She drove her personal car from her house on Calloway Street on the east side of Weldonville to city hall. As she went, she passed empty lots that had once been the homes of people she knew, burned the night of July 19 two years ago but never rebuilt or even sold to new people or builders. Most of the charred wood and the standing remains of chimneys had been removed, and the holes that had been basements were filled in, but the work had not been done by the owners. Many of the owners were dead, and the survivors had abandoned the lots, and the city had assigned the Department of Public Works to use its two bulldozers and four dump trucks to clear the ruins.

Whole blocks on the east side had been leveled, and the wood, bricks, concrete, and pipes hauled off. Two or three houses on nearly every other block had been removed, from where the federal highway met the town at a tangent all the way to Main Street, where the fire damage had been stopped.

Near Main Street in the commercial district there had been a slower kind of damage. More than half the small stores and restaurants that had been alive two years ago now had plywood sheets over their windows and doors. Leah could look along Main Street and see the handiwork of the employees of Clay’s Hardware Store. The plywood was all cut accurately to size, placed over each opening, and screwed—not nailed or stapled—in place. The boarding-up job would probably last longer than the other parts of some of those buildings. You couldn’t get hired at Clay’s Hardware if you didn’t know your way around a toolbox, and you wouldn’t stay long unless you took pride in doing things right. The older Clays, the brothers who had run the business, had died that night two years ago, but those standards hadn’t changed.

Leah had heard that the work of boarding up storefronts and offices and gas stations had actually given Clay’s a year of better-than-normal profits before things had begun to taper off from people leaving. But that was typical gossip. People in the area beyond the periphery of a disaster did a lot of talking, while the ones in the center seemed to lose interest in it. The talk wasn’t even about anything most of the time, just people’s way of claiming a small share of a big event.

She parked her car in the lot of the Public Safety Building next to the big, black unmarked car she’d had assigned to her when she’d returned to Weldonville from her years with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in Lakewood. She looked at it for a second and wondered who would be driving it next.