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anytime.”
    Kristen laughed. Marydale recited the address, and Kristen typed it into her phone. Marydale expected Kristen to turn back toward the motel, but she didn’t, and the cool breeze at their back seemed to carry them forward.
    “What’s it like living in a town where everyone knows everyone?” Kristen asked.
    And before Marydale knew, they were talking, and Kristen’s casual questions reminded her of Aldean. There was no hidden meaning behind her small talk.
    “Do you like working at the diner?” Kristen asked, not Frank’s a good man to give you this chance, ain’t he?
    “It’s all right,” Marydale said. “I hear a lot of gossip.”
    “What’s the best thing you’ve heard?” Kristen asked.
    Marydale paused. People in town didn’t talk about the best gossip. Only one really interesting thing had ever happened in Tristess, and Marydale knew that story too well, even if people in town didn’t tell it out of deference to her poor, dear mother .
    “You’ve heard of a Landrace?” Marydale asked.
    “You mean like a 5K, like a run?”
    Marydale smiled. “It’s a kind of swine. I heard Mrs. Woodrow say”—she added a little twang to her voice—”that she heard from Ella at the bank that last year at the county fair when Lu-Anne Stewart’s boy, Kent, showed his Landrace and won the blue ribbon for heaviest year-old, it wasn’t a true Landrace.” She paused, lowing her voice with mock seriousness. “The National Swine Registry won’t record a Landrace with less than six functional teats on each side of the underline, and Mrs. Woodrow said Ella saw an inverted teat on the back left side.”
    Kristen stopped, her smile cocked at an incredulous angle. “That’s a thing?”
    “Ella thinks Lu-Anne paid off the judge.”
    “With what?”
    Marydale imitated Mrs. Woodrow’s shocked whisper. “I can’t say, but she has the harlot’s mark on her.”
    Kristen chuckled. “Sounds like Portland law: who slept with whose paralegal, which big firm is stealing which clients. No one tells me anything here.” She shook her head.
    “You’re new,” Marydale said. “They’ll warm up to you.”
    The sidewalk narrowed, and Marydale fell into step behind Kristen. Kristen did look like a librarian with her tortoiseshell glasses and her gray suit fitted a bit too tightly around her ass. She probably hated the way her jacket flared up in back and strained a little at the seams, but Marydale didn’t mind.
    Marydale wanted to take her hand. No, it was more than a want. It was that familiar feeling that there was another life, another world where another Marydale was walking hand in hand with a woman like Kristen. If she could just close her eyes or run fast enough or sprinkle gold dust…but that was what Aldean was always warning her about.
    “This guy Ronald Holten offered me a house to rent for free,” Kristen said. “Do you know anything about him? I just got this feeling…I’m not used to taking anything for free.”
    Kristen stared up at a streetlight. In profile, she looked like one of the Greek statues in Holten State Penitentiary’s Encyclopedia of Western Culture , plain but in a way that made other women look cheap.
    “The Holtens always want something,” Marydale said. “There are people in town who won’t like you for turning down Ronald Holten. Things would be easier for you if you said yes, but…I’d say no.”
    They had arrived at the little grass octagon that served as the town “square.” In the center, a wooden gazebo housed the Pioneer Poison Well.
    “Easier how?” Kristen asked.
    “Just easier.”
    “That’s cryptic.”
    “He owns everything. He likes it that way.”
    They stepped into the darkness of the gazebo. The well was a concrete barrel with metal bars across the top and a plaque documenting the forty-seven pioneers poisoned by the water. Marydale leaned over, feeling, as she always did, that if she had anything precious, it would slip off her like a necklace