Notes from the Bench

Six weeks after Fixed to Death launched, a plain thank-you, a note on what this blog has been since March, and why the series keeps a ticket open.

A woman came in with a doorbell transformer off her own wall and asked me to make the bell ring softer, for a house with no noise allowed in it from the morning to the middle of the afternoon. Nothing was wrong with the box, and a bell has no volume to turn down, so what went home with her was a cut-off switch to fit by the bed.

September brings the rain back, and the whole region turns over with it. It is my working weather, and it is the weather my first novel happens in, because it is the weather I wrote it in.

Violence off the page, the dead treated with decency, the town as important as the crime. The puzzle is no softer for it, and I would not write it any other way.

Late August in the town I made up. The river is down to its gravel, the evenings are coming in earlier, and everybody is waiting on the wet half of the year to start.

Six years ago, on the day her name came off the post-office window, the town threw Dot Kowalski a going-away party in the church basement. Somebody asked the question the town had waited thirty years to ask. This is the answer she gave them, and the one she kept.