“We got an alarm call. Was there a break-in?”

“Sure was. Back door. I shut off the noise.”

“Anything missing?”

He collapsed into his antique wooden desk chair, coughed some more, and spat into a tissue. He turned his music down.

“One laptop computer. Some fool’s personal effects.”

She unflapped her breast pocket, took out her notebook, clicked her pen, and began to look around.

“I see they left a crowbar behind.”

One leaned against Fanta’s desk. Beside it sat a battered cardboard box jammed with framed photos, coffee mugs, award plaques, pens and pencils, inhalers, and a cone-shaped lump of foam.

“It looks brand-new,” she observed of the crowbar. “This could be easy. It’s still got a bright new FARMSTEAD HOME AND AG sticker, so it came from across the street. Whoever broke in might be close by.”

The ruined editor cleared his throat. His spotted hands shook. He had barked several knuckles. “Bastards,” he rumbled.

“Any idea which bastards? Or should I ask at Home and Ag?”

“Hey, you wanna hear something?”

“Babette and Barry are on their way, I’m sure, to supervise my work. It’s only about twenty minutes from Blooming Hill.”

“Screw ’em. You gotta hear this.”

She realized he had been listening to a message. He reached across his desk and restarted his answering machine. An angry old man’s voice continued.

“ ‘… turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ ”

Fanta raised his shrubby eyebrows at her. The voice went on, tremulous with seeming rage.

“ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Meanwhile, the complete assholes print ads for gas-guzzling Ford trucks and thirty-six-packs of Coca-Cola—”

Fanta paused the rant.

“Who is that?” she asked.

He creaked back in his wooden chair, knit his bent hands behind his ponytail, showing her his wet armpits. He hadn’t bothered to brush away the wood splinters that clung to his shirt.

“William Butler Yeats,” he said. “The great Irish poet, 1865 to 1939.”

He hesitated and she said, “Oh.”

“Except for that last part about assholes.”

“Oh,” she said again.

“My mother was a Donovan, Irish all the way. Same as your father, yes? Rest his soul. And your mother’s.”

He seemed a little drunk. Maybe the dead body had knocked him off balance too.

“I meant the caller.”

“Ah, him.” Fanta shot his answering machine a wave of acknowledgment. “I think he’s this crank who used to write me letters to the editor—which, as you know, the Happy Valley Shopper won’t print anymore. That guy quoted Yeats too. T. S. Eliot as well. Sometimes Jimmy Buffet and KC and the Sunshine Band.”