“That’s what bothers me,” Arlene said, leaning back in her wooden chair.

“A death notice with no accident report usually means somebody paid a fee to keep it out of the public record.”

By three in the afternoon, the sky over Miller Hardware had turned the dark gray of wet slate.

Gene sat at his metal desk in the back office, working through a pile of supplier order forms under a bare fluorescent tube.

I laid the photocopy of the 1990 check ledger right on his desk blotter, on top of his order sheet.