Based on a tip from the Tri-County reporter, there was a chance that they were looking for a Town of Zion resident named Larry Hubbard, who drove an old white pickup. She had deputies searching for him, visiting taverns and fishing piers along the Mississippi. Several of the deputies knew “Derp” Hubbard already from various incidents, but their information was a poor match for the profile of Fanta’s raving caller. So far, Hubbard was a roofer, sometimes, and a milker, sometimes, but more consistently a poacher and notorious drunk. He was a high school dropout and a violent fan of the Green Bay Packers. The first bartender contacted had not laid eyes on him in a month.

Meanwhile, Patience Goodgolly—found by the Tri-County Press reporter inside Hubbard’s cabin—continued to glare emptily at the sheriff. She did not speak English. Or she would not speak English. This still wasn’t clear.

Beyond the girl’s window, Sheriff Kick watched the Cuba City reporter heading across the hospital parking lot toward her car. Her newspaper had been getting these crazy calls, Maggie Smithback had explained. Except they weren’t that crazy, she said—in case anybody wanted the opinion of a former farm wife, happily divorced and finally doing her dream job. Down around Cuba City lately, she had told the sheriff, hundreds of wells were testing off the charts for E. coli. The region had become a chronic wasting disease hot zone, and just about everybody she knew had Lyme disease. Widen the viewpoint, Maggie Smithback had continued, and half a million bird and insect species had disappeared throughout the world in the last twenty years, while Venice would be underwater in the next twenty. These were facts. So this poor man might be sick, the reporter had explained, but he had not been making stuff up. In fact, she thought he sounded like a prophet. That was why, looking for a story, Maggie Smithback had traced one of the calls to Larry “Derp” Hubbard’s landline. With her editor’s blessing, she had journeyed to his cabin in the Bad Axe, hoping to interview him. Hubbard wasn’t home. So the reporter had snooped a bit, looking into his windows, and that’s how she had discovered—

“It’s nice to see you again, Sheriff.”

She started at the doctor’s voice behind her.

“But we never seem to meet in happy circumstances, do we?”

“No, but I’m always glad to see you’re still here,” she told Dr. Alka Patel, whose young family had struggled mightily to adapt to the Bad Axe.

The doctor lowered her voice.