Prologue PROLOGUE March 24, 2018 Bad Axe County, Wisconsin As she watched the shivering band set up to play the farmers market at the corner of Kickapoo and Main, Bad Axe County sheriff Heidi Kick found herself counting days again. How many days since she had danced? Pink-cheeked Augustus Pfaff was the bandleader. His cold hands were full of tuba, so he shot the sheriff a nod and a wink. She waved back, recalling that the last time she had hopped and twirled to a polka was to Pfaff''s band at the bowling alley, with Harley, her husband, at Family Fest on the afternoon of New Year''s Eve. So, that was--to calculate, she used an app on her phone--eighty-one days. The number made her wince. She loved to polka. She needed to polka.
Polka was sheer and simple joy. Sheriff Kick sighed, feeling she had lost track of herself. She and Harley had been banging heads lately. Last night things had gotten heated. Then she had a nightmare. At times like these, she tried to take a hard, clear look. Wow Long time, no polka . Augustus Pfaff, tuning up, pushed a lungful of air out his old silver tuba and delivered the first oompah of spring.
She smiled and made a decision. OK, then: today. Hungry for a two-step, her feet drifted. She found herself gazing at a bushel of yellow onions that had overwintered in an Amish root cellar and were not too awfully shriveled. Right. Today . She always looked for markers in time--points after which things would be different--and Mr. Pfaff''s oompah would mark a new beginning.
Family repair begins today. For real this time Keep it simple. No new conflicts. "I''ll take a half dozen onions. Not the muddy ones, though." "Dem muddies dunna kept better." An Amish boy, one of the Schrock kids, with a dirty face and bright blue eyes, looked behind him for the support of his granddad. "Eh, Dawdy? Ent dem muddies dunna kept better?" The elder Schrock nodded.
"OK, I''ll take a half dozen muddy ones." Sheriff Kick passed the boy a five-dollar bill. He passed it to his sister. She showed it to the granddad, who pointed a bent finger across the market, and the girl sprinted away with the bill gripped tight and her bonnet strings and long black dress flapping. Waiting for her change, the sheriff used her phone app again. She put in April 15, 2016. The app came back with 707. So it had been 707 days since she had shot Baron Ripp, a local guy who had been rearing back to club her with a steel fence post.
Secretly, improperly, she had shot to maim, and she hadn''t killed Ripp, who deserved worse than death. He had lost his left leg at mid-thigh before heading off to manage two life sentences as a one-legged rapist, sex trafficker, and killer of other people''s daughters. She hoped he was popular. The little Amish girl, breathless and smiling, put three one-dollar bills back in her hand. "Danke!" "You''re welcome, sweetheart." She had been the interim sheriff at the time, and three months later, the Ripp case had swayed a special election in her favor. Now she put the date of the election into her app and it came back with 619. So anywhere between 707 and 619 days is exactly how long she and Harley had been debating the impact of her job, the drain of her workload and her trauma, the fallout from her absence, on the family.
"Mommy." As if to score a point for Harley, their daughter, Ophelia, tugged on the cuff of the sheriff''s new dusty-rose Carhartt jacket. "Did you forget me? I said I''m cold." "I know, hon." She marked the place in her thoughts. "How about chase the boys? That''ll warm you up. We''ll go inside the library in a few minutes." With an emphatic roll of her eyes, Ophelia, they called her Opie, seven going on seventeen, rejected the suggestion to chase her twin little brothers around the first farmers market of the season.
She had chosen not to wear her winter coat because the coat, like her mother''s new jacket, was also pink. So either Opie was no longer liking pink, or she was no longer liking her mother, or both. Whatever it was, life was choices, and the oldest Kick child had chosen to be cold. Augustus Pfaff''s entire band was tuning now, bleating and plinking, wheezing, thumping and rattling--five goose-bumpy old men in lederhosen and short-sleeved white blouses--tuba, clarinet, banjo, accordion, bass drum, and snare--the Principals of Polka. "Or, sweetheart," the sheriff suggested, "how about you go sit in Rosie Glick''s buggy? I''m sure that would be OK. You''d be out of the wind." Opie glowered her refusal. Against the trembling girl shoved a raw wind from the northeast.
