When he arrived above the creek, Bender said in a raw voice, “Dr. Geyer’s on vacation.” The sheriff waited. Bender always dropped another shoe. Benderisms, she and Denise called his hostile little habit. “I’da thought,” he said eventually, “that the person in charge would have known a basic fact like that.”

Sheriff Kick peeled Deputy Luck’s undershirt off her head. She went to hands and knees in the watercress, stayed there enduring a weird cramp between her hips, then stood unsteadily inside her wet pants. She waited out a wave of dizziness, then looked up to the road. Bender appeared grim, his narrow shoulders deflated.

“Thank you for taking care of the horse, Dick. Can you tell whose buggy that is?”

“It says GOODGOLLY under the dash rail.” Count three. “All you had to do was look.”

The frightened animal probably tried to go home. It would have found the gate shut.

“OK,” she told Bender. “Let’s get Roads out here with a front-end loader to pick up the horse. Then diagram the accident and take the buggy into evidence. There’s a rubber boot in there. Make sure that gets bagged.”

Bender stared through his smudgy glasses, running fingers through his thin hair. She sometimes felt like he was sizing her up for a lampshade.

“Pick up the horse and do what?”

“Take it in on Goodgolly’s land and bury it.”

“Wouldn’t have hurt you to say so in the first place.”

“Right as always, Dick.”

The sheriff tested her balance, then bear-crawled up the creek bank onto sizzling gravel. Bender pulled away. A pair of vultures coasted high above the horse. Sirens twined nearby, closing on the Goodgolly farm.

“Meet you there,” she told Lyndsey Luck.

She rushed to put on dry pants and chugged a warm Powerade from her trunk. As she got behind the wheel, her full faculties were coming back. The dead man in the ditch had been on the Goodgolly farm. He might have stabbed the old man and stolen the buggy. But then who had shot him and buried him? The old man? Who did what to whom? When?

She Y-turned the Charger. From this angle she got a weak bounce from the tower in Farmstead to Schwem’s phone.

“We’re treating Patience Goodgolly as a person of interest in two crimes,” she told him, “homicide and aggravated assault. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

“Well, that’s the thing.” Schwem’s response crackled back through gaps and static. “Denise reported a stabbing victim sitting on the pot in the outhouse, did I get that right?”

“An old man, yes.”

“Well, I opened the door, all I saw at first was a Bible and a hat, and a lot of blood. Then I heard something. Sheriff, now the old man is all the way down inside the toilet pit.”

She surged the Charger.

“Are you sure?”