Chapter 17: Sheriff Holt Makes His Choice

The Harlow's Creek Sheriff's Department occupied the ground floor of a sandstone building on Mill Street that had been a hardware store before the war and still smelled, very faintly, of machine oil and sawdust beneath the floor wax and burnt coffee. Mara had passed it ten thousand times. She had never been inside.

She went in at nine-fourteen on Friday morning, which she noted because she had started noting times the way Old Betty noted everything — as if the record itself were a form of protection.

The folder was tucked under her arm: photocopies from the Gazette morgue in one section, Caskey's map traced in Curtis's precise hand in another, and three pages of her own notes organized under headings that would have made her fifth-grade teacher weep with professional pride. She had been awake since five. She had eaten a piece of toast because she understood that her body required fuel regardless of what her body felt like doing.