“And jumping in front of that sonofabitch is what makes a sheriff a sheriff,” he said, looking almost vehemently away. “A fella might even say he felt proud to work for a sheriff like that, being as himself, if he had to, he couldn’t have done it.”

The heat wave continued through the whole nine days. On the morning of the day that she finally went home, a thunderstorm broke the spell for a short while. Alone in her room, she watched it rain for thirty minutes in drops that seemed as big as marbles, steam rising from pavements and fields back up into the downpour. It felt cooler outside, even through the window. Her eyes were relieved.

While this happened, fifty miles south in Fennimore, where it wasn’t raining, the Grant County Sheriff’s Department got a report of a horse tied off in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot and arrived to find a teenage boy in an Amish dress drawing on the sidewalk. He seemed disoriented and became combative. Officers eventually delivered him to the local hospital, where he was fed, medicated, and observed. Within mere minutes they had charged the kid’s phone and spoken to his mother and knew his name was Aaron Robert Zimmerman, seventeen, from Silver Falls, Oregon, a high school straight-B student until a year ago, now suffering from schizophrenia, alogia, and grandiose delusion. He had told Grant County deputies that he had been homeless and on the road for a week or two, but in fact he had been missing from a juvenile mental health facility since March. As she heard this—since March!—a storm broke inside Sheriff Kick and tears as heavy as the raindrops ran down her face.

An hour later, it was a hundred degrees again and humid. Harley helped her get comfortable in the relative cool of the shade on the front porch.

“Hopefully he can relax a little now.”

Her husband meant Taylor, whom they could see over by the barn trying to attach a spear, an old tool handle that he had sharpened, to the handlebars of his bike, given that Dylan had just figured out that if he filled his water bottle, put it in the holder, and left the top off, it would keep him cool by splashing up and hitting him in the crotch every time he went over a bump, an invention he planned to showcase when Opie came home.

“Look at us,” Harley said. “All of us just out here waiting when she’s only just left the camp. It’s a long van ride. Two hours is going to take forever.”

She, they were calling Opie these last couple days, falling back into the word like a familiar old chair.

“Well, since we have time, there are a couple things we can talk about,” she said. “If you’re up for it.”