O soul, be changed into little water drops
And fall into the ocean, never to be found.
   —Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

THE FIELDS were burned in the fall, after harvest. Outside of Post Falls, between the Bitterroot and Spokane, the burn started as soon as the wheat was in the silos. On windy days, the smoke came off the country and coiled around the basin of the Spokane Valley, hemmed in on one side by Five Mile Prairie and the dry heights of Eastern Washington.

On the day that Matt Worthson took his wife, Sall, with him on a visit to Spokane, the wind seemed to follow them. Fed by the hot updrafts of the burning stubble, the breeze brought cinders and soot from burning piles of hay. It filled the sky above Spokane with debris.

Sall’s dirty-blond hair swung in around her arched eyebrows as she turned her head back toward Matt, her lip curling with yet another sarcastic remark. “Some father you were. You never gave a damn about Doug anyway, why do you care that he’s left now?” Even after all these years, she was every bit the unstoppable force she’d always been, her derision like acid, eating away at his every failing.

Matt didn’t say anything in reply. After Doug had stormed out of the house, the only thing he’d asked her was, “Why did he leave?” One sentence, but she had a lot of answers. It seemed to him that she’d been saving some of these things up to say for decades.

“Twenty damn years you’ve worked for the sheriff’s,” she’d said. “Twenty years at the same damn desk job for Merrill. Sure you got the pity promotion after the last election—but where has it gotten you, Matt? Jesus Christ, Matt, the kid has his own life now, and yours is hardly a life to look up to.”

But he didn’t say anything, and eventually she stopped too. It seemed to Matt that they were always coming back to this place where no one talked to each other. It seemed hard to recall that in the early days of their marriage, they’d spent hours together every Saturday morning, cooking breakfast together. That had been gone for a long time now.

He thought of the time three years ago, after the accident, when he’d stopped talking to Sall at all. Near the end of that spell, Sall had found some comfort on her own. She had been gone from the house for days at a time. When she came back to the house late one Saturday morning he asked her to stay, sitting at the beer-stained table, bloodshot eyes looking up at her.

She didn’t give him an answer for half the week. But sometime that week, she began to speak to him, haltingly, as if he had been the one who had left her. Sall rolled her car window up as the wind lifted chaff off the field and the dusty air gusted across the highway. She sighed, interrupting his thoughts. “These damn fields always screw up the air in the fall!” And although Matt knew that her sigh had nothing to do with the burning fields or the chaff-filled air, he was still grateful. At least she wasn’t talking about Doug anymore.

When Kev opened his eyes, he saw red. The light hit his eyes and everything hurt. He rubbed his cheek and felt the blood come back with a sting. He rubbed his throat too, he’d put the necklace around his neck to keep it safe. Then he sat up. The steering wheel was in front of him, it was time to go.

A doll slid off the seat and hit the floor, it made a heavy sound. He started and sat up, rubbing at the grit in the corners of his eyes. He reached down and lifted the doll off the floor. He threw her in the backseat with the rest of the trash. There was a hollowness when he looked at it, something like hunger.

The previous night came back to him in scattered images, a smear of colors and violence and excitement. Fuck, he’d kicked some ass, taken some people apart, goddammit. What the hell had that little priest been thinking? The girl had gotten out of it without being slashed apart. The rest of it was a blur.

His head hurt. He groped in his pocket. And he was out of reddies and weed. Fuck being straight-edge. Maybe he should buy a bottle of something. Somewhere in town.

He rolled down the window and turned the key. Somehow, he’d ended up in the fields outside of Post Falls. He had nothing he’d come for, at least he had the green car.

Now he was going to get the guy, he was going to make him pay.

Kev swerved narrowly around cars and telephone poles. He drove the car like a weapon, designed to hurt everyone he could touch.

The traffic was stalled at the bridge. Far away down the river, past the curve in the direction they had come, they could hear someone yelling loudly, boisterously.

Sall had let go of Doug, she seemed to have exhausted the topic. When she pointed out the window, her voice had changed. “When I was a kid, I went tubing on this river—every summer right here,” she said. “The last time I went, you were in college here in Spokane, remember?” There was a pause. The distant sound of yelling, and of water, was fading. Someone revved an engine.

“Oh,” said Matt. “I’d almost forgotten that.”

Then, without thinking about it, Matt began to talk to Sall about the murder. He told her about the confusion of the coroner’s office with the body in the bathroom. He told her about Arlen’s missing car, and the man who had been seen driving the car, alone, sometime after Arlen died.

