He sees his ragged image reflected, superimposed over her blue bulk behind the glass. While they stand fixed, the reflection shows a car puttering past behind him. The woman inside makes a sour face, shakes her head, and turns away.

The car softly beeps.

Chickenshit. You do nothing.

Beeps again.

He turns and squints against the hostile brilliance. A rust-riddled old green car has stopped along the opposite curb:

CAUTION: I BRAKE FOR PEACE.

The car backs up a few feet in his direction.

Stops.

Beeps once more.

He shades his eyes. A second faded sticker tilts his rigid grin:

MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR.

“Are you looking for work?”

The driver calling to him is a hippie woman with a thick gray braid. She rests her forearm in the open window and waits for him to cross the street and come abreast.

CHAPTER 23

Heading home, Sheriff Kick read Oppo’s latest on the screen of her phone with the minivan rolling along Pederson Road. The dawn fog had dissolved. The eastern coulee wall cast a jagged shadow across the Glicks’ potato field, the sunstruck plants wilting precisely as the shade line withdrew. The six barefoot Glick girls were out there already, bent in their curious right-angle posture, picking beetles off the leaves. Amos and Dawdy Glick and the two boys were in the apple orchard on the rise behind the house, spraying something—vinegar, probably—on the caterpillar tents that had appeared overnight. A few hundred yards on, a freshly road-killed doe lay mangled in the ditch.

Oppo’s “Rickreiner Fairy Tale” told of events that occurred in the Bad Axe while she was in high school down in Crawford County. But even before BARRY HER’s campaign and redemption story, she knew by osmosis that his father had been murdered, possibly by a farmer who had owed him money. She never knew that suspects had died from mysterious Kim Maybee–like symptoms.

Something orange caught her eye in the newspaper tube beneath the H+H KICK mailbox. She stopped the van and stepped out into a wall of green heat. The tube still said Broadcaster, though lately an unwanted Happy Valley Shopper had begun to appear inside it. But this wasn’t Babette Rickreiner’s Shopper. What she extracted turned out to be Harley’s blaze-orange three-hole ski mask, for deer hunting in extra-cold weather. Had he dropped it on the road—in August?—and some Good Samaritan had picked it up and put it in the newspaper tube?