He walked over to the fence corner.

He looked at the posts. He looked at the wire. Four strands, tight.

Then he reached up and plucked the top wire with his thumb. Like a guitar string.

It sang. A high, clear twang that went down the whole line.

“That corner’s tight,” he said.

He didn’t say anything else. He looked across the fence. At Vern’s corn. At the end rows where Vern had stood with his rifle. At the house beyond, the old Lindgren place, with smoke coming out of the chimney.

He looked back at me.

“You want me to call anybody, Jill?”

“No,” I said.

He nodded slowly. Like he understood.

Then he went to get his hoist.

Kinley came across the pasture at a run.

I didn’t hear her coming. I was helping Arnold with the chains. I looked up and there she was. Running across the brown grass from the house in her pajama pants and her sweatshirt and her rubber boots. Her hair still messy from her pillow.

She’d heard the shot. Or she’d heard Arnold’s truck. Or she’d just looked out her bedroom window and seen the locker truck in the pasture and known.

I met her halfway and held on.

I dropped the chain and ran to her. I caught her in the middle of the pasture, about fifty yards from the fence corner, before she could get close enough to see. I wrapped both my bloody arms around her and held on.

She fought me. She tried to pull away. “Mom, let me go. Mom. Is that Domino? Mom!”

“Don’t look, baby,” I said. “Don’t look. Come back to the house.”

“Is it him?”

“Yes.”

She stopped fighting. She went limp against me. She was eleven years old and she was almost as tall as me now, and she sagged against me like she was three.

She didn’t cry until we reached the porch steps.

We walked back across the pasture together. My arm around her shoulders. Her face pressed against my shoulder so she couldn’t look back. She didn’t make a sound the whole way.

Then we got to the porch steps. And she sat down on the bottom one. And she looked at her rubber boots. The same ones she wore every morning to feed him.

And she broke.

I sat down next to her on the step. I held her while she cried. Big, gasping sobs. The kind that shake your whole body.

Behind us, in the kitchen, the radio was still playing. The pancake batter was still sitting in the bowl on the counter.

Out in the pasture, Arnold was working. I could hear the hoist.

“Who did it?” Kinley finally asked. Into my shoulder. “Mom. Who shot him?”

I didn’t want to tell her.

But I’ve never lied to my daughter. Not once. Not about Santa Claus, not about where babies come from, not about where hamburger comes from.

“Uncle Vern,” I said.

Chapter Four: Two Hundred Miles

Dale was two hundred miles away hauling corn for the co-op.

He drives a semi for the Plainview Farmers Cooperative during harvest. Runs corn from the elevator to the ethanol plant in Shell Rock and the river terminals in Dubuque. Twelve, fourteen hours a day. He was in Dubuque that Saturday, waiting in a line of semis at the terminal on the Mississippi.

I called him from the porch. He picked up on the first ring.

“Jill? What’s wrong?”

I told him.