The Obituary Writer of Cedar Falls

• Chapter 1 The Final Edition
• Chapter 2 Ink and Eulogies
• Chapter 3 The Ledger of Arthur Vance
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Archive
• Chapter 5 Surviving Relatives
• Chapter 6 Between the Lines
• Chapter 7 A Quiet Passing
• Chapter 8 Cedar Creek Secrets
• Chapter 9 Missing Dates
• Chapter 10 The Florist's Silence
• Chapter 11 Unmarked Graves
• Chapter 12 Black Coffee and Redactions
• Chapter 13 The Mayor’s Footnote
• Chapter 14 What the Ashes Hid
• Chapter 15 A Widow's Alibi
• Chapter 16 The Typesetter's Error
• Chapter 17 Phantom Byline
• Chapter 18 Family Plot
• Chapter 19 Dead Letters
• Chapter 20 Off the Record
• Chapter 21 The Autumn Vigil
• Chapter 22 Sins of the Benefactor
• Chapter 23 The Press Run Halted
• Chapter 24 A Draft Left Open
• Chapter 25 Graveside Confessions
• Chapter 26 The Last Word

The Cedar Falls Gazette had survived two fires, the Great Depression, three distinct bank consolidations, and the advent of cable television, but it was currently losing a slow, sticky war against a leaky roof. Every Tuesday morning around ten, water gathered in the acoustic tiles directly above the copy desk, expanded until the brown paper sagged like a wet grocery bag, and then released a rhythmic, rusty drip into an aluminum stockpot originally borrowed from the VFW hall in 1984.

Nora Blythe did not look up from her monitor when the drop hit the bottom of the pot with a crisp ping. She merely hit the spacebar twice, checked the spelling of "bereaved," and took a sip of lukewarm diner coffee.

In Cedar Falls, people died in predictable seasons. Heart failures spiked in the winter when the driveway snow got heavy and men with pride and bad arteries insisted on digging out their own Buicks. Cancer took people steadily across the calendar, quiet and methodical. Autumn was usually car wrecks on the blind curves along Black Ridge Road, where wet oak leaves turned asphalt into a greased skillet. July and August brought swimming accidents down at the quarry and the occasional tractor roll on the western edge of the county.

Nora kept track of them all. For six years, she had occupied the corner desk on the second floor of the brick building on Market Street, right where the linoleum gave way to bare pine floorboards that squeaked if someone walked within ten feet of the drinking fountain. Officially, her title on the masthead was Associate Editor. In practice, Nora wrote ninety percent of the obituaries, compiled the police blotter, summarized the zoning board meetings, and covered the annual county fair pie contest whenever the summer intern inevitably quit after realizing small-town journalism involved more driving across gravel washboards than exposing government conspiracies.

"Nora," called Frank Miller from the door of his office. Frank was sixty-two, wore short-sleeved polyester dress shirts in every month except January, and still smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes by leaning his upper torso out the fire escape window until his knees caught the metal railing. "You got that piece on old man Henderson done? Press run starts at three, and Gordy says the folder is jamming again on the six-page inserts."

"Henderson is in the folder, Frank," Nora said, not lifting her eyes from the screen. "Eighty-four. Passed peacefully in his sleep at St. Jude’s. Survived by four daughters, nine grandchildren, and an ungodly collection of antique cast-iron skillets. I left out the bit about him suing the township over his neighbor’s hedge in 2008."

"Good girl. The widow dropped off twenty dollars for extra copies. Treat yourself to a donut from Klein’s."

"The widow’s ninety-one and living on social security, Frank. Give her the extra papers for free."

"I run a newspaper, Nora, not a monastery." Frank grunted, retreated into his cave of yellowing broadsheets, and let the frosted glass door drift shut. The glass was cracked in the upper right-hand corner, held together by a strip of yellowing scotch tape that had lost its tackiness during the Clinton administration.

Nora leaned back in her chair. The spring in the lower lumbar support gave its familiar, metallic groan. She was thirty-four years old, possessed a degree in English literature from the state university sixty miles down the highway, and had returned to Cedar Falls when her mother’s joints began to seize up with rheumatoid arthritis. Her mother had passed three years later, leaving Nora a small, cedar-shingled bungalow on Maple Avenue, a mortgage that was small enough to be manageable on twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, and the profound, inescapable familiarity that came with knowing the maiden names of half the women within a twenty-mile radius.

