Chapter 11: Mayor Prout Pays Mara a Visit

The mayor's car was a 1981 Buick Electra in a shade of brown that aspired to dignity and mostly achieved it, and Mara saw it through the kitchen window at half past seven Friday morning while she was eating cereal that had gone soft in the bowl because she'd forgotten about it. She registered the car first, then the man unfolding himself from the driver's side with the particular deliberateness of someone who has decided in advance exactly how he will appear stepping out of a car. Gerald Prout was sixty-three years old and looked like someone had assembled him from a kit labeled SMALL TOWN AUTHORITY: the silver hair swept back from a high forehead, the blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow in a calculated gesture toward approachability, the slacks that said county seat but not Indianapolis, the shoes that were always polished because a man in Gerald Prout's position had learned before he was thirty that people made decisions about you in the first four seconds and the shoes were the last thing they checked.

She put down her spoon.

He was coming up the front walk, not the side. The front walk nobody used. He was carrying something — she squinted — a square shape wrapped in aluminum foil.