And Matt told her how he wanted to stop dreaming about the pieces of the body in the stalls. It was a dream of terror that had plagued him the night before, a vision of walking back into the bathroom, with the lights off, alone with the wet floor, the walls freshly blooded again.

“Do you ever dream about your dying patients? Or the dead ones?” he asked.

“No,” said Sall. “I know they’re gone. I think you’re still seeing him because you don’t know what happened. My patients died at peace.”

“Really? You don’t have any belief that maybe, just maybe—”

“Matt, you know me. Do I believe any of that? Have I ever?”

“But just last Sunday, you took Pop to church.”

“Stan is having a hard time getting out. Going to church means a lot to him.”

“Oh, so you were doing it for Stan, not for yourself.”

Sall shook her head. “You should call him. You really should. He’s getting so old, Matt, and he needs you.”

“Yeah, that’ll be the day,” said Matt. “Pop has never needed me for anything yet.”

Sall moved her fingers out of the car window, into the wind, and back toward her lips. She hadn’t smoked in five or six years, but her hands continued to mime her habit. She spoke again. “Saw Smitty yesterday at church too. He’s a preacher again.”

Smitty was an old friend, someone who went all the way back to high school days. After North Idaho Community College, Smitty went and got salvation and became a preacher at Christ’s Ordained Baptist Church in Kellogg. He was a preacher for almost fifteen years before he left town with a parishioner. Something happened, and next thing Matt heard, Smitty had been arrested in Boise. He’d gone to prison. That was all Matt knew. He’d received a few phone calls from Smitty on the home machine since then, but he’d never returned them.

He glanced at Sall, suddenly angry. “How could he come back?”

“I asked the same question of Stan. He said that Smitty repented, and the church forgave him.” She shrugged. “Lord saved him, said your pop, taught him where he’d gone wrong. Guess you repent, and the church says you’re white as snow again.”

“That’s not what the justice system says—felonies stay on the damn record.” Matt spun the wheel, moving quickly into the left lane. “That’s the way it should be. Throw the book at ’im.”

“Well, few of your friends would be clean, if all the crimes in the book, as you say, were actually prosecuted.”

Matt sighed. “Yeah, I know. But at least Russ is honest about his mistakes, he doesn’t try to cover them up with some Christian mumbo jumbo. He tells the truth. He’s the only guy who’s always been honest with me.”

“I don’t know if Smitty is covering things up at all—he seems to be telling it straight too. He just says he came to Jesus, and he left all that stuff behind.”

“Uh-huh.” He did not want to hear more about Smitty. Matt turned the radio up, fussing with the dial. Static hissed out, filling the car with white noise.

Sall shook her head at Matt’s nervous motion and flipped the radio off. “Smit was talking to us after the service on Sunday—he recognized your pop. Said he’s been trying to reach you. He told us Merrill asked him to cover the duties of the Sheriff’s Department chaplain, until they find someone new.”

“What? Him? Smitty acting as Sheriff’s Department chaplain?”

The traffic outside slowed imperceptibly, until Matt found that they were once again waiting, locked in by cars all around them.

“Guess you should have returned his call.” Sall pointed at the glove box. “Put your glasses on, wouldja?”

Reluctantly, he pushed the driving glasses on his nose. Now he could see miles ahead. All around was the smoke of stubble burning off the fields. Summer was ending.

“Well, if he’s the chaplain now, I guess I’ll have to talk to him. Maybe some one from prison was trying to kill Smitty—maybe they hit the wrong priest.”

“That’s a stupid theory,” said Sall. “I think you should look into where the body was dumped. Tubbs Hill is twenty yards from the lake—it would have been easier than the resort. Why did they take the trouble to put Arlen’s body in the bathroom?”

“Look into the resort? Val Herrick?”

“Yeah, of course—her hands aren’t clean. I can see someone having a beef with the Herricks. Maybe someone wanting to get back at her father, or even her brother, that asshole Will Herrick. After all, look at the reason you and Merrill and the sheriff’s bunch were there in the first place, instead of the city police.”

Chaff and smoke filled the distant air. Outside the window, the residue from the wheat fields blew toward them. The car edged across a lane, closer to Spokane.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“C’mon, Matt, you told me about Val getting the resort exempted from zoning when she knocked down the Potlatch lumber mill. She couldn’t get the city to agree to everything she wanted—so she just pulled strings, got the resort put under county jurisdiction, and built whatever she wanted. Don’t tell me you don’t remember!”

