Two minutes ago it had been whole. Now I’m telling myself: It’s only a thing, an object. It doesn’t matter. But I hesitate throwing it away and I’m trying to piece it back together, this blue egg with golden flowers painted on it. Maybe this porcelain knickknack had it coming and my backing into the side table while vacuuming was foretold, written in the stars but too mundane for anyone to predict. It makes me think some things are meant to endure, like my one hundred year old grandmother. This blue egg was meant to perish in a banal hoovering accident. My best friend dies of cancer so quickly I hardly get a chance to say goodbye, but my parents still have paintings I drew thirty years ago. I like to think I’ll have better luck than this blue egg, that someone as clumsy as I am won’t back into me while cleaning the bedroom or come at me in the street with a rabid dog on the end of a flimsy rope. It could happen.

The damage isn’t too bad. I try to superglue the pieces together but some get stuck to my fingertips. It hurts and I panic, because I don’t know how to remove them without causing more damage. Some of the golden paint has chipped and my repair efforts have created another fissure. Bits are slipping through my fingers, like yolk, and fragments of shell remain stuck on my skin. I try to put the egg aside and go back to what I was doing, but it takes me twenty minutes to pick the pieces off my hands and fingers. I’m the only one in the house who will register the egg’s demise. My husband probably doesn’t even know it was here and our daughter won’t miss it either. Finally I scrape the last bit off my palm and manage to wrap the egg in tissue and put it in a drawer. I’m wondering how to go about fixing it properly when my attention veers onto my next task.

The last time Debbie walked in the woods, Kendra went with her kicking at leaves and trying not to cry. The sisters reached the tree that housed the ruins of a tree house. A pair of weathered boards nailed to a branch and the remains of a frayed rope ladder hung from the tree—a reminder of their youth. Debbie leaned on her sister who almost had to carry her back to the house, to her chair by the window overlooking the vegetable garden where the rampant pumpkin vine had taken over. Kendra lifted and steadied her, remembering the fights they had in the tree house. The girls were supposed to share, but Debbie would climb up gathering the rope ladder behind her. Kendra screamed and begged her to let her come up. She smiled and taunted her younger sister and pelted her with crab apples.

“Build your own,” she said. “This one’s mine.” She turned her back on Kendra and used a stick to stir an empty saucepan she’d taken from the kitchen. Kendra tried to climb the tree, but couldn’t pull herself up. She struggled, falling, scraping her legs on the rough bark. She retreated to the loft in the barn, looking for abandoned swallows nests, weaving straw into a rough mat, waiting for her mother to call them for lunch. Kendra hid, ignoring her mother’s shouts and pleas for her to come in and eat. Waiting for Debbie to run by, Kendra slipped out of the barn and headed back to the woods. She pulled at the rope ladder and hacked at it with a sharp piece of stone until it was mangled.

Debbie barely weighed ninety pounds now. It was easy for Kendra to help her along. She could have scooped her up and cradled her. But they stumbled toward the house, Debbie trying to suppress her low moaning and imagining what the pain relief would feel like. At the bottom of the porch steps they stopped. Debbie caught her breath slowly and turned around to look back at the woods, the barn. Kendra started to cry.

“It’s going to be ok,” said Debbie.

Kendra sat in the diner and read. The long-time church deacon was charged with embezzling funds (also front page news). Twenty-five cords of firewood were stolen from a farm. A deputy was called out last Tuesday to dispatch a rabid raccoon. A gang of underage kids were stopped in the state park for alcohol infractions. That’s what the paper called them. Infractions. Attenburg’s paper had a hall of shame too. Pictures of men wanted for non-payment of child support, armed robbery and check forgery. They all looked the same—skinny, mulleted, scowling. She took a good look at the picture of Nelson Arnold. Everyone was looking for him and this mugshot taken two years ago felt like as close as she might get to him.

The waitress brought her coffee and omelette. Kendra waved over Andy Mercer, her counterpart in Attenburg. There’d been three sightings of Arnold here in the last week, but the Sheriff’s department had come up with nothing. Both sheriffs thought there might be a mass hallucination—but Attenburg was only a forty-minute drive from Seneca so Kendra decided to cruise over on this Tuesday morning and follow up the lead.

Andy Mercer was a good policeman and friend. He and Kendra had worked cases together before and got to know each other fairly well. For a small town sheriff he had an impressive arrest record and had solved some serious crimes. He sat down with Kendra and smiled. A second later a coffee was placed in front of him. He ordered himself some eggs.

“I doubt anything’s going on here,” he said. “I’ll show you what I got back at the station. Not a heck of a lot.”

