Later that morning, Janson entered the diner at the corner of Main and Pemberton, where he started a conversation with the counterman. The counterman’s sloping forehead, close-set eyes, and jutting, square jaw gave him a slightly simian appearance, but when he spoke, he proved surprisingly knowledgeable.

“So you’re thinking of moving nearby?” The counterman splashed more coffee into Janson’s cup from his Silex pot. “Let me guess. Made your money in the big city and now you want the peace and quiet of the country, that it?”

“Something like that,” Janson said. Nailed to the wall behind the counter was a sign, white cursive lettering on black: Kenny’s Coffee Shoppe—Where Quality & Service Rule.

“Sure you don’t want someplace a little nearer to your high-class conveniences? There’s a Realtor lady on Pemberton, but I’m not sure you’ll find exactly the kind of house you’re looking for around here.”

“Thinking of building,” Janson said. The coffee was acrid, having sat on the hot pad too long. He gazed absently at the Formica-topped counter, its pattern of loosewoven cloth worn to white in the middle of the counter, where the traffic of heavy plates and cutlery was heaviest.

“Sounds like fun. If’n you can afford to do something nice.” The man’s drugstore aftershave mingled unpleasantly with the heavy aroma of lard and butter.

“No point otherwise.”

“Nope, no point otherwise,” the counterman agreed. “My boy, you know, he had some dang-fool way he was going to get rich. Some dot-com thing. Was going to middleman some e-commerce gimcrackery. For months he was talking about his ‘business model,’ and ‘added value,’ and ‘frictionless e-commerce,’ and flapdoodle like that. Said the thing about the New Economy was the ‘death of distance’ so that it didn’t make no difference where you was. We was all just nodes on the World Wide Web, didn’t matter whether you was in Millington or Roanoke or the goddamn Dulles corridor. He and a couple of friends from high school, it was. Burned through whatever was in their piggy banks by December, was back to shoveling driveways by January. What my wife calls a cautionary tale. She said, just be happy he wuddn’t on drugs. I told her I wuddn’t so sure about that. Not every drug is something you smoke, sniff, or shoot up. Money, or the craving for it, can be a drug just as surely.”

“Getting money is one trick, spending it’s another,” Janson said. “Possible to build around here?”

“Possible to build on the moon, people say.”

“What about transportation.”

“Well, you’re here, ain’t you?”

“I guess I am.”