On fields beyond the parking lot, sunshine strove against the last dregs of snow. Flocks of starlings whorled above the muddy void. Opie turned her blue-lipped scowl toward Main Street. The state highway as it bisected the town of Farmstead was winter-fatigued, rimed with sand and broken into chuckholes by heavy trucks barreling elsewhere. The banners installed last summer by the Chamber of Commerce-- VELKOMMEN! WE''RE GLAD YOU''RE HERE!--snapped and frayed against their poles. "Or," Sheriff Kick tried, realizing Opie might have heard her fight last night with Harley, "you could think about how much Daddy and I love you and your brothers, no matter what. But maybe that would make you so hot from love you would sweat." "Mommy.
" "What?" "Stop that." She returned to her thoughts: her workload, her trauma, her absence. and the pressure on her to perform , Harley had reiterated last night. In the special election, she had defeated "Olaf the Handsome"--her popular chief deputy, Olaf Yttri, a good guy and a great deputy--by eleven votes to become the first-ever female elected sheriff in Wisconsin. Olaf the Handsome had left the Bad Axe to become a police chief up north. He was mourned and missed by the same people who judged and tested Sheriff Heidi Kick. "Two rhubarb jams, please," she told Eli Glick. "And two quarts of mustard pickles.
" The granddad of Rosie, Opie''s Amish friend, nodded and through his bushy salt-and-pepper beard muttered something inaudible but no doubt pleasant. She moved on to the beekeeper, Amos Yoder, and his honey. Then the Zwickle family and their maple syrup. Opie tagged unhappily along in jeans and an old flannel shirt that was actually a pajama top because she didn''t have a real flannel shirt, yet she was determined to wear one. Her brothers, Taylor and Dylan, now four, were dressed as if for sledding and played happily on the parking cleats, leaping between them. " Eins, zwei, drei! " whooped Augustus Pfaff, and his chilly little band burst into "Happy Valley Polka." But instead of tickling her feet, the tune sent Sheriff Kick right back to numbers. A lack of happiness at home, in their own little valley, was her issue.
Last night Harley had complained that she "never" took days off. He had wondered: Was it that she couldn''t take days off? Was she not capable? " Never is a big word," she had told him. " Never is a fighting word." Like the baseball guy he was, he had answered, "Bring it. Hit me with the stats." Well, by light of day, her contract with Bad Axe County gave her two of every ten days off, so in the 619 days since her election, that came to 124 days--a far cry from "never." "Let''s see," she said next to Sara Bontrager. "I think I''m out of butter.
" She was never out of butter. Opie snorted, crossed her arms and shivered. "I''ll take five pounds." It seemed like a good comeback: 124 days is a far cry from "never." But just after she imagined this response, a text the sheriff had been waiting for arrived, from her night dispatcher, Denise Halverson. She had called Denise at 3:00 a.m. in a post-fight lather and asked her, when she had time, to count up the days that she had actually taken off.
Denise had needed to check with Payroll at the county clerk''s office, open nine to noon today. Denise''s text said: 27 total out of 124 The sheriff stared, not believing. Denise added: Only 6 so far this year That could not be right. She reached to take her five pounds of Amish butter, a roll wrapped in wax paper. But no, that could not be correct. Yes, hon, that is correct. and not good for you Then her phone rang. "OK, Heidi," Denise said, sounding nervous, "I have to tell you something that I swore I wouldn''t tell you, but now, since you asked for these numbers, and you and Harley are having this fight, I feel I have to tell you.
" Sheriff Kick turned away from Opie. "Tell me what?" she said. She bit her lip and felt her pulse speed. Denise was a good friend who watched her back. "I shouldn''t. Oh, shit. Heidi, I know it''s not my business. But you''re my business.
OK. Well, I saw Harley with somebody up at the Ring Hollow Dam." "Somebody? You mean a woman?" "A woman, yeah." "When? Doing what?" "Last Friday about lunchtime. Remember that day when it was weirdly nice out and we all thought spring was here? Harley and this chick were sitting in the sunshine on that concrete dam spout. It looked like they were having a picnic. Long blond hair--" Denise paused as if to mute herself. "That is completely all I know.
I have no idea who.