These guesses still seemed right. As the Vietnam War had shredded the nation, as students rioted and cops fired tear gas, there had been a back-to-the-land movement, and after Fanta had returned home and kicked around in despair for a time, the idea of checking out and homesteading, becoming a society unto himself, had beckoned. He had pursued meaning through journalism instead. Maybe FROM HELL HOLLOW had done the same through nature. And look at both of them now.

Fanta’s cigarette ash reached his fingers and he jolted. He tilted up out of his chair and stared dizzily toward his bank of filing cabinets.

A man goes back to the land, the land infects him with spirochetes and prions.

A man seeks sanctuary, sanctuary attacks him.

A man seeks truth, finds pain, and madness.

A man like that, Fanta thought, he and I could talk.

CHAPTER 6

The sixth Busch Light can from Lars Hansen’s lost twelve-pack had been drained and jettisoned on the way down Liberty Hill to the distressed property in the hollow below.

When Sheriff Kick arrived in the farmyard, she found the torn beer box and the other six empties strewn in heavy grass around a body sprawled facedown, unmoving in direct sun.

Sweat in her eyes caused the sheriff to wince and blink for a clean look. It was a young female in plain Amish dress. The girl’s eyes were shut. Her cheek rested in dried vomit. But her nose whistled as she breathed slowly in and out.

The sheriff blinked again. The girl’s face and hands, her bare feet and ankles, were covered with bites and rashes. Her long-sleeved gray dress and black bonnet were stuck all over with the same burrs that were attached to the sheriff’s uniform. A blurt of oxidized fluid had dried across the dull-blue dress, which was freshly wet in back where she had peed herself not long ago. Her dirty feet looked a hundred years old. She had a mustache and a few long black chin whiskers. But her shallow bust and lithe body made the sheriff guess she wasn’t much more than sixteen.

“Hello? This is Sheriff Kick. Are you all right?”

Getting no reply, she looked around. The farm was a dilapidated mess but it still seemed to be a working operation. A swaybacked horse had been tethered near a stand of tall cottonwoods, but the shade had shrunk and left the creature to suffer. From that same brutal glare, a handful of shabby chickens hid beneath an iron-wheeled wagon. A cow bawled somewhere. Both men’s and women’s clothes hung from the drying line, and the sheriff stared at this an extra moment. The Glicks, her Amish neighbors on Pederson Road, never hung men’s and women’s clothing on the same line, as the local bishop had decreed this to be indecent. Several strips of rags, long and narrow, hung with the clothes.