“Tyrus killed the sheep,” I told Muncie. “Just Tyrus.”

Turning away from the kill, I stood, my fists clenched, looking across the field toward the Powers property.

I heard Ripley coming before I saw him. He was yelling at his dog. That boy always yelled. Seems like he didn’t know any other way of talking.

Ripley appeared through a break in the trees, looking huge, even for a fifteen-year-old. He stood on the tangled bank at the edge of his property, his legs wide apart in the weedy grass. Tyrus, with a blood-stained muzzle, fawned around Ripley’s feet.

Ripley’s radiation mask stretched up around his forehead. He was the only one I knew who refused to wear his mask all the time. Looking over at me and Muncie, Ripley folded his long arms across his chest.

“Tyrus kill one of your sheep?” he yelled.

“Damn right he did.”

“Why don’t you get yourself another guard dog?”

“Why don’t you tie your dog up?” My grip tightened on the bony handles of my hips.

Ripley glared at me from across the road. Even from this distance, I could make out the droop of the lid over his bad eye. He reached up, rubbing where the mask cut into the back of his neck.

“I wish that mask would strangle him,” I mumbled. “I swear, I do.”

“Nyle.” Muncie’s voice warned me to cool down.

Muncie was right. A thirteen-year-old girl, even one as thorny as I was, had no place messing with the likes of Ripley Powers. He was too big, too strong.

But I couldn’t help it. That boy sent the blood swarming in my head.

Ripley took a half step forward and tugged off his mask. He tossed the wad of gauze down the bank, into the road.

Looked like he meant to start some kind of trouble. I whistled for my dog, Caleb. Caleb’s a Border collie, a herding dog, low and fast, silky black and white. With Ripley looking so threatening, I would have felt better having Caleb nearby. But he didn’t come to my whistle. Must have been inside with Gran.

All I had standing beside me was Muncie. The November sun shone on Muncie Harris’s straw-blond hair, the way it shines on a cabbage in the kitchen garden. She stood on her short legs, breathing hard through her radiation mask.

“Forget about Ripley,” she said. “You’d better tell your grandmother about that dead ewe. She’ll want to call Red Jackson right away.”

Every year at town meeting the people of North Haversham elected Red Jackson as town officer. He’s the one got us radiation detectors and masks after the accident.

Whenever we had a sheep kill, Red would come out to the farm, take a look at the evidence. If a dog, and not some coyote, had done the killing, the town paid us for our loss. Usually dogs went for the rear first, coyotes for the throat. Considering the condition of the sheep and the bloody mess on Tyrus’s face, the dog’s guilt would not be hard to prove.