Notes from the Bench

September brings the rain back, and the whole region turns over with it. It is my working weather, and it is the weather my first novel happens in, because it is the weather I wrote it in.

Violence off the page, the dead treated with decency, the town as important as the crime. The puzzle is no softer for it, and I would not write it any other way.

Late August in the town I made up. The river is down to its gravel, the evenings are coming in earlier, and everybody is waiting on the wet half of the year to start.

Six years ago, on the day her name came off the post-office window, the town threw Dot Kowalski a going-away party in the church basement. Somebody asked the question the town had waited thirty years to ask. This is the answer she gave them, and the one she kept.

For a good many years, one man came to Dot Kowalski's window every month to sign for a registered letter. Then, month over month, the signing got harder, until a day the pen would not make his name at all, with a line waiting behind him and the postal rule saying no signature, no letter. What that rule also held, and what Dot did with it, is the whole of this one.

A clue that can only mean one thing gives the case away. The craft is an innocent reading a careful reader would prefer, until the evidence rules it out.