The priest stopped his spin of images.

“This vehicle.”

He swiped back to a long shot of an old white pickup.

“Excuse me, Sheriff.”

Rhino’s massive frame filled her doorway.

“I’m sorry to interrupt. We just got a call from the Tri-County Press, the newspaper down in Cuba City.”

She frowned. Cuba City was sixty-some miles southeast of Farmstead, across major highways, across the wide Wisconsin River. Cuba City was another world.

“Can I call them back?”

Rhino frowned and fiddled with his thick bison beard. “Um, I think you’d better take it.”

Father McCartney rolled his eyes with dramatic effect as if to say, Brushed off again.

Rhino watched this and applied his placid gaze an extra instant to let the father know he might be out of line, making faces at the boss. Then her dispatcher’s explanation rumbled out.

“From the description, Sheriff, it sounds like one of their reporters was up here doing a story and just stumbled onto that Goodgolly girl we’re looking for.”

CHAPTER 16

Fanta double-hit his Walker for courage, then backed up his Tercel and took a run at the shallow creek. A crashing splash, some crunching and grinding, some weird slippage that felt like his own body coming unglued—and then he had made it across, with both axles intact and no worse damage than a galloping pulse and a funny wobble in his pig valve.

Once a fresh smoke burned, he aligned his tires with the truck’s path through goldenrod and eased it into gusts of pollen and swirls of insects.

He felt unusually alive as leaves scratched and squealed along the car’s flanks and bees thumped the windows. The flagrant sky slipped overhead, dry things snapped beneath the tires, and the contours of the rocky earth gently pitched the creeping Tercel this way and that. It was his habit and perhaps his obligation to miss Maryanne, his beautiful and feisty late wife, anytime he felt himself approaching a “sea of joy.” But, presently immersed, he asked himself a jaunty question: Did he miss Maryanne right now?

Strangely, and without precedent, no.

And he knew why too: because he felt his most private and most sacred ecstasy—experienced just once before—flooding back into his soul. He had never told Maryanne how the most authentic moment in his life—perhaps the only pure moment in his life—had been rising from the boiling mud of a rice paddy into a hail of Vietcong bullets, rising up and fighting back without regard for rules, safety, survival, hot to wreak death upon others and with exquisite indifference to his own.