The woman grabbed her hand. ‘I’m so sorry, how awful for you! He was just a boy. How can I help you?’

‘Well, you can’t, probably. Justin was a writer, like me. He was doing a story for an Orlando magazine about the tenth anniversary of the Labor Day murders – you know, with Diane Fairmont running for governor now. I’d like to finish the article for him, but I can’t make heads or tails of his notes, so I’m trying to follow in his footsteps. Re-create his research. That’s why I’m here.’

‘I see.’

It wasn’t entirely a lie, and Peach sold it with the sweetness of her face. ‘Anything you can tell me would be such a help,’ she said.

‘Well, yes, he said he was doing a story about those terrible murders,’ the woman said. ‘He asked me if I lived here back then, but I’m afraid I only came to town five years ago, so I couldn’t help him.’

‘Did he talk to anyone else?’

‘Maybe a couple of our volunteers, but they’re not here today.’

‘Oh. I understand.’

‘He was in the library for a long time,’ the librarian told her. ‘He spent much of it in our microfiche section. I think he was going through all of the newspapers from back then. He made a lot of copies.’

‘You don’t know what he copied, I suppose.’

‘No, I’m sorry, patrons make their own copies. I can show you our newspapers, however, if you’d like.’

‘Yes, okay,’ Peach said.

The librarian guided her to a row of carrels stocked with microfiche readers, near the windows that looked out on the fierce rain. She pulled out a drawer in a nearby filing cabinet. With a quick glance, she took a box from the back of the drawer and opened it to show her a stack of oversized negatives.

‘These are the Lake Wales papers from August and September of that year. I believe that’s where your young man started.’

Peach nodded. ‘Thank you.’

‘Do you need help with the machines?’

‘No, I’m fine. Thank you so much. I appreciate your help.’

Peach sat down alone at a microfiche reader, and she quickly found the newspaper reports for the day after Labor Day. When she saw the headlines and photographs, her eyes blurred with tears, and her stomach squirmed, as if a great hole had opened up inside it. Instead of reading, she stared out the windows, hypnotized by the beat of the rain. She was glad there was no one else around.

It didn’t really help her to know that Justin had studied the newspapers from ten years ago, other than to confirm that Cab Bolton was right. She didn’t know what Justin would have learned, or what she hoped to discover by revisiting events that she had spent a long time trying to forget.