In Broad Daylight Read Online Free PDF

others working in their gardens or leaning against their pickups and chatting with their neighbors.
    As the road descends into the depression, it passes the large red-brick Methodist Church. With a pair of tall spirals and several large oval stained-glass windows, it is the town's most striking building. Across the street and down a few yards, just before the bottom of the hill, is the seat of town government-a converted gas station with large black letters spelling out SKID MORE across the top. The board of aldermen meets once a month in the former station's office, which also houses the town clerk. Attached to the city hall is the Skidmore Community Fire Department, which contains three trucks of varying vintage.
    Thirty yards down the road, where the depression flattens out, sits the old Skidmore Depot, a red wooden building which was recently fixed up to serve as the town museum. Hot dog and marshmallow roasts are held here on Halloween night in a futile attempt to distract teenagers from shooting out street lights and setting bales of hay on fire in the middle of bridges.
    Rising on the other side of the depression, Elm becomes the one-block business section and reveals with uncompromising clarity the extent of the town's economic decay. The few businesses that remain are barely hanging on. In place of the big hotel is an empty wooden garage with splintered wooden slats where the front door used to be. In a squat, cinder-block building attached to the garage is Mom's Cafe, where farmers, seed dealers, and the few remaining merchants gather during the day.
    Further on up the hill is the D & G Tavern, named for owners Del and Greg Clement. A long building of corrugated metal, with a nearly flat roof and an air conditioner in the only window, the tavern has a bare cement floor, two pool tables, and booths along the east wall. Much larger than it looks from the outside-it sometimes hosts dances on Saturday nights-the tavern is the sole source of night life in Skidmore.
    Across the street from the tavern is the post office, and a few feet to the east of that sits the Masonic Building, a two-story brick building with a large arch over the front door. The building, which has been a drugstore, a barber shop, and an opera house in years past, now serves as the town library, but it is really only an empty building with books piled in it. In the little park on the corner, just west of the post office, a flagpole has been planted in cement next to a plaque honoring local men who died in various wars. Brief services are conducted in the park every Memorial Day for the town's veterans, and frog jumping contests are held here in August during the annual Punkin' Show. A wire fence runs along the edge for posting community notices.
    The intersection at the top of the hill, where Elm Street turns back into Route 113 and heads south out of town, is Four Corners, the crossroads of town. On the northwest corner, across from the little park, sits Sumy Oil, a gas station and repair shop and one of the enduring businesses in town. The Sumys are a third-generation Skidmore family, and Marvin Sumy, like his father, sells most of his gas and does most of his repair work on credit. Each spring, his gasoline truck makes the rounds to the farms, and the farmers settle up with him on the way back from the grain elevator in October. On the southwest corner sits a combination gas station and convenience store. Next door is the American Legion Building, Sam Albright Post No. 411. (Sam, from another old Skidmore family, went down with his ship in World War II.) The brick building is large (for Skidmore), with an exterior like a 1930s five-and-dime store. A battered wooden bench sits outside the door, a convenient roost for old-timers on summer days.
    Route 113 emerges from Skidmore to meet the corn and bean fields growing up to the backyards of the houses on the southern edge of town. From there, the road begins a long, gradual descent, passing the