Jenny had always been one to give it to him straight. She’d been slinging bacon and eggs and hash browns since Harry’s dad brought him here for the occasional breakfast back in the seventies. Jenny was pushing that magic number herself, still working at an age when most had retired, but she showed no signs of slowing down, except for the odd complaint about her aching feet.

“Can I get a bacon sandwich or something for Gavin out there? He’s not lookin’ all that great. Put it on my tab.”

“Tab? You gotta tab?”

“Just put it on there.”

“How about you?”

“Just coffee.”

“Bullshit. You need something to eat. You’ve lost five pounds this last month.”

More like eight or nine, he thought. There was a tossed copy of the Lucknow Leader two stools over. Harry grabbed it, unfolded it to see the front page, ignoring the egg yolk stain across the banner. The lead story was not, for a change, about the two Lucknow men who had been missing for more than a month now. Angus Tanner, a fifty-two-year-old maple syrup producer, married thirty years, father of two. It had been a Tuesday, and sometime between leaving the factory and heading home, he vanished. And then a couple of days later, Walter Hillman, twenty-five, single, assistant manager of a Business Depot, didn’t come to work one day. Someone finally went to his home—he lived on his own in a one-room apartment in a rooming house—and he was gone.

In both cases, there was no sign of foul play, but nor was there any indication that they had voluntarily walked away from their lives in Lucknow. No charges to credit cards, no withdrawals from cash machines. And in both cases, their cars—Tanner’s 1996 Dodge minivan and Hillman’s 1984 Toyota Celica—had been left behind.

But a story like that, of two town men disappearing, didn’t stay on the front page of the local rag without developments. There’d been updates for the first ten days or so, then a story every couple of days, then maybe one a week. There were theories; chief among them, and without any supporting evidence, was that the two men had run off together. Hillman was gay, but if Tanner was, he’d kept that part of his life a secret.

Harry wasn’t buying it. Not that he had a theory that was any better. And then came that call in the middle of the night—just a few hours earlier—about something suspicious being found in a ditch on one of the county roads about ten miles out of town. He didn’t know how long he could keep a lid on that. Especially since there’d been a local in attendance who wasn’t likely to stay quiet.