What the Pond Keeps

Five crates. Four bodies. Not one heart.

The thaw comes to Rell County on a February night, and a dairy farm’s manure lagoon gives way.
Sheriff Kelsey Voss expects a drowned calf. What comes up on the chain is a seventeen-year-old girl missing since September — a girl Kelsey herself filed away as gone. Her chest has been opened and sewn shut again. Her coat is zipped to the throat.

At the bottom of the sludge, five weighted crates are waiting, and a list of ordinary people who once signed a form and went home to supper.

Draining the pond will cost the county a third of a million dollars and every comfortable story it tells about itself. What surfaces is not one murder but a list.