Working the obituary beat in your hometown was a peculiar form of haunting. In a city of three million, death was statistics and demographic shifts. In Cedar Falls, population four thousand eight hundred and twenty, every name on the fax machine from the Holcomb Funeral Home was a face she had seen across the counter at the pharmacy, a man who had yelled at her from a riding mower when she cut across his lawn on her bicycle at age ten, or a retired elementary school librarian who had taught her how to use the Dewey Decimal system.

She opened the next manila folder on her desk. Inside was a single sheet of lined legal pad paper, covered in the cramped, trembling handwriting of an elderly relative, accompanied by a black-and-white wallet-sized photograph clipped from a 1974 driver’s license.

It was Arthur Vance.

Nora picked up the photograph. Arthur Vance had been the town’s premier dry goods merchant before the mall opened out by the bypass, and afterward, he had run the hardware store on the square until he abruptly locked the doors on an afternoon in November of 1996 and never reopened. He had lived alone in the tall, narrow Victorian on Elm Street—the one with the unpainted gingerbread trim and the wrap-around porch that had sagged into the periwinkle ground cover.

The note on the legal pad was brief.

Arthur Vance, age 81. Passed away Sunday morning at home. No services planned per his request. Memorials may be made to the public library. Survived by a cousin, Evelyn Vance of Des Moines.

Nora picked up her ballpoint pen and tapped the yellow pad. There was something unnatural about an eighty-one-year-old pillar of Cedar Falls disappearing with five lines of text. Arthur Vance had served on the town council for three terms. His grandfather had built the timber mill that had given the town its first post office. In a town where even the village drunk got three paragraphs detailing his military service and his devotion to his coonhounds, Arthur Vance was being shuffled off the board like an inconvenient pawn.

She pushed back from her desk and stood up. The floor groaned. She walked down the short hallway to the morgue—which was what the newspaper called the room where seventy years of bound volumes rested in massive, dust-caked shelves beneath buzzing fluorescent tubes that hummed in B-flat.

The room smelled of dry paper, acidic glue, and mouse traps. Nora pulled the 1996 volume down from the third shelf, her forearms straining against the twenty-pound binder. She dropped it onto the wide oak reading table, blowing a faint cloud of powdered calfskin into the air.

She flipped through the yellowed pages of November.

Cedar Falls in 1996 had been preoccupied with the high school football team making it to the state semifinals. There were pictures of sixteen-year-old boys in oversized jerseys, reports on the grain elevator prices, an editorial complaining about the county’s decision to pave over the old horse troughs on Main Street.

On November 14, tucked onto page three beneath an advertisement for radial tires, was a small, two-inch box.

VANCE HARDWARE TO CLOSE. Owner Cites Retirement.

There had been no retirement party. No photograph of Arthur Vance shaking hands with the president of the Chamber of Commerce. Just that single, perfunctory announcement. And then, nothing. For nearly thirty years, the man had simply walked the two blocks from his house to the grocery store every Thursday at eight in the morning, bought bread, eggs, and three cans of sardines, and walked home.

Nora closed the volume with a dull thud.

"Find anything interesting?"

She turned. Gordy was leaning against the doorframe. Gordy was fifty, had fingers perpetually stained with black printer's ink, and smelled entirely of solvent and cheap peppermint lozenges. He had worked the press in the basement since he was eighteen years old and knew more about the private mechanics of the town than the police chief.

"Arthur Vance died Sunday," Nora said, wiping dust from her palms onto her corduroy skirt.

Gordy’s mouth twitched. He pulled a lozenge from his pocket, unwrapped it with one hand, and popped it into his cheek. "Did he?"

"That’s all you have to say? 'Did he?' He lived here his whole life."

"Some people live somewhere because they like it, Nora. Some people live somewhere because they’re stuck. And some people stay because they’re keeping an eye on things."

"What was he keeping an eye on?"

Gordy looked down at his black-stained fingernails. "Ask Frank. Frank was writing the front page back then. I just ran the ink."

"Frank doesn't remember what he had for breakfast, Gordy."

