We don’t need to speak. He can read my face.

“Oh shit,” he says.

“I’ll go inside and check on Joshua and Sarah,” Bernie says, disappearing through the front door, the screen door screeching like a bird of prey.

“It’s like we thought,” I say as we walk toward the barn, where Mindy is now collecting samples for the lab. “The Luminol lit up that workshop like the Fourth of July. Seriously. Spatter and castoff are clear as could be. Merritt hit his wife with the hammer. He dragged her over to the carpet and rolled her up.”

“Things like that don’t happen around here,” Sheriff says. “Not on my watch, anyway.”

I know he wants to believe that, of course. Truth is, places like the woods around Jefferson County are full of nefarious doings. We just don’t hear about them. Nobody calls in their neighbor to find out if something bad happened.

I think I heard a shot.

Someone screamed in the middle of the night next door. Bloody murder scream.

Haven’t seen anyone at their place for months.

Mindy is finishing up.

“What happened here was brutal,” she says. “The velocity and trajectory of the spatter shows some major rage.”

“Kids say their father was very demanding, even cruel to his wife,” Sheriff says.

“Let’s be direct,” I say. “He cut off one of her toes as punishment for some made-up infraction.”

“Infraction? Was he running a prison camp here?” Mindy asks as she continues to record samples for chain of custody. Her writing is precise, somewhere between cursive and printed. Everything about Mindy is precise. Even the way she arranges flowers. No loosey goosey English Garden bouquets with a sprig of this and bunch of that. Hers are always perfectly proportioned, symmetric and, very often, single-hued.

“You could call it that,” I say. “Family is a mix of doomsday preppers, cult-like religion and prison camp. Very little contact with the outside world.”

“Sheriff, this is going to hit the news. I need to call Ida’s sister, Ruth.”

He gives me a knowing look. He hates making family notifications. No one likes to. It’s the worst part of the job. But one of the most important parts.

I get back to the office. It’s stone cold quiet, except for the hum of our relic of a refrigerator—Harvest Gold—which is like an outboard motor on the other side of a lake. You don’t hear it unless you mistakenly hear it, and then, it’s all you hear. I settle in at my desk and once more dial Ruth Turner, on a number that she doesn’t want me to use.

Unless I really have to.

Her sister being murdered by her husband qualifies in anyone’s book.