“The town has reciprocated,” said Mosley. “It certainly helped me get over my poor wife’s passing.” He added, “Are you going for a walk too?”

“To Abby’s actually. She has some work out at her house she wants me to do.”

“A beautiful place that is, A Midsummer’s Farm.”

“Is that what she calls it?” Stone asked.

Mosley nodded. “A variation on the Shakespeare play. A dream, you see. I guess in a way all of us up here are living a dream, isolated as we are from the rest of society.”

“Not such a bad thing,” Tyree noted. “The rest of society isn’t all that great. Divine is just what it sounds like, at least it is for me.”

Mosley passed by them and continued on down the street.

Tyree took off his hat and swiped his hair. “Well, you have a good one, Ben. Don’t work too hard.”

Tyree went inside the jailhouse and Stone continued on his way to Abby’s.

Or A Midsummer’s Farm.

Or a dream.

Or a nightmare.

Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17

AS STONE PASSED DOWN the main street of Divine, he quickly observed that the shops seemed prosperous and the customers happy-looking. It was hard for him to reconcile this image with that of broken-backed, gnarled-handed, dirty-faced miners with the coal-caked lungs having breakfast in Rita’s Restaurant. And then his thoughts refocused on what he’d seen on the TV.

Leads. People of interest. Ties between the two murders.

As he glanced through one storefront window he saw it. Ubiquitous for so many decades, it was now rare to find one anywhere, at least one that worked. Yet Divine apparently was a bit slow in following the rest of the country’s lead.

He slipped inside and looked at the payphone on the wall and then at the sign behind the front counter: “Appalachian Crafts.” The store’s shelves bulged with sculptures made from wood, stone and clay. On the walls were paintings and photos of mountains, valleys and little tin-roofed shacks clinging to the sides of hills. Behind the counter a large, red-faced woman was pecking keys on her computer.

She looked up and smiled. “Can I help you?”

“I just wanted to use the phone. Do you have change for a five?”

She gave him the money and he retreated to the rear of the store and loaded the quarters in the phone’s slots. He dialed the one person he knew had a truly untraceable phone number: Reuben. This was because he didn’t have a phone in his own account but rather used minutes of piggybacked phone time from hundreds of different people. Stone had always assumed it had been something Milton had shown him how to do.