"Frank remembers everything that cost him money," Gordy said mildly. "And Arthur Vance had plenty of that, even if he did wear the same brown overcoat until the lining fell out of the sleeves."

He turned and shuffled down the hall, his steel-toed work boots thumping rhythmically against the floorboards.

Nora walked back to her desk. The drip in the stockpot had accelerated; it was raining harder outside now, the grey November sky dumping cold water over the brick facades of Market Street. Across the street, the sign for the diner hummed in blue neon, reflecting in the puddles that gathered along the curb.

She sat down and looked at the short note again. No services planned per his request.

Cedar Falls was not a place where people died without services. Even the atheists had gatherings at the Legion hall with lukewarm ham sandwiches and sheet cake with white shortening frosting. A man like Arthur Vance did not slip into the ground without half the county showing up to see who bought his land, unless he had specifically designed his departure to prevent precisely that.

Her telephone rang. It was an old rotary set, painted olive green, that shrieked with a high, mechanical rattle that always startled her even though she had answered it thousands of times.

She lifted the receiver. "Cedar Falls Gazette, Nora speaking."

There was a pause on the line. For a second, Nora thought it was one of the automated marketing calls that had begun plagueing the lines over the past year, but then she heard breathing—shallow, unsteady, and old.

"Miss Blythe?" The voice was a woman's, paper-thin, like dried corn husks rubbing together in a November wind.

"Yes. How can I help you?"

"You're the one who writes the passings, aren't you? Margaret’s girl?"

"I am."

"Arthur's dead."

"Yes, ma'am. We received the notice this morning. Are you Evelyn?"

A dry, rustling laugh came through the earpiece. "Evelyn's in a home in Council Bluffs, child. She hasn't known her own name since the flood of ninety-three. Evelyn didn't write that notice."

Nora’s hand hovered over the legal pad. She reached for her pen. "Who is this, please?"

"It doesn't matter who I am. What matters is what you print tomorrow."

"We print what the family provides, ma'am. That's our standard policy for the obituary section."

"Arthur didn't have family," the woman said, her voice sharpening with an edge that hadn't been there a moment before. "He had people who were afraid of him, and he had people he was afraid of. If you print that nonsense about Des Moines, you're helping them bury the rest of it."

"The rest of what?"

"Look at the ledger, Nora. The one he kept under the counter at the store. The township trustees didn't buy that gravel from the quarry in ninety-six. They bought it from Arthur. Only there wasn't any gravel."

The line went dead with a hard, plastic click.

Nora held the receiver to her ear for three long seconds, listening to the hollow dial tone that followed. She slowly replaced the handset on the cradle.

Outside, the rain beat against the windowpane with increasing force, blurring the red brick of the hardware store two blocks away into a smear of rust and grey. In the office behind her, Frank’s typewriter began its erratic clatter—clack-clack-clack, pause, return—an old man writing about high school basketball while the water slowly filled the stockpot in the hall.

Nora looked down at the five lines written on the yellow legal pad. She picked up the black-and-white photograph of Arthur Vance. He was staring straight into the lens, his jaw set in a hard, uncompromising line, his eyes dark beneath thick, grey brows. He didn't look like a man who would leave his final words to a cousin who didn't remember her own name.

He looked like a man who had left a bill behind, waiting to be collected.

The smell of printer’s ink in the basement of the Gazette building was not the sharp, chemical reek of modern offset facilities. It was thicker, an accumulation of petroleum, boiled linseed oil, damp limestone, and half a century of ground graphite that seemed to have penetrated the very mortar holding the foundation together. Nora smelled it before she reached the bottom of the wooden stairs, each step complaining beneath her loafers with the dry rasp of unvarnished white pine.

Down in the pressroom, Gordy was standing over the ink fountain with a wooden paddle that looked like an antique butter churn. He was scraping a thick, black skim off the top of a five-gallon drum, his overall straps hanging low on his hips, his forearms corded and glistening faintly with sweat despite the draft blowing in through the coal chute.

"The Henderson notice is set," Gordy shouted over the idle drone of the exhaust fan. He didn't turn around. He knew her tread by the slight hesitation on the fourth stair, where the riser was loose. "Two columns, four inches, standard border. You want his lodge emblem in the corner or just the cross?"

