“Photograph it all. Then rinse it off as best you can and take it into evidence.”

Deputy Luck, pale and gulping breaths behind her germ mask, answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Not ‘ma’am,’ please. Call me ‘sheriff.’ There’s a water pump. Maybe you can find a hose.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The sheriff gazed across the scorched farmyard. Patched trousers, gray undershirts, heavy dresses, shapeless bloomers, and narrow strips of soiled fabric hung limply from the clothesline. An open stretch of cord showed where something had been removed. A clean dress, probably. Patience Goodgolly had vanished.

“Schwem, go with Roads and help Bender recover the buggy.”

“I’m on it.”

She called him back.

“Did you see anybody on Liberty Hill after I sent you this way?”

“Negative.”

“An old white truck?”

“Negative.”

She stripped her gloves and mask and dropped them into the pit. The re-staging of the crime scene had happened quickly, between the time she had run to call for help and when Schwem had arrived. How much time had passed? Twenty or thirty minutes? Had Patience Goodgolly fooled her by playing possum? Where had she gone? And how had she gone there?

The sheriff had no way to judge the normalcy of what she saw inside the house, the startling severity of the kitchen and the sitting room, shabbiness and tidiness bluntly intertwined. She had known Amish all her life but never been invited inside a home. What had Schwem said about this family? They converted to Amish. Or tried to. She gave herself a tour. In a bedroom she found two single beds with bedding, each with a wooden chair at the foot, each with an electric lamp on a wooden nightstand at the head, and a rag rug along the plank floor between.

Electricity. That wasn’t Amish. Or was electricity OK if it came from solar? Down in Crawford County where she grew up, the bishop had been famously strict—and infamously known to bend his own strictures to make himself comfortable. The juicy hint of hypocrisy among the English back then had been the rumor that Bishop Hershberger entertained Amish maidens in his backyard Jacuzzi.

But if she hoped to uncover scandalous secrets inside the Goodgolly home, her inspection disappointed. She cataloged exactly three minor oddities: a half-knit garment for a baby, a 1992 Florida license plate hung on a nail, and a full Mason jar of buttermilk in an icebox.

None of these pointed to anything. She saw no other evidence of a baby. The girl had not walked barefoot to Florida in the last thirty minutes. Buttermilk was out of fashion but still commonplace on farms. Sheriff Kick photographed the license plate—turquoise-and-red, OHGEOMY1, Palm Beach County, hung next to a crucifix—and moved her search to the barn.