Valentine came out of the kitchen, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, wiping her hands on a paper towel while the smell of bacon turned to burning.

“What are you doing here, Red?” Sheriff Phelps asked, first thing, looking nearly as surprised to see the teenager as Red was to see him. Momentarily, it distracted the sheriff from the order he had originally planned to say things.

“I p-picked up Billy last night,” Red stammered. “I brought him on home here.”

His hair flattened by sleep, his jeans and T-shirt rumpled, and one side of his face still creased from sleeping on the teeth edge of the zipper of the sleeping bag-Red looked confused by the hullabaloo and scared by the sheriff’s tone of voice. One of the deputies told people later, with a laugh, that Red had that look teenagers get when they don’t know if they’re in trouble, the look that says, Oh, shit, whatever it is, please don’t tell my dad.

“You weren’t drinking at Bailey’s, were you, Red?”

Red was only sixteen and shouldn’t have been drinking at all.

“No, sir,” he said with fervor, looking willing to swear to it on a Bible if the sheriff produced one. “I was just drivin’ around ’cause I like storms, and I saw somebody lying in the parking lot at Bailey’s, and it was Billy. He was drunk as a skunk! I couldn’t just leave him there to get run over, so I hauled him into my truck and brought him home to Mrs. Crosby.”

“Why are you still here, Red?”

The kid blushed as red as his hair. “Mrs. Crosby, she told me to call my mother and tell her it was too dangerous to drive in the storm and that Mrs. Crosby said I should sleep over.”

“Where’d you sleep?”

Red gestured to a sleeping bag. “There, on the floor.”

The sheriff turned to Valentine. “What did Billy do when Red brought him home?”

In a high, nervous voice, she said, “He passed out on that couch.”

Collin had moved over to stand beside her, and now she tried to get him to leave the room, but he wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t unpleasant about it, but he didn’t move. His mom shook her head and gave up trying.

“Son,” the sheriff said to him, in a kind but firm tone, “do you have your own room?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you need to go there now and shut the door.”

Collin obeyed, and they all heard a door click shut.

They didn’t hear it quietly open seconds later.

The sheriff turned back to Red. “Did you see Billy get up and leave?”

The teenager nodded. “I thought he got up to go to the bathroom and then probably went on in to sleep with”-he blushed again-“Mrs. Crosby. He never came back in here.”

“What time did Billy leave the room?”

“Had to have been around eleven. Wasn’t all that long since he laid down.”

“Did he come in to sleep with you?” the sheriff asked Valentine.

“No,” she said, her lower lip trembling. She’d asked the sheriff what Billy had done this time, but he hadn’t told her yet.

“Did you know he wasn’t in the house?”

“Not until I got up this morning and looked out back.”

“Do either of you know what Billy did or where he went between the time he got off this couch and the time Mrs. Crosby saw him in the hammock?”

They both said no.

“Where is Billy’s truck, Mrs. Crosby?”

She looked relieved to be able to say, “Oh, he doesn’t have it anymore! Mr. Linder bought it. It’s parked behind Hugh-Jay and Laurie’s house.”

“No,” the sheriff told her, “it isn’t there now.”

He made that fact sound ominous, which confused and scared her more.

“Mrs. Crosby, does Billy have any guns?”

She looked terrified now. In a whisper, she said, “Yes.”

“Show me where they are, please.”

All of Billy’s three pistols and five shotguns and rifles were where they were supposed to be, in a cheap gun case in their bedroom.

“You’re sure he doesn’t have any other guns, Valentine?”

The “Mrs. Crosby” had disappeared.

“No!” She was unconsciously tearing apart the paper towel in her hands, and bits of it floated to the carpet. The burning smell was stronger now, but only Collin noticed it. He ran from his room the back way into the kitchen to turn down the heat and remove the pan from the top of the stove. He could hear his mother saying, “I mean, I don’t know about any other guns! I’m sorry, I don’t think so. Please-”

The sheriff took all that to mean that Billy might have used one of Hugh-Jay’s own guns to kill him.

“What’s he done?” Valentine’s voice rose to a quavering high pleading.

The sheriff took a sort of pity on her and told her. “Billy has gone and killed Hugh-Jay Linder and done something bad with Laurie.” The sheriff set his jaw, looking as if he was fighting one urge to cry and another one to detonate in fury. “We can’t find her. He may have killed her, too. You have any idea what Billy might have done with Laurie Linder?”

Valentine screamed, “No!”

Her little boy came racing out of the kitchen, his face a pale little raisin of scrunched-up fear and worry. He ran up to her side and grabbed her hand. This time, given that he had already heard the worst, nobody made him move away from his mother.

The deputy who’d grabbed Billy came in and reported on it.

“Get him an attorney, Valentine,” the sheriff advised her.

“We can’t afford-”

“Too damn bad,” one of the part-time deputies muttered, before turning and slamming his way out of the house. The sheriff and his other men followed, without offering Valentine any other advice she wouldn’t be able to take. “Where is he?” she screamed, running out into the yard after them. She saw him then in the backseat of the sheriff’s car and stopped, not attempting to get any closer to her husband. Billy’s head was lying back on the seat and his eyes were closed. If he heard her, he didn’t look in her direction.

“Are you taking him to jail now?”

The sheriff threw her a look that said she ought to be able to figure that out for herself, and then they all drove away, leaving her standing in the yard with Red and Collin beside her.

ONCE THEY HAD BILLY behind bars in the jail at the county courthouse in Henderson City, the sheriff and his men were free to go looking for Laurie.

What they found instead was Billy Crosby’s truck.

It was caught up in a streambed where it had been carried along by last night’s flooding. Inside, tied up in a plastic bag that had protected it from the water, was a bloody yellow sundress. Belle Linder was later asked to identify it as belonging to her sister-in-law, which she was able to do. The crime lab at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation connected the blood to Laurie Linder. The conclusion was eventually and regretfully reached that Laurie was dead-even if they never found her body to prove it.

Billy Crosby refused to confess what he’d done with her, so her family never had the solace of her funeral. His final words on the subject that anybody local heard were at his trial: “All right! God Almighty, I killed the fucking cow, but I didn’t kill any people!”