She gasped, “Go ahead.”

As she listened to Deputy Schwem, she closed her eyes against the relentless assault of blinding light and searing air. Via the faint signal bounce around Liberty Hill, Schwem was telling her that for the second time in two days they had lost Patience Goodgolly.

The swing gate was open. The clothes were off the clothesline. On the grass in the shade of the cottonwood lay a drinking glass, empty, filmed with drying butterfat.

The ambulance still wailed in the distance as Deputy Schwem emerged from the barn.

“Solar power,” he said. “I’ll be darned. And there’s this weird electric robot thing in there.”

“Did it point a gun at you?”

“I think it tried. But it didn’t have a gun.”

“She has it, then. Did you find that old horse?”

“Negative.”

“Then she’s on it. Anything to see inside the house?”

“Buttermilk.”

The sheriff felt woozy as she climbed the porch steps. Beside the kitchen sink was a drinking glass from the same set as the one on the yard, but full. Beside it stood the quart jar of buttermilk, now half-full.

“Jeez,” Schwem said, “who poisons somebody?”

“I think it must have been meant for Patience,” the sheriff said.

Sie nett, Mrs. Lapp had told the girl at the hospital that morning. Always be nice to people in the uniform.

“I don’t think she meant to poison Deputy Luck. I think she didn’t know there was poison and meant offering a drink to be a thoughtful gesture. Then she saw what happened and she took the opportunity to run. Take the jar and the glass into evidence. I’m guessing it’s something like Killex. Search the house and property for a pesticide container, but my guess is whoever did this didn’t leave one behind.”

She turned at the sound of boots on the porch. Interim Chief Deputy Bender entered the Goodgolly home. He went straight to the glass of buttermilk and sniffed it. Then he looked at her through his smudged glasses, seeming to measure her for a bolt of upholstery. She awaited her Benderism.

“Came to help you chase your tail,” he said.

“Thank you, Dick. Please head back out to where you have reception. Tell Denise to put a BOLO out for a young woman in a long dress and a black bonnet, riding a swaybacked brown horse, carrying a sawed-off shotgun.”

“Pretty hard to lose something like that in the first place, some might say. Twice.”

“Good point. Then come back here and direct a search with Schwem, please. We have all the probable cause we need. Take this place apart.”

She felt a new kind of sick as she reached the porch steps. The yard looked a long way down. She felt overheated again. She grabbed the rail and sat heavily.

Abruptly her mouth burned with a strange taste, and her windpipe narrowed while her esophagus bubbled and fizzed.