Chapter 11 2025
The sheriff sits in his patrol car outside the tidy brick house. Snow patches the winter-worn lawn, and on the porch, a pallet of red geraniums waits to be planted.
Delivering the news that a loved one is dead, even when it’s suspected, is one of the hardest parts of the job. The sheriff’s only had to do it a handful of times, and each left a bruise on his soul.
He thinks of Grace and feels the black cloud descend.
Don’t go there, he tells himself, which of course only makes him spiral deeper into the darkest misgivings of his mind.
Grace once told him the brain doesn’t hear negatives, which means if you tell yourself, “Don’t go there,” the mind hears, “Go there.”
It was early in their relationship, and they’d been on a golf date. Grace was a talented golfer. Her dad was a semipro, and Grace followed in his footsteps and played all through high school and college. The sheriff was middling on his best day. He hit the ball far but without any control.
They were on the sixteenth hole, a par-four.
His young male pride had already taken a beating, but miraculously, off the tee, he’d hit a perfect drive over three hundred yards.
Which meant, if he hit a decent pitch and sunk his putt, finally he’d win a hole, a minor consolation, but one he desperately wanted.
A small pond was between him and the green, and as he stepped to his ball, he muttered, “Don’t hit it in the water.”
“You know you just told yourself to hit it in the water,” Grace chirped from the cart. Her feet were on the dash, her tan legs taunting him.
“No,” he said. “I told myself not to hit it in the water.”
That’s when she explained how the brain doesn’t hear negatives.
“So you’re saying I’m going to hit the ball in the water?” he said.
“I’m saying you’re saying you’re going to hit the ball in the water.”
Pride bristling, he shook his head, turned back to the ball, swung too hard, and did exactly as she predicted. Kerplunk. She giggled her signature laugh, and he knew right then he wanted to spend the rest of his life hearing that sound.
With a deep breath, he shakes away the memory and steps from the car.
The screen door swings open, and Heddy Reicher steps out. Her hair is tied up in a sloppy ponytail high on her head, and she is dressed in a Winona State University sweatshirt, faded jeans, and rubber boots. She looks young, happy, and unworried, and he hates that he’s about to ruin that.
“Sheriff?” she says as if glad to see him, then suddenly, realizing the likely reason for his visit, the smile drops.
“May I come in?” he asks.
She leads him into the house. It’s bright, clean, and Pottery Barn chic.
Over the fireplace hangs a wood crucifix, and on the mantel is a wedding photo of Heddy smiling up at the reverend.
The sheriff knows from his previous conversation with her that she and the reverend were newlyweds, their marriage less than six months old when he went missing.
Heddy takes a seat on the couch, and the sheriff takes the armchair across from her. She sits with her feet on the floor and her hands clasped on her knees.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She tenses then, subtle, almost like an aftershock, her expression shifts ever so slightly into an expression that takes a second for the sheriff to recognize as relief. She straightens it immediately. “You found him?”
“This morning. A woman walking her dog saw the body in the pond.”
“The pond? Black Hollow Pond?”
The sheriff nods.
“What was he doing at the pond?” she asks half a second before a spark of recognition flickers across her face.
“Heddy?” he asks.
She blinks it away. “How’d he even get there? I had the truck, and it was blizzarding. The roads were snowed in.”
“I was hoping you might be able to tell me. Is it possible someone from the service might have driven him before the storm got bad?”
Her finely teased brows furrow as she considers it. “I doubt it. There was hardly anyone at the service that morning, it being Thanksgiving break. And the only people there old enough to drive were me and Ms. Bamford.”
The sheriff makes a mental note to speak again with the director, though he’s certain she wasn’t involved.
When the reverend went missing, Ms. Bamford seemed genuinely baffled by his disappearance as well as frustrated by it.
She commented on what a headache it was going to be to find a substitute for the next day’s service.
Daily devotion is an elemental part of the school’s curriculum, and there are so few ministers these days.
He decides to try a different tack. “Is it possible he went to the pond to meet someone?”
Heddy tilts her head at the question, then her eyes widen. “Oh. You’re asking if he was having an affair?” Her lips twitch as if about to smile, but she thinks better of it and stops herself. “Not even a possibility.”
Even without her certainty, the theory feels wrong. The reverend was dressed in his preaching clothes, and Black Hollow Pond during a blizzard is about the least romantic place the sheriff can think of for a rendezvous.
The next question is more difficult. “The other possibility is he went there alone,” he says. “Thanksgiving can be a difficult time for some people—”
Heddy’s head is shaking before he finishes the thought.
“Not a chance. My husband considered suicide a sin, and worse, he thought of it as the most cowardly act a person could commit. His dad killed himself.”
“But maybe—”
“No,” she says with absoluteness. “He wouldn’t have done that. Plus he was ridiculously happy since we moved back here. He had everything he ever wanted.”
The sheriff takes a beat before continuing because, if it wasn’t an affair or an accident or suicide, that leaves only one other possibility. “Was your husband having any problems with anyone?”
Heddy’s large sea-blue eyes hold his but then flick up and to the right half a second before they return, and she says, “My husband devoted his life to helping people. He was a man of God, and everybody loved him.”