“So, it was a sweetheart deal. What’s your point?”

“She’s got a deal with Merrill. They’re both bottom-feeders. Geez, put it together, Matt. Someone’s out to make the Herricks pay. Finally!”

“But not Merrill,” said Matt. “Merrill is helping me out on this. He’s the one who assigned me to this case—it could make a career, this case. He’s got a good heart.”

“Andy friggin’ Merrill.” Sall rolled her eyes and sighed. “When are you going to learn that Andy Merrill doesn’t have your best interests at heart? One thing you’ve got going for you is that despite it all, you’ve genuinely got a good heart. Not Andy Merrill. He just doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself.”

“But he’s behind me one hundred percent,” Matt protested. “He’s told me how pissed he is that Valerie Herrick isn’t helping me out more. Val doesn’t want any attention—from the police or the media. Merrill gave me Russ to help out too. They’re both helping me work on this, break this case open.”

The wind from the window caught Sall’s hair, and she leaned into it before she turned back toward him. “See, there you go again with your good heart. Figure it out, Matt—Merrill isn’t really helping you, he isn’t gonna give you the time of day.”

“You really think people would keep things from me? This is a murder case.”

“I think the only one who’s going to be honest with you is Russ. You said it yourself—he’s the only guy who’s always told you the truth. He may be married to Val, but he’s always been a true friend to you.”

“Even when he drinks.”

“Yeah, I gotta admit that—even when he drinks, which is when you gotta stay away from him.” Sall’s fingers went through their mime of smoking once more. Then she turned and looked at him, the wind pulling her hair outside the car, pushing it back in.

“Whatever happens to this case, I do know you and Russ will figure it out. After all, the other thing you’ve got going for you is that you’re stubborn as hell. Makes me love you and hate you. But you’ll figure it out, like the damned bulldog you are.”

More chaff filtered into the car from outside. Sall rolled her window up.

“Thanks. I think, coming from you, that was a compliment.” Matt swung the wheel gently and they eased through a hole in the traffic. “I guess I just find it hard to believe that either of the Herricks would do something illegal— they’ve both got too much to lose.”

Sall made a guffawing sound. Then she flicked a bit of wheat or burnt husk off her skin with the edge of a finger. Afterward, she put the mirror back up. Now he was glad she had come.

Sall looked up from the list, checking things off she wanted to buy. “Anything you want in Spokane?”

He looked back at the road. “No,” he said. “I don’t need anything.”

“Why do you have to do this, again?” asked Sall. “Don’t you usually—”

“Yes, we usually notify the family immediately. This time, we’ve tried to call, but there’s no answer at all. Like they’ve been out of town, or something. Nothing. So I’m going over in person. After all, he was a member of the department. We owe it to him.”

Ahead of them, the traffic halted. “Hell,” said Matt. “Arlen helped me through. He had a tough marriage too, sounded like. Gave me some comfort in my hard times.”

“What, with me?”

“Yeah, with you. And after that last time you left, the only person who helped me was Arlen. He was honest with me. So I want to take care of his family. I owe it to him.”

“I never knew he heard about our problems,” said Sall. “I thought you just talked to Russell. You talked to Father Arlen too, huh?”

Matt did not reply. After silence, the car began moving steadily through traffic again. Industrial warehouses and open fields gave way to office complexes and mini-malls. He caught a glimpse of the Greyhound sign a few blocks away.

“Maybe the guy used a bus ticket,” he muttered to himself.

“What?” said Sall. “Some other case?”

“No, the resort thing.” Clouds were blowing over Spokane, drifting toward Five Mile Prairie. Matt tapped his fingers on the wheel. “Someone took the car. Probably the same man who killed him. But why would they connect after the car was initially taken? Maybe they rode a bus together, stopped in Coeur d’Alene, and then the killer came on alone to Spokane. That’s what I wrote in my first report to Merrill.”

“Did he buy it?”

“Don’t know. But now I think it was bullshit. I’m wondering if the Greyhound ticket to Spokane was ever used. Arlen might never have been on the bus at all. I need to find someone else who was on that bus, to check.” The wind touched Matt’s face, and the driving glasses slid down his nose. Sall looked at him, he pushed the glasses back up.

“What if the perpetrator was on the bus with him? Do you have a picture of the suspect?”

