Page 6

By the time Sheriff O’Shea reached me, flashing red and blue light was sliding across the corn outside the structure, turning the familiar rows into alternating bands of color. Deputies had pushed the remaining workers toward the public side, and paramedics had gone into the room after deputies photographed the route they needed to take.

One of them came back out without urgency.

That was when the last small part of me that had been waiting for someone to say Justin was still alive finally stopped waiting.

O’Shea asked me to move to a folding chair near the staff entrance while his people worked.

He was in his fifties, solidly built, with close-cropped gray hair and a mustache I had seen across town often enough that his face should have felt familiar.

Nothing about him felt familiar now.

He took out a notebook.

“Tell me what you did after the final guests left.”

I walked him through the route from the moment the exit attendant confirmed the last group was clear. Instead of firing questions at me one after another, he let me finish each section before asking for times, locations, and names.

That almost made it worse.

Every ordinary detail sounded different once it went into his notebook.

He asked when I had last seen Justin, and I told him about the vendor conversation with Clinton. He asked whether Justin had argued with anyone else that night, so I explained the safety dispute with Troy and why I had sided with Justin.

“Was Troy angry with him?” O’Shea asked.

“He was irritated because Justin corrected him in front of me. That isn’t the same thing as wanting to hurt him.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“No, but you wrote it down.”

His eyes lifted from the notebook.

“So far, I’m writing down everything.”

The answer was reasonable.

I still hated it.

A gust of wind carried the smell of wood smoke from the public area and something sweeter from the cider stand that had already closed. Behind O’Shea, one of my illuminated directional signs still pointed toward an attraction nobody was going to enter again tonight, possibly not tomorrow either.

That thought made me feel sick for reasons that had nothing to do with money. Justin was dead, and I was already thinking about Friday.

Maybe that was monstrous, or maybe it was simply what happened when your brain tried to cling to the part of the disaster it knew how to solve.

O’Shea turned a page.

“The knife beside him. Tell me about it.”

“It’s a prop from the room.”

“Yours?”

“My company selected the attraction props. Hollowfield paid for them as part of production.”

“Have you handled that one?”

“Yes. During setup, inspection, resets. Probably more than once.”