"He was an Elk, Gordy," Nora said, raising her voice just enough to cut through the hum. "His wife made a point of mentioning the antlers. Put the Elk in."

"Antlers it is." Gordy slapped the black paste against the ink roller with a wet, heavy smack. "Cost her an extra eight dollars. Frank already made a note in the daybook."

Nora crossed the concrete floor, steering clear of the drip pans catching mineral spirits under the delivery belts. She stopped beside the imposing bulk of the flatbed press, an ancient two-revolution Miehle that had been hauled into the basement in pieces through a trench in the alley back when Harry Truman was still president. It took up half the room, black cast iron and burnished brass, a great iron beast that groaned whenever the drive motor engaged.

"Who handled the intake on the Vance notice, Gordy?" she asked.

Gordy didn't drop his paddle, but his rhythm slowed. "Came through the mail slot yesterday evening after we locked up. Red envelope, no stamp. Just 'Editor' written on the front in ballpoint."

"The handwriting on the legal pad didn't look like an old woman’s hand," Nora said, leaning her hip against the paper staging table. "It looked like a man trying to write like an old woman. Shaky, but the baseline was straight as an iron rail."

"You ought to leave that alone, Nora."

"An anonymous woman called my desk ten minutes ago. Said Evelyn Vance is in a nursing home in Council Bluffs with dementia, and she didn't write a word of it."

Gordy wiped the wooden paddle clean on a rag soaked in kerosene, the sharp vapor immediately cutting through the heavier oil smells of the cellar. He tossed the rag into an iron safety can and finally turned around, wiping his palms against his thighs. His grey eyes were small, deep-set beneath brows that looked like two smudges of charcoal.

"Cedar Falls is full of old women who don't know where they are," he said flatly. "Half of them call the police department when the streetlight flickers. The other half call the paper because they think the crossword is printing coded messages from Moscow."

"She knew Arthur," Nora insisted. "She knew about his store closing. She said something about gravel."

Gordy went completely still. It was an unnatural stillness for a man whose whole working life was measured in revolutions per minute and the percussive clatter of metal chasing metal. His gaze dropped from Nora’s face to the oil-stained floorboards directly between them.

"People talk a lot of nonsense when a recluse goes in the dirt," he said, his voice dropping an octave, slipping beneath the exhaust fan's drone. "They remember things from thirty years back, and they twist them until they fit whatever grudge they’ve been nursing over their morning toast. Arthur Vance was a sour bastard, Nora. He didn't like children, he didn't like dogs, and he didn't like paying property taxes. That’s all there was to him."

"Then why didn't he have a service? Even Doc Holloway had a service, and he drank away the county clinic’s pension fund."

"Arthur didn't want people looking at him. Not when he was breathing, and sure as hell not when he was cold." Gordy reached into his pocket, took out another peppermint lozenge, and worked the cellophane off with his thumb. "Go back upstairs. Help Frank with the church announcements. The Methodist ladies are having their bazaar next Saturday, and if you leave out the date of the mincemeat sale again, they’ll cancel their subscription block."

Nora watched him. In a town like this, silence was rarely empty; it was dense, weighted with the things people had agreed not to mention over the butcher’s counter or across the back fence. Gordy’s father had been the county road commissioner back in the seventies, an era when county contracts were settled with handshakes over roast beef dinners at the Elks Lodge.

"I’m going by the Vance house," Nora said quietly.

Gordy popped the lozenge into his mouth with an audible click against his front teeth. "The sheriff’s got a seal on the front door, Nora. Nobody’s supposed to be in there until the estate lawyer shows up from the county seat."

"The county seat is forty miles away, and Sheriff Miller is Frank’s third cousin. If I tell him I’m looking for a photo for the obituary, he’ll let me stand on the porch."

"Don't do it, Nora," Gordy repeated. There was no anger in his voice, only a heavy, flat weariness that sounded older than the Miehle press behind him. "Some things rust out quiet in the grass, and that’s the best way for them. You start turning over old iron, you just get tetanus for your trouble."

Nora didn't argue. She turned and headed back up the wooden stairs, her steps firm, ignoring the loose riser on the fourth step.