“Yeah, Russ has a composite started. Last thing he does before he retires.” Matt waved a hand in the air, dismissing the idea. “That’s not my part of it— I’m trying to find out where the man ended up. If the family will tell me, I’d like to find out why Arlen’s car was missing—and why Arlen took the bus from Wallace to Coeur d’Alene instead of driving.”

“Good luck getting any useful information out of the family today.” Sall looked out the window. “I wish we lived in Spokane—the big city,” she said abruptly.

“We got out of the Valley at least,” he said. “That’s what you wanted.”

Sall turned toward him, some kind of fury in her. “Jesus, Matt, don’t you care that you’ve been stuck in the same place for twenty years now?”

“I went from hourly security to sheriff’s lieutenant. I don’t think I’ve been stuck.”

“You’re blind to it. You’ve been mired there ever since Herrick promoted you at the Sunshine.” Sall sighed. “Damn Silver Valley mines. They kill every ambition.”

“I worked security,” said Matt. “After that summer, I never worked in the mines.”

“Whatever.” Sall turned away from him so she could look out at the burning fields, the brown air over the Spokane Valley. “It could have been us here in Spokane.”

“But it’s not,” Matt said. He took the North Division exit. Ahead of them was the expanse of Spokane’s Riverfront Park, the Opera House by the river, and the skybridges that connected the downtown skyscrapers. He stopped the car at a green awning, Auntie’s Bookstore and Café. “Thanks for coming with me.”

Sall leaned in the window. “Hey, I came for the shopping, remember? Now don’t forget—pick me up here at Auntie’s. Don’t be late, okay?” Then she was gone.

Matt looked in the rearview mirror at the traffic. As he swung the car out into the flow of traffic, he reached up and took the driving glasses off his face. A hazy cloud of husks struck the window, they drifted on the fire-blown air into the car. The gust covered his shoulders with a fine dust.

Kev drove the green car out of the rutted lane between the standing grain. The path between the wheat fields turned and twisted with the lie of the land, and it was so deeply rutted it could have served as an irrigation ditch.

Soon he came to the end of the lane, a dirt road. Here there were only turns, one way or another. To Kev’s right were the mountains of North Idaho, the lake, the river. He could imagine, in the distance, the river coming out of Coeur d’Alene, toward Spokane. To the left was the distant buzz of the highway and the city. From here he was certain he would come into the city from the rough side, where the warehouses and run-down machine shops were. In among the broken-down contract workers and bar bums, no one would ask any questions of someone who looked and acted like he did.

He listened to the engine murmur and thought of the darkness, the calm, the emptiness of the lake. He turned the engine off and stood up beside the road.

With his free hand, he rubbed his eyes again and wished he’d never woken up that morning. None of it had turned out the way he’d thought it would. Kev could hardly remember how he’d ended up over in Spokane—dropping something off, maybe someone. The tattooed man had even taken the damn blanket. Now Kev didn’t have a pad to crash in, he wished he’d at least kept that yellow blanket. He had been sleeping in the car, windows rolled up against the night air.

He didn’t care what it took, he was going to get the bastard. One of them should be dead already. And at the end of the day, it sure as fuck wasn’t going to be Kev Macht.

Five Mile Prairie rested on top of a bluff that hung above the west side of the city of Spokane. In a large, growing city, the houses with views on top of Five Mile would be part of a suburb. In Spokane, this bluff near the heart of the city remained farmland.

Up on top of the Prairie, Matt found the small house with the prefab walls. The walls were a little higher than the ground, they rested on a mortared cinder block foundation. The steps were of the same cinder blocks, loose on dirt.

Matt stopped at the side of the screen door and checked the address. He was about to knock when he realized there was someone watching him from inside the house.

“Ma’am,” he said, and took off his hat.

“You’re with the police.” She looked at him. “But you’re not from Spokane.”

“No, ma’am, I’m not. Lieutenant Matt Worthson, from Coeur d’Alene, the Bitterroot County Sheriff’s Department. We’ve tried to call you, but . . .”

The woman waved a hand nervously. “Oh, I’m sorry. My daughter threw the phone across the room last week—when her husband, or soon-to-be ex husband, called. He’s really given her a rough row to hoe.”

“I’m sorry,” said Matt.

The woman stared at him for a moment. “Anyway, so the phone isn’t work ing. But you drove over from Coeur d’Alene, so it’s not about the burning ban then? We’ve got a Spokane permit for the field-stubble fires.”

