youngest girl, Hannah, peeks out of the barn, too late to see the police car. The older sisters, Kelli and Mandy, are too busy brushing the horses and petting their velvet noses. The girls aren’t much help to Dinah, but she loves having them at the farm. It’s good for them to remember their roots. Moreover, Dinah’s daughter, Deborah, needs some time at home without them. As she sets a bucket under her prized cow, Dinah hears an engine in her drive, and she knows her son, Jared, is leaving, heading for the bar. It’s only three in the afternoon. Ever since his wife, Paula, left fourteen years ago, Jared has spent most of his free time at the bar.
Back in the heart of River Bend, a car pulls into the drive at the Muylder Mansion, a historic home open to the public from twelve o’clock to three o’clock on Saturdays during the summer, unless its curator, Mrs. Tabitha Schwartz, is sick or out of town with her seniors’ club. Mrs. Schwartz—who often feels lonely since her husband died, and who thought her seniors’ club would do the trick, and who thought curating this mansion would occupy more of her time in the summer, and who was distraught to find the funding of the mansion was practically nonexistent and that the Muylder Foundation wouldn’t open the museum more than three hours a week, not when there is a perfectly good replica of the mansion at the Muylder Museum in Kalamazoo, and who was downright dismayed to learn that her seniors’ club consisted only of her and a bunch of old biddies eating deviled ham on white bread—rushes to put on a pot of coffee and open a box of butter cookies. It has been ever so long since the mansion had a visitor. Mrs. Schwartz fluffs her hair and waits, but nobody comes in. When she looks through the window, she’s disappointed. It’s only one of River Bend’s boys in blue, stopped in her parking lot in an unmarked car, talking on his radio. When a beat-up brown Buick drives by, the officer pulls his car out after it. What a waste of a pot of coffee.
Derek Williams sits with a low heart at the kitchen table of his under-furnished modular home, waiting for the sound of his uncle Steve’s truck. His kitchen sink, clogged again, is beyond his ability to fix—his ability being limited to emptying bottles of drain cleaner into the pipes. When he hears the engine, his heart sinks further. No doubt his uncle will give him shit for calling about such a simple task. Steve will leave his own tools in the truck with the sole purpose of borrowing Derek’s just so he can judge his nephew. Why on earth does Derek have an adjustable wrench instead of a good crescent wrench set? Really, his uncle should shut it, given that Derek works so many hours at the hospital, and doesn’t have time for tool shopping, or energy to complete his own home repairs. That’s another sore spot with Uncle Steve, who staunchly believes a real man takes care of his own home. How Derek wishes he could call a different handyman. But no doubt if he did, if he not only called but paid another man, it would get back to his uncle and his father, Jared. No, it’s easier to steel himself. Stiff upper lip and all. As Derek answers the door and lets his uncle inside, he hears police sirens in the distance.
As his uncle sets to work on the sink, Derek’s phone dings: a text from his half sister, Skyla. She has sent the same message to him and her older half sisters, Linda—who lives in Texas—and Paige, who lives up in Kalamazoo. Skyla is sixteen, bored, and always on her phone. She sends her siblings five or six texts a day, emoji-heavy missives from River Bend. Today, the text is a shaky video of a crummy old Buick pulling into the drive of the house next to the park. The owner of the Buick gets out and goes into his house, and then a white car—an unmarked police car—pulls through the alley and parks behind the house. Skyla can’t believe her family is missing this. Some shit’s going down at that creepy house, she texts, with a Wow emoji: the wide eyes, the mouth an O.