The residential streets were five lanes wide, as generous as the commercial avenues that bisected the downtown. The homeowners seemed to favor raw board fences, picket fences, and tidy alleyways where trash cans had been set out waiting for the pickup. In addition to three mobile home parks, there were one-story frame and stucco houses of modest proportions. Neighborhoods were punctuated by tall palms, feathery pepper trees, paddle cactus, and telephone poles that listed to one side or the other, straining the overhead wires.

I stopped at the first service station I saw and picked up a local map, where points of interest had been flagged with small representative drawings. There was a library, a movie theater, and four elementary schools, a junior high school, a high school, and a community college. In addition to numerous supermarkets, I spotted a hospital, two hardware stores, a feed store, a boot museum, a dry goods emporium, coffee shops, drugstores, a retail tire business, three beauty shops, a fabric store, and a store selling Western attire. I couldn’t think why anyone would choose to live here. On the other hand, I couldn’t think why not. The town was clean and well-kept with more sky overhead than scenic wonders at ground level.

I was assuming that when Pete arrived in Burning Oaks the previous spring, he did so without the benefit of the mailing pouch. I couldn’t imagine how he might have acquired it unless he’d met with Father Xavier, who had delivered the items into his hands. Because of Pete’s preliminary work, I’d been provided with two critical points of reference: the name and address of the priest and the return address of the sender in the upper left-hand corner of the mailer.

I circled back to the library and pulled into an empty slot in the fifteen-space parking lot. I locked the car and went in, mailing pouch tucked under my arm. The one-story structure was of an uncertain architectural style that probably dated to the years just after World War II, when the country was recovering from steel shortages and throwing together new construction with whatever materials happened to be at hand.

I went into an interior made cozy with oversize paper tulips cut out of construction paper and mounted under a row of clerestory windows, like the flowers were yearning for the light. The space smelled of that brand of white library paste so many of us loved to eat in elementary school. Assorted preschoolers sat cross-legged on the floor while a young woman read aloud from a book about a bear who could roller-skate. To these tykes, the world was full of novelties and a skating bear was only one of many. Older adults, retired by the look of them, claimed the comfortable chairs along the far wall. Not surprisingly, much of the rest of the space was taken up by row after row of bookshelves, filled to capacity.

I approached the main desk, where a librarian was sorting and loading books onto a rolling cart for a return to the shelves. According to her name tag, she was Sandy Klemper, head librarian. She appeared to be fresh out of graduate school; a blonde in her early twenties, wearing a mint green sweater over a white blouse with a green-and-gray tweed skirt.