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Prologue

"The lunatic, the lover and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact."

Wm. Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Chapter 1

Normally, Constable Brian Stoker would not have been anywhere near the construction site in O'Dell Township late Thursday evening. Unpaved township roads were not part of his regular patrol route.

That night, however, he'd had to drop by a house just outside the village of East Lister to deal with a drunk husband in a touchy domestic situation.

Even so, he would not have slowed down and turned into the rough gravel drive if he had not noticed a light where it shouldn't have been. And he certainly never would have left his cruiser if he hadn't thought he heard the low rumble of a bulldozer, and wouldn't have slipped in the goop of engine oil if he had bothered to point his flashlight on the ground in front of him instead of waving it toward the collection of backhoes and other construction equipment parked near the shed.

It was not engine oil, however, he discovered as soon as he regained his balance.

On a normal day, which contained anything from checking seatbelts on motorists to cornering a runaway bull, Stoker was not an excitable man. But as he stared down at the soggy bundle at his feet, the burly six foot three police officer decided he wanted some company. Badly. In gooey boots, he hop-skipped back to the cruiser and radioed a concise message to the police dispatch thirty miles away.

Early the following morning as the young constable was filing a report at the detachment office in Plattsford, the ramifications of what he had found at 11:50 p.m. on a warm summer evening suddenly dawned on him. He glanced down at his left boot, the sole of which had been sticking softly to the floor of the staff room, and nearly lost two tuna sandwiches.

***

"This is the third time this has happened in seven weeks!" Gloria Trevisi wailed to the noisy little black box mounted under the dashboard of her car. "For once, I'd like something to happen before this newspaper's deadline, not five hours later," she moaned as she slowed to make a quick u-turn on the deserted highway.

The recently hired editor of the district's only weekly newspaper would not have known much about the incident either, if she hadn't been returning from a late-running (and deadly dull) meeting of the Plattsford Memorial Hospital Board of Governors. Tired, bored, and frustrated, she had just passed County Road One to East Lister on her route home when her police band scanner picked up the excited broadcast. Swearing at the radio, and at the fact that she was smartly dressed in skirt and good leather pumps instead of wearing something comfortable and practical, she doubled back to the county highway, floored the accelerator, and ground the gearshift of her ancient Mazda into high.

Industrial park indeed! All she had ever seen was a crudely painted sign tacked to a construction shack and a muddy hole; and tonight, traffic. An ambulance and two police cruisers were pulling into the site when she arrived five minutes later. She stepped carefully from her car onto the gravel shoulder, watching while Sergeant Dave O'Toole carefully swathed the gate with yellow tape. After eight weeks of covering local police and courts, she knew that O'Toole rarely came out from behind his desk.

"Whatever this is, it must be important, Sergeant," she called out. "What's up?"

"Can't say," replied the reticent sergeant, tying off the end of the tape and regarding her over the barrier.

"Well, what can you tell me?"

He paused, his hand resting on the gate post. "Not much, at this point."

Annoyed, but not surprised by his guarded response, she persisted. "May I look?"

"Look all you want," he said, blocking the view, "as long as you don't cross the line."

"For heaven's sake, I'm not a souvenir hunter." She stood uneasily beside her car, looking toward the industrial park, currently the front half of a one-hundred-acre cornfield about a mile from the village of East Lister. At the moment, the "park" looked like a muddy, stony wasteland populated with earth movers and dump trucks, and all of it barely visible in the headlights of two cruisers.

Photo prospects? Naturally, there were none. Would the readers be satisfied with a blurred, inky, seven-day-old snap of a large police officer standing beside a strip of yellow tape? Depends on what happens, or doesn't happen, between now and next Tuesday, right? Reaching into the vehicle, Gloria grabbed her camera and flash unit and walked toward the gate.

"Watch your step, Ms. Trevisi," O'Toole warned in his blandest tone. "There's a pretty steep ditch there. Wouldn't want you to take a tumble, would we?"

She quickly sidestepped back into the muddy ruts at the bottom of the driveway, ignoring the loose gravel collecting under her toes of her low-slung pumps and the splash of dirty water from a puddle that added an interesting pattern to the hem of her skirt.

"Thanks for the tip." Many, she mused, would no doubt have enjoyed watching the local newshound topple into a ditch full of sludge and muddy water left over from a recent June rain. She was, however, reasonably good-looking, and more or less single, according to local gossip, and therefore warranted a little consideration. And, of course, being a gentleman, the sergeant would have felt obliged to crawl into the muddy abyss after her. Or maybe not.

Halting beside the yellow marking tape, she peered through the darkness. The construction shack was completely in shadow, headlights of the police vehicles facing the other way. A large elm spread its umbrella branches from the ditch across both sides of the road, its summer foliage preventing the yard light at the top of the drive from illuminating the scene below. Other trees along the fence line of the property had been eliminated. Farmers, hydro workers, even developers, however, were reluctant to destroy so rare a find as a healthy elm.

She took a deep breath. The evening was warm, and the scent in the air was of damp soil and sweet grass munched by contented cattle, reminding her that she was deep in the heart of the best farmland in the province. Strangely, the air suggested life and renewal, not death by misadventure.

"Stay where you are," O'Toole cautioned. "We've called a couple of investigators to collect evidence. They won't be here for a couple of hours yet." His eyes took in her full-skirted elegance. "Got a hot date?"

Fat chance. "No, I'm working, like you. What are you doing out of the office? Had to see it for yourself?" The gray-blue beam of the solitary yard light gave the sergeant's face a grayish, pinched look; or perhaps, Gloria thought, it wasn't the light.

He shrugged. "You planning to take pictures?"

"I'm not sure." Gloria stepped back a few paces and glanced again at the murky scene behind him, where another officer was spreading a yellow plastic sheet over something pinpointed in the cruiser's headlights. She hoisted her camera and flash. "Who is it?"

"We can't say just yet."

"Can't say? Don't you know? Is he a stranger? Local? Vagrant? Employee?"

"We'll know better tomorrow when we've compiled a few more facts. Sorry." He grimaced. "Stoker should have known better than to broadcast it for you media types to pick up on your scanners. Paper's out, anyway, isn't it?" he added smugly.

"Sure. This week's issue hit the street six hours ago, but the next issue is only a week away. Look grim, Sergeant." She snapped a photo before the officer could protest, and left him muttering an impolite curse and blinking at red dots in the darkness. "Don't worry. Even if it does turn out, it'll probably do no better than the back page next week." She retreated to her car, tiptoeing through the soft ruts. "Can't say," she mused, meant "won't say" until he has been given the official nod. It was a reasonable courtesy to the victim's next-of-kin. If she were pushing a deadline, it would have been infuriating to be kept waiting. Instead, it hardly mattered.

She almost liked Dave O'Toole, in spite of his grim face and dry, humorless way of talking. He was as reticent as any cop should be, but at least respected her job well enough to answer whatever questions he could. He was also reasonably nice-looking, in his late forties, and a widower with a teenage son...not that she cared much at this point, but in a community this size, personal details were difficult to avoid.

Her predecessor on the Plattsford Sun would have whiled away most of the night chatting with the police officers, found out nothing in particular, then slept away half the following day. Not Gloria; as exciting as news might be, hanging around at the scene of a tragedy, or watching someone's life and dreams go up in smoke at a spectacular house fire in hopes of catching a...