At the entrance of both wine and horse country, Kerrigan Falls was surrounded by the lush and humid rolling hills of the Virginia countryside with their old horse farms and new vineyards. In the past ten years, tourists had begun to flock to the area for its quaint downtown, buying up old farms, opening antiques shops and vintage bookstores. In its heyday after the war, the town had been the home of the Zoltan’s Spicy Brown Mustard plant and before that, of the famous (or infamous, depending upon the story) circus, Le Cirque Margot. In the past year, a noticeable shift had happened here. A famous DC chef had opened up a restaurant that had earned a Michelin star. People who once worked shifts at the old mustard plant were now running bed-and-breakfasts in sprawling Victorians, complete with picket fences and porch swings.

The downtown itself was laid out like a movie set from the 1940s—awnings, sandblasted brick buildings, a state theater, big stone churches at the corners, and Victorian homes all restored with a meticulous devotion. The Orpheum Theatre still showed It’s a Wonderful Life the Saturday before Christmas to a packed house. There was a strange, unnatural perfection to Kerrigan Falls.

Ben had his own Victorian that he still owned, although he didn’t live in it. According to their divorce agreement, Marla was supposed to buy his half out, yet she’d shown little interest in selling. So he’d taken to stopping at houses with FOR SALE signs in front of them and determining whether the photos of the selling agents looked hungry enough. Any agent they hired would need to navigate between his eagerness and Marla’s reluctance to sell. He glanced down at the passenger’s seat where he’d listed a bunch of real estate agent numbers along with a little cartoon drawing of his own house, shading in the ornate trellis and crepe myrtle tree that adorned the front.

Honestly, the town was too perfect. Nothing—not a shooting or a robbery or even a petty theft—had happened here. Ben Archer was almost the laughingstock of every police gathering or convention in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Washington Post had written an article about the “Kerrigan Falls Phenomenon” last year in the Style Section. (The Style Section?) If you searched back in the archives—as Ben had many times—the last murder within city limits had been in 1935. The surrounding counties had their share of murders, murder-suicides, and pileups on the highway, but those accidents never crossed the county line, almost so as not to offend Kerrigan County. But there had been that one case.

That one case was very much on Ben Archer’s mind this morning,