Chapter 4: Maren Reopens the Unsolvable File

The file rewrites itself at 3:47 in the morning.

Maren knows the exact time because she has not been sleeping — she has been sitting in the office chair that lists slightly to the left, the one she has been meaning to fix for six years, watching the rain on the window do what rain in Casket City always does: fall without conviction, as if the sky is going through motions it stopped believing in long ago. The office is one room above a jazz bar that closed eight months back. She can still hear the ghost of a bass line in the floorboards when the building settles. She has stopped finding this melancholy. It is just the building talking.

The file is in a manila folder that she has handled so many times the edges have gone soft and furred, the color of old bone. Maren Holloway: CASE UNSOLVED — REASSIGNED stamped across the front in the particular shade of departmental red that means someone higher up the chain ran out of patience with you. She opened it tonight because she opens it three or four nights a month, always at the same stage of sleeplessness, when the brain stops performing rest and starts performing the shape of rest without the substance. It is a habit with no productive endpoint. She has known this for years and kept the habit anyway.