“No, ma’am. It’s something else. No one’s done anything wrong here.” He paused, took a breath. “May I come in?”

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry. What was I thinking?” She unhooked the screen door from the inside and opened it for him. He saw that she was older than her voice. Her hair was white and frizzed around her face. The lines around her mouth made her look angry, and he wondered what was the cause. She glanced out at the girl playing by the field and closed the screen door behind them.

“Sit down, please,” she said, and sat down herself in one of the brown overstuffed chairs. He stood for a moment, and then shifted his notebook to his other hand.

“I’m Paula Hart. How can I help you?” she said.

He sat down and glanced at his notebook, at the neat lines written there. “I need to ask if you are related to the Reverend Arlen Bowman.”

“Well, I’m his mother-in-law. I live here with his soon-to-be ex-wife,” she said. “They separated a few months ago. Like I said, the business with the phone. I think he’s out of town right now though. Over in your neck of the woods, actually.”

“Oh,” said Matt. “Is his wife, is Mrs. Bowman, at home?”

“She’ll be home in a little while,” she said. “Is Arlen in trouble? Is there some problem?” She laughed a short, forced laugh, and he saw that he could not keep the news.

“Ma’am, representing the Bitterroot County Sheriff’s Department, I regret, I mean, I’m sorry—I’m deeply sorry to tell you that Arlen, your son here, is deceased. He was found dead, ma’am, in Coeur d’Alene over the weekend.”

He saw that nothing had changed for her, her face ungiving. “He’s dead, Mrs. Hart. He was deceased before we found him. There was nothing we could do.”

“He’s not my son,” she said. “He’s not mine.”

“On Saturday night,” Matt said, “Arlen was found dead at a crime scene in Coeur d’Alene. From what we can tell, Arlen was not involved with any criminal activities.”

“Do you know why it happened?” she said. He could not see that what he’d said was going to have any effect on her.

“We’re working on that, ma’am.”

She looked directly at him for a moment, and then she put her face in her hands, pushing her hair up, leaning down until her head was almost on her knees.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m sorry,” he said. He saw then that she was not crying.

“What can we do,” she said from behind her hands. “What can we do?”

There was a pause. When she looked up she said, “You’ll have to wait for Betty. You’ll have to tell her yourself. I can’t.” She went into the kitchen. He looked at his notebook, and saw that he had not said most of what he had planned on saying.

From the living room, Matt could look out the front door and see the girl walking back and forth beside the wheat field. She had something in her hands, bright and moving. He looked at it for a moment before he realized that it was a fountain of water. As the water came out of the hose, it splashed to the ground, covering her legs in small mud specks.

The water pooled on the ground when she left the frame of the door, sparkling brightly as the clouds moved, washing indiscriminately across the girl’s collection of sticks and pebbles and wheat stalks. Each time she came back into the picture, he could see that the mud puddle had splashed higher on her legs.

Matt turned to see that the grandmother had come back in the room. “I’m sorry . . . ,” he pointed out the door. “She’s in the mud—I was going to say something to you.”

She looked outside, and shrugged. “Thought of something,” she said abruptly. “Little Karyn there came back late Friday night—night before you say you found him dead. He was supposed to have her for the weekend. Guess he got rid of her, he dropped her off here. But he didn’t bother to come in. And then I guess he got himself killed. Girl came in alone.”

“She did?” Matt swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. “Do you have the ticket she came in on—the Greyhound ticket?”

“Funny you should ask about that—I figure he dropped Karyn off. I didn’t think of the Greyhound. How would she get up here?” said the grandmoth er. “Don’t know why she was alone, or who dropped her off. God must of looked out for her. Her father didn’t. Irresponsible son of a bitch.” The woman shrugged. Her expression hadn’t shifted at all, as if her words did not matter. “You want to talk to her, she’s out there.”

She pointed beyond the screen door, where the girl flitted in and out of view. When she turned and went into the kitchen again, he felt as if she had gone for good.

Matt looked down at the girl, Karyn. Her dress was covered by the small things left behind by the wind. All over her arms and legs were tiny bits of dead wheat husk, it seemed like a million bugs had landed on her skin. The gust of wind died out in dust devils that whirled across the yard and disappeared among the weeds.

When he had come out of the house, the girl had looked up. At first, Matt thought she would say something to him, there was a spark of recognition in her face at the uniform.

