I went out looking for her. Under the skyscraper hickory. In the storage house, wide wood rooms mostly empty now. In the dairy, where the fresh cheeses slumped on the sill, glittering with frosty salt. In the pitch-black cellar, in the pigpen, the sheep’s beds, the henhouses, the horse and cow stables, calling. I called up the trapdoors. She’s dead, I thought. What was the bone room like, anyway? Maybe she had been bitten by a copperhead. Or maybe she’d tried to run away. Maybe the white dogs had caught and shredded her. Maybe she’d gone as far as the freight yard, maybe she’d died there, like Cassie. Or maybe Dice had decided to punish her, maybe he’d locked her somewhere where we wouldn’t be able to hear her pounding. I knew there were locked places in the barn.

I wished we had cell phones, a wish that hadn’t flown into my head in months.

I found her in the loose-floored hayloft. I rushed forward, relieved for only a second. She looked blue-green, sweat-soaked. A terrible smell, roadkill, high meat, reached me and made me retch. And then I noticed the ground beneath her was slick with blood.

“Harmony,” she said. “I’m dying.”

I knew that people and sheep who expect to die often do.

“Nonsense,” I said. I suppose I thought we’d fix it, put it back. “I think we’ve got to get you to town, though.”

“They’ll kill me if I leave,” she said.

“No, they won’t,” I said. I knew from our trip to the bait shop that I was right: Dice believed in second chances.

“Oh, I should have run away as soon as I was late,” she said.

I needed to find Pear. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

I jumped over the ramp onto the hayloft. I ran through the trapdoor into the cow enclosure. The cows seemed huge in the dark, like aurochs. I ran back to the house, where the singing was just beginning, and I pulled Pear outside.

“Herbal remedies,” said Pear. “Blue cohosh—”

“Pear, this is a case for a hospital,” I said frantically.

“No case,” Pear said agonizingly slowly, “is a case for a hospital.” I didn’t know why she was being so difficult until I looked up and saw Dice’s shadow in the window.

Later, during hot nights in the long house, I’d wonder if the miscarriage wasn’t a coincidence. But for now I felt only the obliterating roar of what our songbook called great tribulation.

* * *