I was actually happy to see the sheriff’s car rounding the corner. I hadn’t met the new sheriff, though I’d seen her around town. As Marta Schuster emerged from her official car, I crossed the road once again.

We shook hands, and she gave me the silent eyes-up-and-down evaluation that was supposed to prove to me that she was tough and impartial.

I took the opportunity to scan her, too.

Marta’s father, Marty Schuster, had been elected county sheriff for many terms. When he’d died on the job last year, Marta had been appointed to fill in the remainder of his term of office. Marty had been a genuinely tough little bantamweight of a man, but his wife must have been made of sterner and more majestic stuff. Marta was a Valkyrie of a woman. She was robust, blond, and very fair complexioned, like many people in this area. Shakespeare had been founded by a literature-loving, homesick Englishman, but in the late eighteen hundreds the little town had had an influx of German immigrants.

The sheriff was small-bosomed and somewhat thick-waisted, which the uniform blouse and skirt did nothing but accentuate. Marta Schuster was somewhere in her mid-thirties, about my age.

“You’re Lily Bard, who called in the death?”

“Yes.”

“The body is…?”

“In there.” I pointed toward the little track.

Another sheriff’s department car pulled in behind Marta Schuster’s. The man who got out was tall, really tall, maybe six-four or more. I wondered if the sheriff’s department had height restrictions, and if so how this man had gotten in. He looked like a brick wall in his uniform, and he was as fair-skinned as Marta, though his hair was dark-what there was of it. He was of the shaved-head school of law enforcement.

“Stay here,” Marta Schuster told me brusquely. She pointed to the bumper of her official vehicle. She went to the trunk, unlocked it, and pulled out a pair of sneakers. She slipped off her pumps and put on the sneakers. She wasn’t happy about being in a skirt, I could tell; she hadn’t known when she got to work that morning that she’d be called on to tromp around in the woods. The sheriff got a few more items out of her car and went to the edge of the trees. Marta Schuster was visibly bracing herself to remember every lesson she’d ever learned about homicide investigation.