Despite his reservations, Thomas pulls next to the old depot, a shell of a building with boarded-up windows and doors, and situates the truck for a quick getaway, headlights facing the exit. He opens the door and is met with the chilly morning air that is unique to April. Stinging and brisk but with the promise of warmer hours ahead. The depot is surrounded by broken concrete cushioned only by the overgrowth of weeds that over the years have sprouted, untamed, through the crumbling slabs.

There’s no crime scene tape, no police presence at all, no townspeople or press with a ghoulish curiosity. Only him. Thomas carefully steps from the truck well aware that he is one misstep away from a broken ankle or worse. He thinks he hears the gravel pop and looks around to see if another vehicle is approaching but none appears. He’s jumpy, paranoid. Being silly, he tells himself.

He hasn’t been here in years. Not since he was a child and he went with his parents on a cross-country train ride to visit relatives in Pennsylvania. The depot closed soon after and the rails were then used exclusively for cargo transport. Over the years there has been talk of renovating the depot into a restaurant or a museum or something of the like, but, unsurprising, it’s never come to pass. Pitch, for some reason, tends to rail against any kind of progress before it even begins.

A cold breeze brushes against his neck, the sound of metal on metal clatters and Thomas turns to see the red eyes of an opossum lumbering across the train yard. He checks his watch. Another cargo train will come through in the next twenty minutes or so. Four times a day they hear the telltale whistle, more of a lonely foghorn, really, that lets the good people of Pitch know that boxcars and storage containers filled with ethanol, fertilizers, grain, stone, sand and gravel are passing through.

Thomas scans the train yard, the abandoned boxcars, the acres of waving grass and the tracks that go on for a thousand miles in either direction. Wearily, he realizes the futility of this treasure hunt. How is a man of near seventy, with failing eyesight and unstable joints and an unreliable heart, going to be able to find anything helpful to the investigation?