“He’s down there groaning in the doo-doo. He had to be folded up and pushed hard. I can see a bunch of other stuff down there too. A shovel, a rifle, some beer cans. Maybe some clothing—”

She heard her deputy gag and spit.

“But there is no Patience Goodgolly,” Schwem continued.

“She’s on the porch of the house.”

“Not there, Sheriff.”

“Look inside the house. Don’t touch the doorknob.”

“Too late for that,” Schwem told her with a high laugh. “But at least I got my hair permed. She isn’t in the house. Or anywhere.”

“She has to be.”

“Sheriff, I’m telling you, if there was a girl here, she’s gone.”

CHAPTER 9

In the office of what had become the Happy Valley Shopper, Leroy Fanta lit a new Winston, leaned across his former desk to set the smoke in his former ashtray, and opened another manila file folder labeled Letters to the Editor, this one from 2017. He peered in, accompanied by a Procol Harum cassette hissing forth from his dusty boom box with “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

A man like FROM HELL HOLLOW, Fanta repeated to himself, he and I could talk.

But how to find him?

Well, was he lost?

Was he hiding?

Fanta skimmed the 2017 letters, seeing the usual. Taxes were too high. Farmers deserved more government support. People should stop eating meat. People should eat more meat. We should all support the soldiers.

FROM HELL HOLLOW could have used his real name. Most letter-writers did. Most newspapers did not print anonymous submissions. But in his capacity as editor-in-chief, Fanta had violated this norm. In his view, truth needed both light and dark to fully flower. Whistleblowers, right? Don’t we make laws to protect them? Deep Throat took down Nixon. FROM HELL HOLLOW’s screeds amounted to dropping a big, fat dime on our lethal human weakness for business-as-usual. Let him speak.

But was the man escaping contact, or seeking it? Was his anti-Fanta vitriol a bluster, or a threat, or was he sending out cries for help? Was he directing Fanta? Or misdirecting him? Or both? Or none of the above? This would make an interesting front-page story.

Local Madman Seeks Same

By this time more than a little drunk, the ousted editor composed this and other mock headlines as he worked his way through 2017.

Local Dead Man Suddenly Full of Piss, Vinegar, Johnny Walker Red

If that nasty little toad Babette Rickreiner could publish a pretend newspaper, he could write pretend headlines. He could rant and prance, swoon and mutter. He could fudge his promise to the sheriff and defiantly haunt the front window when the candidate’s cover-story family, Becky Rilke-Rickreiner and her marshmallow brood, schlepped past en route to the public pool.

Bad Axe Voters Seek Whiter Shade of Pale

He could loom and fog the glass like a bogle.