The newsroom was empty when she reached the landing. Frank was still in his office, his profile visible through the cracked glass door, the blue coil of cigarette smoke rising toward the acoustic ceiling before curling into the draft from the hallway. He was on the phone, his feet propped up on a metal desk covered in copies of the Des Moines Register and unopened press releases from the state Department of Transportation. His laughter was a dry, hacking bark that ended in a cough.

Nora went to her desk, took her wool coat off the back of the swivel chair, and pulled it on. It was a dark green car coat, eight years old, with horn buttons and fraying cuffs, but the wool was thick enough to keep out the damp chill coming off the river. She reached into her drawer, pulled out a small spiral reporter’s notebook—narrow, wire-bound at the top, the kind that fit neatly into an overcoat pocket—and two unsharpened pencils.

As she pulled her gloves on, she glanced at the yellow legal pad on her desk. The note sat there, innocent enough on its face, but the five sentences looked more like a fence than a tribute. It was designed to keep people out. Most obituaries were monuments; this one was a "No Trespassing" sign.

She walked out into the rain.

Market Street was slick with water. The gutters, choked with wet, brown sycamore leaves, were overflowing onto the curb, sending little brown torrents rushing toward the storm drains at the intersection of Fourth. The neon sign for Klein’s Bakery was sputtering, a pink halo against the grey drizzle, the smell of fried dough and cinnamon fighting a losing battle against the wet asphalt.

Nora turned off Market onto Elm Street. The transition was immediate. Market Street was commercial, functional, and mostly maintained with brick pavers, but Elm Street was residential, shaded by massive, centuries-old silver maples whose roots had buckled the concrete sidewalks into jagged miniature mountain ranges. The houses here had been built during the town’s timber boom at the turn of the century—large, drafty, three-story Victorians with turrets, fish-scale shingles, and wraparound verandas designed for an era when people sat outside in wicker chairs to watch their neighbors pass by in carriages.

Most of them had been divided into apartments during the eighties or covered in pastel vinyl siding that stripped them of their character. Only the Vance place remained untouched, preserved by thirty years of neglected paint and stubborn isolation.

It stood on a double lot near the dead end of Elm, where the road petered out into a muddy access lane leading down toward Cedar Creek. The yard was an overgrown thicket of sumac, blackberry brambles, and unpruned lilac bushes that had grown thick as small trees. The grass had not been cut since August, standing pale and matted under the rain, like the fur of a dead animal.

The house itself was narrow, painted a dark, leaden grey that seemed to have absorbed the color of the storm clouds. The gingerbread trim along the eaves was rotting, several pieces having fallen into the periwinkle below, leaving gaps that looked like broken teeth in an old skull. Every blind on the front windows was drawn tight, the yellowed roller shades pulled down to the sills, showing only uniform, opaque squares to the street.

A length of yellow plastic tape—SHERIFF’S LINE DO NOT CROSS—was tied clumsily between the banister of the front steps and an ornamental iron post that had once supported a gas lantern. It flapped wetly in the wind, its edges curling inward.

Nora stopped at the gate. The iron latch was tied shut with a piece of baling wire, rusted red. She unhooked the wire, the metal cold and rough against her leather gloves, and pushed the gate open. It didn't swing; it dragged through the wet weeds with a muffled hiss.

She walked up the flagstone path, keeping her eyes on the windows. Even knowing Arthur Vance was lying in a refrigerated drawer at the county morgue forty miles north, she half-expected to see a lean, shadowy figure pull back the corner of a blind on the second floor. That had been his routine. Every schoolchild in Cedar Falls had grown up knowing that if you threw a baseball into Arthur Vance’s yard, you didn't go in after it. You waited until dusk, or you kissed the ball goodbye. The old man would come out onto the porch with a cane, not to lean on, but to push the ball slowly, deliberately, into the blackberry briars until it was out of reach.

She stepped onto the front porch. The floorboards were tongue-and-groove pine, soft with dry rot near the edges where the eaves had leaked. They groaned under her weight with a high, hollow sound.

The front door was oak, heavy and varnished so dark it was almost black, with an oval pane of frosted glass in the center. Taped to the glass was an official notice from the county coroner, printed on blue cardstock and covered with a clear plastic sandwich bag to keep off the rain.

