Before I drove Peppy to her day-care appointment, I circled the downtown but didn’t see any obvious signs of a tail. Yesterday’s Buick Enclave wasn’t parked nearby either. Another phantom?

Free State Dogs was the kind of place you could get only in a small town with a lot of open space—huge runs where the staff could sort dogs into compatible packs for play and rest. The staff seemed to know how to work with the animals, but I still felt a wrenching as I finally let Peppy trot off with one of their crew.

I guessed she’d be okay. I hoped she’d be okay. The third time I checked that they had my cell-phone number and would text me if anything went wrong, the manager patted me on the shoulder.

“Every parent feels like this the first time they leave their baby alone. She’s a sweetheart; we’ll take good care of her.”

Free State was on the main east-west artery that led from Lawrence out to the McKinnon farm and the Kanwaka silo. I unfolded my paper maps and checked the roads against the property lines on the documents the library had printed for me. Folded them up, cast a last longing look at Free State Dogs, and put the car into gear, singing, “Hey, said I, for the open road and the open camp beside it.”

Traffic was heavy on the highway, but as soon as I turned onto the county roads, I was alone. One good thing about the country, I guess, is that it’s easy to spot a tail. Unless you counted the circling hawks, I was on my own. I didn’t even see tractors in the fields I was passing, just the occasional herd of morose-looking cows.

At a crossroads near the McKinnon farm, I pulled over and took out my tablet, bringing up the stills that August had shot in the dark. I tried to compare them with the land around me. The ditches on either side of the road were filled with wild grass, brown now at winter’s approach. A heavy wind blew through the grasses, creating waves that looked like Lake Michigan in a storm. The wind buffeted the Mustang, increasing my sense of vulnerability. I turned on the radio just to hear the sound of a human voice.

“And God said, the unclean shall you cast from you. When Jesus told us he brought not peace, but a sword—”

I turned off the radio: I’d risk going mad on the prairies.

All the land around me resembled the photos: the ground plowed or harrowed or whatever they did after they’d harvested the crops, leaving behind little hillocks with tufts sticking up. I wasn’t looking for a needle in a haystack but a haystack in a land of hayfields. Impossible.