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Down on the green the festival has gone to sleep. Hay bales are dusted with frost, the bunting hangs limp, and the man in the scarecrow costume from last night is slumped asleep on the bandstand steps with a coffee cup in his hand. My truck is where I left it in the fire lane, with a yellow sticky note under the wiper in handwriting I know too well.

Fire lane, Harris. $50. — K.

I peel it off and laugh once through my nose. Then I thumb out a text with cold fingers and send it before I can think better of it.

Quiet night. Nothing to report.

The reply comes before I've started the engine.

Dolores left a voicemail on the office line at 9:41. It's four minutes long. Try again.

I put my forehead against the steering wheel and laugh until it hurts.

By the time I've showered, changed, and made it to the station, it's one minute to seven and the sky is going pink. The Sheriff's Office is two rooms and a hallway, with desks older than I am and a coffee machine that has only ever made one kind of coffee. Kieran is already at his desk with a mug in his hand and a folder open in front of him. He looks up when I come in and takes me in, starting at my hair and ending at my boots.

"You're early."

"I'm always early."

"You're never early." He sips his coffee. "You're very pleasant this morning."

"I'm always pleasant."

"Dolores said she was blonde."

"Dolores said a lot of things." I drop into my chair, wake up the computer, and look steadily at the screen. "She was not blonde."

Kieran says nothing. He doesn't have to. Six years of working across a room from someone is long enough to learn what their silence means, and his currently means I'm enjoying this.

I let him. I get through twenty minutes of paperwork, the dull kind, the kind I've been avoiding all week. I'm halfway through a report on a missing recycling bin when the desk phone rings. Kieran picks up on the second ring.

"Sheriff's Office." He listens. His face does a small, quiet thing. The pen in his hand goes still. "Yes, ma'am. Hold on, I'm writing it down. Barn doors. And the porch. Okay. No, don't touch anything. We're coming."

He hangs up and looks at me.

"That was Nell Whitaker's granddaughter. She's in from out of town, staying at the house on the hill. She says somebody's been in the yard. The barn's been painted on, and there's broken glass all over the porch steps."

My chair has rolled back from my desk before I know I've stood.

Kieran watches me. Slowly, he sets his pen down. "I can send Marcus."

"I'll go."

"You've got a look on your face."

"It's my face."

"Welfare check?"

"Something like that."

"Is that what we're calling it?" he says, mild as milk, and tosses me the keys to the cruiser.

I catch them and I don't answer. I'm already out the door. The cold air hits my lungs and my pulse is going in a way that has nothing to do with the stairs.

I left her. I left her in that house, alone, with a sticky lock and a creaky board, and I told myself she'd be fine because she's a grown woman and I'm a man with rules.

The drive up Whitaker Hill takes six minutes. I take it in four.