Kids, for sure. She could imagine herself and friends finding beer at about thirteen years old. The idea would be to drink as much as possible, as fast as possible, before their incredible luck ran out. Never mind if hot light beer tasted sour as horse piss. There was alcohol in it.

Twenty scorching minutes later, rashy, sweat-soaked, gasping for breath, now with five cans in her evidence bag and verging on heatstroke, Sheriff Kick reached the base of Liberty Hill. She felt dizzy, temples pounding, and the Charger seemed miles away. But from here on she would be in the shade of the hillside forest. After a short rest, she pushed on to the top.

She had never been on Liberty Hill. A toppled fieldstone cairn reminded her of the reason for the name. Larger and more populated Vernon County began just over two miles north, and with campaigning on her mind she recalled Grape Fanta’s story in the Broadcaster about Grover Cleveland. Barnstorming for president in the 1890s, Cleveland had passed through Vernon County giving speeches from the porch of his train car. Some proud Bad Axer had raised a large U.S. flag right here, and the candidate, gazing south across the ridgetops, had spied Old Glory and famously called this “Liberty Hill.”

When she gazed south, she could see the vast tract of weeds between herself and her Charger at the roadside, and from there the vista skipped across ridgetops all the way to Farmstead. A mile or more to the east she could see a corner of Elmo Quarry—a sheer cliff of dynamite-fractured limestone—but not the deep emerald pond that filled the abandoned gravel pit. Out to the west rolled sister hills of Liberty Hill that had no roads or names. And finally from this height, looking north over rugged ground, she saw a farm.

She moved herself to see it better. She could make out, half-hidden in the isolated coulee directly below, what looked like an Amish farm fallen on hard times: collapsing outbuildings, a primitive sawmill and piles of gray slab wood, a scythe-cut hayfield, laundry on a bowed line. No power poles or wires. No tractors or trucks. She saw specks, brown and white, in motion.

Chickens?

Nothing else moved. It looked like desolation, like despair. Or was that a faulty judgment by her frazzled modern mind? What was wrong with a slower pace and a simpler life? Wasn’t living off the land and depending on no one a cornerstone of American identity? Her thoughts had drifted back a hundred-plus years—subsistence farming, rustic isolation, Grover Cleveland for president—when her phone stirred beneath her badge.

“It’s Dr. Kleekamp, Sheriff.” The medical examiner sounded rattled. “I’ve got some results. Bear with me here.”

“OK. Go ahead.”

Kleekamp exhaled with a whoosh of relief, in exactly the manner of a rookie coroner who had just sawed through his first human sternum.