She looked back toward the house. The girl lay unmoving amid the clutter on the porch.

No one else had appeared.

The man’s eyes were shut. His lips were mashed together. He breathed faintly through his nose.

She touched the radio handset on her shoulder and heard the hiss that told her no contact.

Could she do first aid? She wasn’t sure what. Maybe unfold him? His bare haunches had sunk through the toilet hole toward the stinking pit. The outhouse was a two-seater and his head had lolled right, dumping off his wide-brimmed straw hat to catch in the second toilet hole beside him. Flies swarmed in and out around the hat. They jumped from his face to his blood-gobbed beard and back. Had this happened overnight? Predawn? It seemed he had been reading. His Bible lay upon the outhouse floor, blood-soaked and swollen, double-thick inside its frail leather cover.

“Sir…? Can you hear me?”

She backed away, touching her radio again. No. She retrieved her phone, held it toward the sky. Not that either. She stepped in something and looked down. From the dried orange crust in the grass, she gathered that the girl had begun vomiting here. After seeing this? After doing this?

“I’m getting help, sir. Hilfe bekommen. Hang on.”

First she untied the swaybacked horse, which rolled its bloodshot eyes and tried to bite her before she pushed its head away and slapped it toward shade. Then she broke into a jog along the farm’s narrow dirt inroad, heading steeply uphill through dense hardwood forest.

As she ran, her body felt both weightless and twice its normal weight, and every intake of air became a deeper communion with the inferno in her chest and the questions inflaming her mind. What the hell had happened? Had the girl gotten drunk and stabbed her father?

The driveway summited at a swing-arm pole gate. As she pushed through, the frame dragged a broken chain. When she let go, the gate coasted squeakily, weighted by fieldstones, and banged shut behind her.

She ran on in frustration. She hadn’t even known that these people existed. They didn’t call 911 with their problems…

After a short downhill curve, the driveway leveled. In another two hundred yards she crossed a wood-plank bridge and stopped at the forest’s edge. As she begged for breath, she realized she had returned to Liberty Hill Road. Three hundred yards to her left, east, she could see her Charger.

An Amish buggy traveled slowly past it, away from her.

“Hey!”

The buggy jolted and sped away, wobbling severely. She goaded herself back to a trot.

“Hey! Stop! Halt! I need to talk to you!”

By the time she reached the Charger, the buggy was a quarter mile gone.