As the truck begins to roll, Sammy Squirrel jerks his leg away. He lunges across the seat with his hands like claws. He snatches the sandwich, shoulders open the heavy truck door, dives out after his pack. He pops up on the gravel shoulder and runs.

CHAPTER 8

Deputy Lyndsey Luck, the first to arrive at the chaotic scene on Liberty Hill Road, knew the difference between heatstroke and heat exhaustion, a distinction the rookie clarified at great length while Sheriff Kick shivered and panted in a swirl of abstract vocabulary, not listening.

“Bottom line,” her deputy concluded breathlessly, “we either need a third ambulance because you’re heatstroked, or you’re going to be OK in ten minutes. So, may I?”

When the sheriff nodded permission, the deputy touched her skin, took her pulse, looked in her pupils, asked the sheriff where she was in time and space. Midnight in hell, she wanted to say, but she got the answers right. Yes, she felt cold. No, she did not have a headache.

“Good news. You’ve got heat exhaustion. That’s the easy one.”

The deputy led her boss across the road into the ankle-deep creek and sat her down in a reef of lush green watercress. Deputy Luck stripped off her own tight uniform shirt, then her vest, then peeled off her undershirt. She soaked the undershirt in the creek and draped it over the sheriff’s head. As the shirt came down inside out, the wet fabric glowed bright as a movie screen. The sheriff could read its silhouetted lettering.

DEATH

ROE

SURVIVOR

She flinched and felt her shivers spike. Deputy Luck put her vest and shirt back on. A minute later the deputy returned from her cruiser with the bottle of electrolyte water that she carried everywhere. Slowly, the shivers settled and Sheriff Kick began to feel coherent again.

The second deputy to arrive, twelve-year-veteran Rob Schwem, drew his cruiser close by along the shoulder above the creek. Over his idling engine he hollered down, “If it’s that unmarked driveway a half mile back, I went in there a few years ago checking up after a flood. That’s the Goodgolly family. Gabriel Goodgolly and his daughter, Patience.”

Deputy Luck conveyed the sheriff’s mumbled response up to Schwem.

“That does not sound Amish.”

“I hear they converted to Amish. Or they tried to. Where does she want me?”

Schwem’s cruiser roared away to meet the two ambulances heading for the Goodgolly farm. A minute later, Interim Chief Deputy Dick Bender parked across the road. Bender drove the department’s oldest vehicle, an ’05 Avenger that somehow looked dog-eared. Without discussion, he drew his service weapon and walked out from the overturned buggy into the high weeds of the meadow.

They heard the horse snort, then a gunshot.