As I drove into town, though, I joined every local kid in chomping at the bit to be someplace else, anyplace else. Ghost town was too fanciful a term for Columbus, conjuring up visions of porch swings creaking in the breeze and tattered vintage Coke signs flapping. This place was a zombie, rotting before my eyes, dead but still somehow functioning.

The population sign looked as if it had recently been reduced from four digits to three, even that estimate bearing an air of desperate optimism. I drove past three businesses on the outskirts of town—a boarded-up bowling alley, a used-car lot with three mud-mired clunkers, and a darkened gas station.

The residential streets came next, if one can still call them that when there’s little sign of actual residents. Maybe a quarter of the lots bore the kind of tidy postwar homes I’d envisioned. Almost half, though, had For Sale signs, most faded or fallen, all hope abandoned. As for the others, it seemed the homeowners hadn’t even been able to work up the confidence to put their house on the market, the yards overgrown, windows boarded up or broken, as if the residents were resigned to the fact they were stuck here, but resentfully, refusing even to do basic maintenance.

I didn’t need magical powers to cast my mind’s eye out to the other edge of town and see a closed sawmill or factory along the rail tracks. Columbus was the kind of place that wouldn’t have anything to recommend it except good-paying industrial jobs. It was an ugly town in a beautiful state. Portland was close enough for commuting, but so were lots of other, better places, with highway access.

As I rode down Main Street, I started wishing I’d rented a car-something old and rusty, something that would fit in. Normally, I’m all about the attention, but the heads turning my way, the eyes narrowing, the lips tightening, wasn’t the kind of attention I needed if I was about to poke my nose into local murders. Everything about me screamed big city, proof that the world was chugging along in relative ease outside the town limits.

I rode down a quiet secondary road where the only business still operating was a pawnshop. Finally, I spotted the building where Brandi, Ginny, and Claire had died. According to my notes, it used to be an office. I couldn’t tell—it looked like it’d been closed for a decade. It’d probably been the town eyesore for years. Now it fit right in.

I parked in the lot across the road. The only other car there was a BMW. An older model but in AI shape. I wasn’t surprised to see an out-of-state plate on it. Texas.