Nora didn't touch the seal. She knew Sheriff Miller well enough to know he didn't care about the rules until someone embarrassed him, and breaking a county seal would do just that. Instead, she stepped off the porch and moved along the side of the house, where the foundation rose four feet out of the mud in blocks of roughly hewn limestone.

The house had a side entrance, an old tradesman’s door that led directly into what had originally been the pantry or the summer kitchen. The shrubs here were thick, their bare branches catching at her coat like skeletal fingers as she pushed through them, water showering down from the wet twigs onto her collar.

She reached the side door. It had no seal. It was an ordinary wooden door with three horizontal panels and a simple brass knob with a skeleton-key hole beneath it.

Nora tried the knob. It turned easily, smoothly, with none of the stiffness of the front gate. The door had been opened recently—not forced, but unlocked and left unlatched.

She paused, her hand on the cold brass. The rain fell with a steady, rhythmic hiss against the leaves above her, drowning out any sound from the street.

"Hello?" she called softly into the crack.

There was no answer. Only the smell came out to meet her.

It wasn't the smell of death—Arthur Vance had died in the hospital, or at least that’s what the initial dispatch had claimed, though the notice said he had died at home. The air spilling out from the dark hallway smelled of old newspapers, cold tea, camphor, and the dry, bitter scent of coal soot that had settled into the wallpaper decades ago and never left.

She pushed the door open three inches further and stepped inside.

The linoleum floor of the pantry was cool and firm beneath her shoes. The kitchen beyond was dim, lit only by the grey daylight filtering through a high, narrow window above the cast-iron sink. There was no clutter on the counters. No stacks of dishes, no half-eaten loaves of bread, no pill bottles lined up in a neat row like in most houses where an old person lived alone.

The sink was bone dry, the porcelain stained with iron deposits where the tap had dripped over the years. On the oilcloth table in the center of the kitchen sat a single white ceramic mug, a clean teaspoon beside it, and an unopened tin of saltines.

Nora took her notebook and pencil from her pocket, though she didn't write anything down yet. She stood still, listening. The house was settling in the damp, wood creaking faintly in the wind, but otherwise it possessed the dead, muffled quiet of a tomb that had been closed for centuries.

She moved through the swinging door into the dining room. Here, the atmosphere changed.

The dining room table, a massive walnut monstrosity that could have seated twelve, was completely covered in paper.

Not newspapers, and not mail. They were ledgers.

Dozens of them, bound in faded black buckram, their corners reinforced with crumbling red calfskin, were arranged in long, neat rows according to date. The spine of the nearest one bore the year 1968 stamped in gold foil that had turned green with age. Next to it was 1969, then 1970, extending down the length of the table like a regiment of soldiers.

Nora stepped closer, her heart beating with a rapid, uneven rhythm against her ribs.

On the floor beside the table, overturned on its side, was an old milk crate made of grey galvanized wire. Several of the books had been pulled from the end of the line—the most recent ones, dating from the mid-nineties—and their pages were spread out across the Persian carpet beneath the window.

Someone had been here before her. And they had been in a hurry.

Nora knelt on the rug, her fingers hovering over a ledger that lay open to an entry dated October 12, 1996. The paper was ruled with thin blue lines, with double red lines down the right-hand margin for dollars and cents. The ink was black, written in the precise, crabbed script of a professional bookkeeper who took pride in the uniformity of his downstrokes.

The entries were ordinary at first glance:

Oct 12 — 12 kegs 16d common nails — $144.00
Oct 14 — Linseed oil, 5 gal drum, township barn — $32.50
Oct 18 — 4 rolls roofing felt, Miller Bros. — $48.00

She turned the page. The paper crackled dryly between her gloved fingers.

On the next spread, the handwriting changed. It was still Arthur Vance’s hand, but the neatness had vanished. The strokes were thicker, pressed so hard into the paper that the metal nib of the pen had cut small tears into the surface.

Nov 02 — Crushed limestone, Grade A, 400 tons. Billed to Cedar Township Road Comm.
Paid in full, Check #4102. Voucher missing.

Beside the entry, written in red pencil that had smudged against the facing page, was a single word:

Gravel.

Underneath the word, Arthur Vance had drawn three heavy horizontal lines, and then, in smaller letters that almost ran off the edge of the leaf:

Not hauled. Delivered to the river.

