As he stood in line, Doug saw empty wire rack space formerly taken by the newspaper. The rack seemed sad and forlorn, if emotions could be ascribed to newsstands, and he found himself wondering what had happened to the risqué fortune cookies in Ben Stockley’s desk drawer. He could still see in his mind the editor sitting behind his desk, but that image was beginning to fade, replaced by that of the bullet-riddled body he had seen on TV. What had happened to Stockley? A lump formed in Doug’s throat and he forced himself to look away from the rack to the impulse items next to it.

It had been nearly half a month that the town had been without a paper. The Weekly had been, for all intents and purposes, a one-man operation, and when Stockley died, the paper abruptly ceased publication. Doug had no doubt that it would eventually get back on its feet once everything was sorted out—there were a few part-time reporters who could probably take over the editing duties, and the secretary pretty much knew how the business end of the operation worked—but for now the press in Willis was effectively shut down, and Doug couldn’t help feeling that that was exactly the way the mailman wanted it. No independent means of disseminating information. No official way to learn what was going on.

Of course, news still traveled through unofficial channels. And traveled quite well. Through overhearing several unconnected conversations the past few minutes, for example, he knew that several more dogs had been murdered, not poisoned this time but decapitated, their severed heads stolen.

Gossip might be reviled in certain quarters for being unreliable—a children’s party game of pass-the-message had been designed precisely to support that argument—but Doug knew from past experience that word-of-mouth was not nearly as faulty a means of learning news as it was made out to be.

He looked up to see Giselle Brennan walk into the store.

She saw him at the same time and waved. “Hi, Mr. Albin.” She walked through the turnstile and around the cash register to meet him.

She was wearing no bra, he noticed immediately, and the hard points of her nipples were visible through the thin material of her tight T-shirt. Her large breasts jiggled as she walked toward him. She was grown now, he knew. An adult, a woman, but in his mind he still thought of her as a young teenager, and he felt strange seeing her in such an obviously sexual light. It disturbed him somehow, bothered him. He smiled warily as she approached. “Hi,” he said. “How’s it going?” He moved up in line.

“I got a job.”

“Really?” he said. He placed his items on the moving black top of the register counter, automatically inserting a rubber divider behind it. “Where at?”

She grinned widely. “The post office. Can you believe it?”