Sorry, fella. There was no stopping me now. I climbed on top of this massive animal and pounded it some more. My dad would have called it a Grand Old Boar, a hunting term for an animal more than seven years old. They were rare, because they were destructive to farms and usually got shot before they reached this age.

The boar still had some fight in it and shook me off roughly. It watched me get up, then came for me again.

I timed my kick just right and connected with its head. The crack of the blow echoed through the woods as the animal collapsed onto the turf and lay there breathing heavily.

If I had a gun, I would have put it out of its misery. But I didn’t, and this guy wouldn’t last long, anyway. Its breaths grew faster and shallower before they faded altogether.

I felt bad but knew that this was a dangerous, deadly creature.

In which case, I wondered, what did that make me?

CHAPTER 34

Maggie

I HUFFED UP the four steps to the police station, all fired up. I stopped at the top, leaned against the cool brick, and took a few long, slow breaths. I had worked myself up into a tizzy on the brisk walk from school.

When I stepped inside, I was surprised by what I saw, though I shouldn’t have been. The yellow-brick-and-concrete exterior, after all, had been power-washed to a brightness probably not seen since the place was built more than a half century ago. The interior had that new-house smell, with bright blue carpets and gleaming stainless-steel desks that looked fresh off the OfficeMax truck.

Three officers, two women and one man, were working back behind the counter, and the male one at the closest desk said, without standing up, “You’re Renee Gooding’s daughter, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, suddenly feeling stupid.

“She handles the K-9 units,” this guy, a lanky fellow with dark hair and a bushy gray mustache, said to the other officers. “Veterinarian.”

Were those two women new in town?

“I’m here for—”

“Let me guess,” he said, stepping toward me so I could read the name Erickson on his badge. “You want to know why we can’t make phone calls, right?”

“W-well,” I said. “Yes. And why we don’t have internet and why no one can come in or out of town and why the newspaper has been shuttered.”

One of the female officers stood up. “Last night an arsonist exploded a propane tank next to the Jefferson Bridge,” she said. “All the work they’d been doing to open up the south road is now wasted. We’re investigating.”

“What?” I said. “That can’t be happening.”

“Well, it did, and there’s nothing the fire department could have done.”

“How did it blow up?”

“Sorry,” Officer Erickson said, “we can’t comment on ongoing investigations.”

“But that’s two propane-tank explosions, the other one at the Carters’.”

“Like I said, we can’t comment.”

“I’m with the school paper,” I improvised, digging into my backpack to pull out my math homework notebook and a pen. “This is in the public interest.”