Nora stared at the red pencil. The lead was soft, the color bright despite the decades that had passed since it was set down. Her mind jumped back to Gordy in the basement of the Gazette, his hands black with printer's ink, his voice dropping into that heavy, flat register.

The township trustees didn't buy that gravel from the quarry in ninety-six. They bought it from Arthur. Only there wasn't any gravel.

She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out her notebook, and flipped it open to a blank page. She pressed her pencil to the paper, writing down the voucher number and the date: Nov 02, 1996. 400 tons. Check #4102.

A board creaked above her head.

It was not the slow, rhythmic settling of an old house in the rain. It was the sharp, localized snap of dry floorboards bearing weight—a heavy, deliberate step taken directly over the dining room chandelier.

Nora froze, the pencil hovering an inch above her notebook.

She held her breath, her eyes fixed on the ceiling plaster. The ornate plaster medallion in the center of the ceiling, from which a six-arm brass chandelier hung by a tarnished chain, was cracked across its diameter. As she watched, a tiny specks of white plaster dust drifted down, catching the dull grey light from the window before disappearing into the dark weave of the Persian rug.

Someone was upstairs.

Nora stood up slowly, her knees cracking in the silence. She slipped the notebook and pencil back into her coat pocket, her hand closing tightly around the wire binding.

She didn't move toward the front hall, where the stairs were located. She backed toward the pantry door, keeping her feet flat on the carpet to muffle the sound of her loafers. The floorboards here were solid, anchored by the thick joists of the old house, but every muscle in her neck was taut, waiting for another sound.

From above, there came the sound of a drawer being opened—the low, wood-on-wood scrape of an antique bureau being pulled out to its full extension, followed by the metallic clink of something small dropping onto the floorboards.

Nora reached the swinging door to the kitchen. She pressed her back against the wooden frame, her hand finding the cold brass latch of the side door.

"Arthur?"

The voice that floated down the stairs was low, male, and thick with the raspy wheeze of an old smoker. It wasn't Frank Miller, and it wasn't Gordy. It was a voice Nora didn't immediately recognize, though there was a cadence to it that belonged to the county, the flat, drawling vowels of men who spent their days leaning against the hoods of pickup trucks outside the grain elevator.

"You left the goddamn light on again, Arthur," the voice muttered, followed by the heavy, dragging scrape of boots moving across the floorboards toward the front staircase.

Nora didn't wait to see whose boots they were. She slipped out through the pantry, eased the side door shut until the latch clicked into place with a sound no louder than a dry branch snapping, and dove into the lilac bushes.

The rain was coming down harder now, cold and needlesharp against her cheeks. She scrambled through the wet brambles, not caring that the thorns were tearing at the wool of her coat or that the mud was soaking through the thin leather of her shoes. She reached the side gate, vaulted over the low wire fence into the alleyway that ran behind Elm Street, and hit the gravel at a dead run.

She didn't stop until she reached the corner of Fourth and Market, two blocks away.

She ducked into the recessed doorway of Klein’s Bakery, leaning against the cold glass of the display window, her chest heaving, the breath burning in her throat. The smell of hot lard and sugar drifted out through the door seals, warm and sickeningly sweet against the cold air.

Across the street, through the grey curtain of rain, the brick facade of the Gazette building looked unchanged. The light in Frank’s office was still on, a faint yellow rectangle against the gloomy brick. Down below, the high basement window was dark, though Nora knew Gordy was still down there, tending the black beast of the press, waiting for the three o'clock run.

She looked down at her hands. Her leather gloves were smeared with red mud and black dirt from Arthur Vance’s lilacs. In the pocket of her coat, her fingers touched the stiff card of the reporter’s notebook.

She pulled it out just enough to see the pencil marks she had made: Nov 02, 1996. Check #4102.

Arthur Vance hadn't died of a heart attack while watching television, and his cousin Evelyn hadn't sent that five-line obituary from Council Bluffs. Someone had written those five lines because five lines was all they could afford to let the town see.

Nora wiped the rain from her forehead with the back of her sleeve, turned her collar up against the wind, and stepped back out onto Market Street, heading straight for the town hall across the square.