“I can add that to the next to nothing I got already,” said Kendra. She slammed her hand on the table, startling Andy. If she burst into tears now, she might as well give up on the case. This two-month crime spree and now a murder already had tested her patience and her frustration was beginning to show.

She dragged her sunlounger out of the garage onto the lawn. It had been a long while since she’d been able to lie out and about five years since she’d had on her swimsuit. The weather had been terrible. The sun had finally come out, accompanied by humidity. She sat back. The warmth felt good on her skin, soothed her veiny and bluish legs. This spot was the only place outside she could tolerate. Here she had her privacy. No neighbors could look in on her and it was quiet. She put on her sunglasses and dozed off.

The sound of her daughter coming into the house awoke her. The puppy started to bark and whimper. This dog, like her granddaughters, was uncontrollable. They’d made absolutely no attempt to train it. Already it’d had three accidents in the house. By the time they left she’d be forced to change the carpet. The roar of a car engine and the continuing whimpering told her Mindy had taken off again, leaving the dog. It would be up to Ina to look after it. The granddaughters had vanished, which was a blessing. But the Lord giveth and he taketh away and she was left with the dog.

Inside, the house was dark and cool. Ina changed into a light skirt and blouse and shuffled into the spare bedroom. The puppy was in its cage, whining and crying. She didn’t like to see an animal suffering. She shook her head. When would her granddaughters learn responsibility? The puppy ran out of the cage and leapt on her when she opened the door. It barked happily and wagged its whip of a tail. Its nails dug into her legs, tender and lumpy with varicose veins. Ina picked up its leash and took it outside.

The dog darted excitedly around the yard, behind the bushes, in and out of the garage. It raced in circles like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit. Ina walked slowly, following it up the driveway and back again. The dog sped off and she called it back, but it was gone. For a few minutes she couldn’t see it. She walked after it, calling, looking for it to run out from a neighbor’s yard, but it had vanished. Further up the drive she called again, tried whistling before walking towards the main road. Cars whipped by, but there was no sign of the dog. Again she called, shouting this time, but he didn’t come back.

She didn’t feel badly for her granddaughters, Mindy or the dog. They put her in this position and now, even though they said nothing, they blamed her. Ina was fixing herself lunch in the kitchen, the dog already forgotten, when Mindy drove up and leapt out of the car crying and screaming. Ina went outside and saw the dog in the back seat of Mindy’s car, it’s muzzle bloodied and hindquarters smashed. Mindy found it on the main road.

It must have run off, said Ina. She admitted she let it out to piddle and watched it sniff around the yard. Must have chased after a squirrel. Mindy sobbed and paced, not knowing where to turn. Ina took herself back to the sunlounger and prayed quietly. She asked the Lord for strength and listened out for her granddaughters’ sorrowful shrieks. Mindy and her girls spent the afternoon in the darkened spare room crying while their grandfather buried their dog.

Her brother Geoff met Hayley while Jenny was working as a medic at the Red Cross in Phnom Penh. Before she got on the plane to return to the UK for the first time in two years, she assisted the senior surgeon in a complex amputation. He’d texted to let her know the elderly female patient died. “We were too late,” he’d written. It happened more than she liked. Many patients, particularly the elderly, arrived at the clinic only to be diagnosed as terminal, having suffered for years. Jenny was due back in Asia in two weeks time, but her brother had almost convinced her to stay on in Essex. It wouldn’t be for him. She didn’t believe her parents had become the burden he described. Being back at Rookery Farm, walking the muddy footpaths, even in the dead of winter, was exhilarating. Perhaps she’d had enough of the tropics. For the first time in months her heat rash had vanished. She loved her mother’s cooking.

Geoff and Hayley sat on the dais, smiling and laughing at the best man’s speech. They were flanked by their parents and the wedding party. Hayley had two sisters, both older and married. They looked on with distain. Jenny couldn’t remember their names, but Geoff assured her they were horrible, complete and utter bitches. Hayley was a bit too orange for Jenny’s restrained tastes. She and her sisters freely used spray-on tan, which in the stuffy hotel ballroom had started to leech into their satiny dresses. The bride wore a tiara and her fingernails were bejewelled with tiny rhinestones. Jenny wondered how she would like being a farmer’s wife. That was assuming Geoff stayed on at Rookery Farm. She got the impression he’d be happier working in a more social environment.