But then she returned to building her miniature town, her movements a little nervous now. With her finger, she traced a path that wound between each of the tiny houses.

He sank down on his haunches to get to her level. “Hi, honey, can I talk to you?”

She stopped moving then. The water hose she was holding just pointed straight ahead, the water running wild, swirling around each of the stalks and pebbles, destroying her town. Gently, he moved the hose aside.

“I want to ask you about your time with your daddy last week. Do you remember your daddy taking you to Idaho, in his big green car?”

At that, the little girl dropped the hose and pushed her hands up to her face, holding them across her eyes like a shield or a charm. Matt stepped back slowly. She relaxed the farther he moved away.

When he reached the porch, she pulled her hands away from her eyes. Her face was streaked with mud. Behind him, Matt could sense the grandmother watching. The angry edge was back in her voice. “Karyn hasn’t talked much since she came back that night. I don’t think she’s said two words.”

Outside the house, there was a sound of something lost in the distance—a piece of metal falling, a tractor grinding to a halt. Matt waited, alone again in the living room. He looked at the walls. There were pictures of Arlen with his arm around his wife. In the largest picture, there was a white spot above the shoulders, as if someone had scratched the face off the picture. The scratches were deep. Someone in this house had hated Arlen.

Alongside the pictures was Arlen Bowman’s diploma in religious studies from Whitworth College in Spokane. Matt had dropped out of that same college. He wrote down the year of Arlen’s graduation in his notebook. After a time he sat down again, settling into the chair in the living room to wait.

Twenty minutes later, when Arlen’s wife came in the house, she was carrying groceries. She was a short, brown-haired woman. She moved quickly, like a bird. Matt thought of Sall when she was twenty-five. The mother-in-law helped Arlen’s wife put the groceries down, and stood behind her chair while he said most of what he had said before, and held her in her arms and rocked her back and forth, holding on while she wept.

Matt waited a moment and then broke in again. “I’m sorry to bother you any further, Mrs. Bowman, but I need some information to help me in your husband’s case. I wonder if our psychologist could spend a little time talking to your daughter. I understand she came back the night before your husband was found. Would that be all right?”

“Sure,” said Betty Bowman. “That’s fine. She’s not talking much, you know.”

Matt nodded. “And one more thing, do you happen to have a copy of the registration for his car?”

“No, no, I can’t think.” Betty Bowman’s voice broke and choked on the words. “I don’t know. The registration would just be in his car, right?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know.” He spread his hands out. “There haven’t been any personal effects recovered. Nothing has turned up.”

“Hasn’t turned up?” Inexplicably, Betty Bowman began to cry again.

“It’s all right, baby, it’s all right.” Her mother held on to her. She looked over her daughter’s shoulder at Matt, as if to accuse him.

When he stepped outside, he could see that Mrs. Bowman’s truck was still full of groceries.

The girl stood near to the sheriff’s car. As he came to the driveway, the girl was washing one of her muddy handprints off of his car tire. The shape of the girl was slicked brown with mud. Her fingernails and teeth and eyes looked out from the dark mass, white bones in the wet dirt. After he closed the car door and pulled away, she lifted her hand. The lines of the palm showed bright through the mud and the dirt that streaked her skin.

“Bye,” she whispered. “See you later.” It was like a promise. When he circled the house, she looked at him, a tendril of unscathed blond hair wafting in toward her eyes.

The road down from Five Mile Prairie was lined with storm windows and stacks of firewood. It was named Honolulu Way. Then Matt turned right on Waikiki Road. Some Spokane city planner must have had a sense of humor.

After Five Mile, Matt felt that he’d caught the family’s grief like a virus. He needed a drink. Going dry wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, sometimes the only difference was that he could remember the pain. He checked his watch— Sall would not like the fact that he was late. The argument about Doug came back to him. What the hell was it that made Sall tick—and how did Doug get it too? To just up and leave town without a by-your-leave. What he wouldn’t give for some of Doug’s gumption.

Now he managed investigations, but it didn’t seem that long ago that he’d worked for pay-by-the-hour wages. After he’d left college and come back to the Silver Valley, he ran into Smitty, who was then working on Herrick Senior’s employment desk. Smitty got him a job, and he worked security at the Sunshine Mine for years before moving over to the Sheriff’s Department.

