolling, Sheriff. What is he looking for?”

“The 4-H kids are at the pond! I might have seen Hubbard’s white truck! We’re circling back! I’ll update!”

So slow. She aimed her finger to call Harley and saw that he had texted her.

Dylan left his letter. I opened it. Pic attached.

“Here we come! Better look!”

They approached the pond again. The bus remained there, the kids. But now the road was empty. The solo child and the white truck were gone. Desperately, as the plane slid away into irrelevant space, she twisted one way, twisted the other, lunged against her seat belt to see beneath the wing, but the truck had vanished from the landscape.

She looked at the photo of Taylor’s apology letter that Harley had attached.

I am not sory. I will never be sory. No one will make me sory when I am not sory. HE will see who is sory.

Then Harley was calling.