Since they’d met Hayley had remarked on Jenny’s gaunt appearance to her face and behind her back. She’d overheard her telling Geoff she was started to look like one of them, like one of them refugees. Jenny went along on the hen night, where her somewhat emaciated figure was commented on by many of Hayley’s friends. One girl asked her if she had cancer. It had been a long night and Geoff had called her far too early to get all the details. He was paranoid and asked a lot of questions about male strippers and a woman called Mel.

She ate her cake and the piece of the woman sitting next to her. Keeping a watchful eye on her parents, Jenny reckoned her father was fading. He’d nodded and snapped his head back a few times during the speeches. Her mother looked uncomfortable, as if her stockings were twisted or too tight. It was time to go. She walked her parents to the cloakroom where they retrieved their coats and headed out to a cab waiting in the rainy night. As soon as the cab turned onto the main road, her father fell asleep.

Sheriff Kendra is already dealing with too many crimes, so this week, I’m going to put my mind to another storyline lingering in the back of my mind. I don’t know if there is a crime here, but there certainly is a kind of crime scene and a minor misdemeanor. [more about WAG here.]
* * * *
This kitchen. She spent almost her entire childhood in this room. Eating all her meals at the table, the family didn’t have a dining room, watching her mother cook or do the washing up. When she was old enough, she helped too, peeling potatoes and carrots, making cups of tea, doing chores for her mother. She loved making cakes for Sunday lunch and had mastered the Victoria sponge by the time she started primary school. The same curtains, speckled with tiny red flowers, hung at the window above the sink and on the side of the cupboard where the mugs lived, was the corn dolly her mother had pinned there 25 years ago. Bought at the Tendring Country Show from another farmer’s wife, it kept them safe, brought them a gentle prosperity. Her mother kept the radio on Classic FM these days, loved the Flower Duet and Bryn Terfyl. She’s almost in tears when he sings Shenandoah. These are the sounds Jenny hears the kitchen, the music comes out of the oven, the taps and rises into the rafters with the kettle’s steam.

Two steps beyond the kitchen door what was a small patch of lawn has been churned into thick mud by tractors and lorries crossing the yard. Sunday afternoon there was a break in the weather and in the sunshine and a convoy of lorries arrived and men wearing white coveralls and face masks, enormous black Wellington boots. They loaded the dairy herd, 109 Jerseys lowing and struggling up the muddy ramps. Each lorry was sprayed down with disinfectant before leaving the farm. Her father, now 67, watched them roll into the lane, turning left towards St Osyth to an abattoir within the infection zone where the herd would be slaughtered and incinerated.

Foot and mouth had been confirmed two farms away on a Tuesday and the January gales off the North Sea pushed it across the fields, hopping from blade of grass to flinty pebble then onto a stray leaf, which landed in the milking parlor. But Rookery Farm had been in lock down before the disease landed on the peninsula. They started using the word biosecurity at the breakfast table. Between milkings her father watched the twenty-four hour news channel, watched pyres built from sheep and cattle burn. When her mother told him to turn it off, watch the darts, he sat and shook his head. He picked up the phone and called around to his neighbors, men he’d usually chat to at the Whalebone. They were panicking and waiting for the all clear that wouldn’t come.

Her mother was passive by nature and easily upset. Like many women of her generation she was very much a domestic. Her rounds of cleaning, airing, baking, preparing, scrubbing and mending were ongoing. She sewed up one hole only to find a stray button that needed reattaching. She arranged flowers at the church and prayed for the forgotten. On occasion she had helped with the cows, but preferred her vegetable garden. She was the type of person whose produce was widely discussed by fellow horticulturalists.

When the cows left, Jenny and her mother pulled on their boots and walked through the silent parlor, the empty cowshed. Their mournful stroll ended at the garden. A few Brussels sprouts clung to a thick stalk and the leeks were almost ready to pick. Jenny wasn’t sure if either of her parents had slept much since she’d been home and worried as her mother teetered along in front of her, inspecting the winter crop. Her mother sat herself daintily atop an upturned bucket and pulled her husband’s silver flask from her pocket. She struggled to unscrew the cap, but when she managed it, took a hefty pull before handing it to her daughter. The whisky burned her throat and its vapor rose into her sinuses. She passed it back to her mother who took another two swigs before bursting into tears.

Paperwork, piles of it, formed precarious towers on her desk. So finely balanced, an unusually heavy fly, like one of those fat green ones, might send papers floating across the office if it landed on a sunny white spot to rest its wings and rub together its tiny black arms. There were quite a few flies around and Kendra noticed they were curiously large. She sipped a mug of sugary coffee and flipped through crime scene files related to the Arnold case, looking for something she might have missed the first time around. There was the trooper shooting, home and business break ins, a gun story robbery. Arnold was a one man crime wave and the more she looked at the photos, blood drops, broken windows, the trooper’s lifeless body, the more she believed it was going to take a bit of luck to catch him. He wasn’t a master criminal, but he was on the move and he knew the backwoods of Seneca County. He had friends and family all over. Kendra was certain they were helping him hide.