It had never satisfied his father—Pop wanted him to be another mining hero. After all, he had the heavy build, the heft in his chest and shoulders, that made the Wallace High linebackers the terror of the Idaho Football League. On the Valley side of Fourth of July Pass, the muscled solidity of a miner came out in the genes. The valley bred heavyweight men, like marshland breeds mosquitoes. Something in the air, the ground.

Matt reached over to the glove box and took out his glasses. The buildings around him rose from the blur, shapes emerging from a dream. The image of Sall as a birdlike thing floated into his thoughts. It was an echo in his mind of the first time he saw her pull herself into the front seat of his car, years ago, when she was nineteen. Then she opened the car door, and she was there beside him, already speaking.

She was always in a bad mood when they were driving home from Spokane. He didn’t understand it. But just like the weather, there it was.

“I mean, how hard is it to keep a conversation with a family to under three hours?” she said. “I should have stayed here at Auntie’s Bookstore. Stayed here in Spokane without you. I mean, really, do you need their entire life stories and all . . .”

There wasn’t anything that reminded him of a bird any longer. “It’s my job,” said Matt. “Just doing my job.”

“Goddammit,” said Sall. “That’s not the point. I wanted to see some of Spokane together. Now the day is gone. Things never change.”

“I could be in politics now,” interrupted Matt. “If the election had been different—”

“That election can go to hell, Matt,” she said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Far ahead, pipes reached toward the sky. Venting stacks, same as for the mines in the Valley. There was more smoke than even two or three years ago.

The Spokane Valley was fading behind them now. Post Falls, Idaho, was up ahead.

“Look, I’m sorry,” said Sall after some time. “How was it? How did it go?”

“Oh, it was shitty,” he said. “It always is.”

Across the empty three lanes ahead, Matt could see a dust cloud coming toward the highway. In the sunlight, the highway trembled with heat, the dust cloud jumped and flickered against the fields. It was a car coming out of the wheat fields, moving with a dust cloud under it, like an Old West stagecoach coming out of the Palouse country.

As Matt and Sall drove into Post Falls, the green car joined the main road a few hundred yards behind them. The car slid over more than one lane as it turned from the dirt road onto the cement lanes. Then it swerved again, barely missing a road sign.

In his rearview mirror, Matt caught a glance at the car. It didn’t seem to have slowed as it hit the highway. The tires squealed and smoked as the driver turned onto the paved road. There was a distance between them, but the car still wasn’t slowing down. Matt watched it barrel toward them. He memorized the license plate, and then he saw that even after the driver had straightened the car out, the tires covered part of two lanes.

Something inside the car punched it forward. The green car leaped toward them, chewing up the distance in a few seconds. Every person he saw in a car on the road reminded him of what he’d lost. Now Matt could see a man behind the wheel. He was slumped against the window—a muscled arm rested loosely on the steering wheel.

The realization of the car’s lopsided path came a mere second before collision. On that moment, Matt spun his wheel into the gravel on the shoulder. Everything seemed to slow as the left tires spun bits of dirt and rock into the air. He twisted the wheel the other way, fishtailing wildly. As he came back onto the highway, he could see the green car moving ahead nearly a quarter of a mile away, holding its position.

The car under him slid once more. Matt pushed his driving glasses back into place and checked that the shotgun clamp between the two front seats hadn’t loosened.

Sall steadied herself in her seat. “What the hell was that?” she said.

He felt underneath his seat for his badge. Matt concentrated on the car ahead of him and began to accelerate. The green car disappeared around the curve of the highway ahead. Matt flipped on his lights. Then behind him he heard a faint, wailing siren. In the mirror now, he could see the red and blue flashing lights of a Spokane County trooper.

In the left lane, Matt slowed down, accommodating the Spokane County car. He watched as the blue and white police car flashed past, whipping around the corner ahead as if it were a few short yards instead of a mile. Matt let his foot entirely off the pedal and merged into the right lanes, ready to pull over behind the officer and lend support.

They came around the bend. On the immediate right, he could see the Spokane County Sheriff’s car parked behind a yellow truck. Someone else had been caught speeding. Far in the distance, Matt could see the speck that was the green car. It seemed to him that despite the distance, the car had slowed. Maybe, he thought, the siren had done the trick on the man in the green car after all. He sighed and turned off his lights.

Matt breathed a little slower. He felt his heartbeat return almost to normal. Sall’s eyes were now closing again. It was warm in the car. In the bright midday sun, her face was faint against the dark smoke rising from the fields all around them. He thought of the small girl at the farm, profiled against the sky over the Spokane Valley.