Nelson Arnold had been on the run since April when he broke out of jail in the next county over. Now it was mid-August and every cop in Western New York still was looking for him, but there were no real leads. Lots of reports came into the switchboard, but they were as credible as Sasquatch sightings—tall bearded creatures roaming through cornfields or disappearing into the woods. One farmer brought her into the middle of his soybean field to examine some footprints he believed to be Arnold’s. When Kendra looked down at his boots, they were about the same size. Turned out the farmer really wanted to talk. He was worried Arnold would steal his shotguns.

On this warm Saturday morning the Arnold crisis felt less immediate than it had in the days since the trooper was shot. Three days of rain had slowed the manhunt. A team of tracker dogs followed a trail down from the trooper crime scene through the gorge towards Westville, but they lost the scent near Lake Seneca. Arnold may have been a few steps in front of the pack, but no one saw him and he managed to slip away, if he’d really been there in the first place. It was impossible to know. Kendra tended the scratches and bruises she’d suffered during the chase through the undergrowth. There were countless insect bites on her legs and a poison ivy rash grew on her left hand and arm.

The weekend receptionist hollered back to Kendra, which she didn’t like, to let her know she had a visitor. Before she could stand up to see who it was, a large woman, bursting out of her tank top and blue jeans barged into Kendra’s office. It was Arnold’s daughter, by whom she wasn’t sure. Dealing with irate family members was usually easily done with a lot of shouting and threatening arrest. Taylor-Ann Phillips came at her in a rage not pausing to give Kendra the chance to deploy her usual tactics. Within seconds she was on top of the Sheriff pummelling her and screaming.

“You bitch!” Taylor-Ann’s sweat dripped into Kendra’s eyes. “You bitch. Gimme back my kids!”

By the time two deputies dragged the woman off to the cells, Kendra was in tears. She crawled behind her desk, opened the bottom drawer and searched for the ibuprofen.

Sheriff Kendra Wattinger looked in the rear-view mirror and adjusted her hat before taking a deep breath and stepping out of the cruiser. The coroner and one of her oldest friends, Dick Thompson was already at the scene, crouched next to the body. He struggled to lift the body. Recently he’d been troubled by unexplained upper-body weakness. Jared Drake, one of her deputies, stood by him taking notes. Immediately she noticed he wasn’t wearing shoe covers, but a dead state trooper trumped what would have otherwise been a very public ass kicking and lecture on crime scene protocol. His infraction would be noted at his next performance review. In any case, as soon as he saw her Jared ran back to his cruiser and returned with his boots properly cover.

“Morning Sheriff,” he said, not looking her in the eye. His voice cracked and whistled like an old radio set. “Morning.”

Dick looked up at her and smiled. If she hadn’t known him better she would have thought he was on the verge of tears, but that was how he always looked—a man ready to cry. He joked about getting an eyelift to look less mournful.

“Any idea of cause here Dick?” she asked.

“Looks like trooper Warren was hit by a .45 calibre.” The coroner ran his hand a long the trooper’s shoulder. “He was hit here and in the neck. Probably died instantly.”

Two state trooper vehicles arrived at the scene, the troopers approached their dead colleague quickly, taking off their hats as they strode swiftly through the tall grass. They greeted Kendra brusquely and then spoke to Dick and Jared. Kendra walked off towards the edge of the woods, scanning the brush for movement, wondering if the killer was watching or had fled. She was already under pressure to take outside assistance on this case and now with a dead state trooper on her head, she wasn’t going to have much of a choice.

The mugshot which ran next to the newspaper report of his escape was not flattering. Ralph looked startled and frightened. His eyes were open incredibly wide and red instead of brown. The creases in his cheeks were smoothed away by the flashbulb and the dagger tattoo on his neck resembled a mottled bruise. Shortly before the shot was taken, the cops had pulled him out of a bog west of Stockton where he’d caught his foot on a sunken log. He’d was still soaked through and speckled with duckweed when the Sergeant snapped the shots—first facing to the front then the left and right. Ralph’s distinguishing features were noted. He had an ace of spades tattooed on his right forearm, a pierced left ear, dentures (which he’d now lost) and was missing the tip of his right-hand ring finger.