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saw nothing amiss, then drove slowly to the loop in front of the house and blew his horn. No reaction. He got out for a look around. He started up the drive to the side of the house when an unusual odor hit him and he spotted the body beside the garage. Suddenly, he realized he was in an exposed position. He drew his revolver, and, crouching, retreated quickly to the cover of his car.
    Tom Swinney had received a telephone call from the dispatcher and was on his way to the scene, only a few miles away on Covered Bridge Road.
    “Three-o-five, step it up,” Nobles called to him from his portable radio. “We’ve got trouble here. Run code three.”
    Nobles also notified the dispatcher to get car 315, Officer Steve Sparrow, to the scene.
    Nobles’s first thought was that the daughter the dispatcher had mentioned might have gone crazy, killed her mother, and was still holed up in the house. He kept a close watch on windows and doors until Swinney arrived.
    “We’ve got a body up here beside the garage and according to the lady who called in, there’s supposed to be a daughter somewhere,” Nobles told Swinney when his cruiser pulled up behind the chief’s. “We’ve got to go inside.”
    “I know the house,” Swinney said.
    He also knew Delores and Janie. He was the officer who had investigated Chuck’s death eight months earlier.
    With revolvers and portable radios in hand, the two officers advanced cautiously upon the house.
    4
    Tiny, sweet Janie. That was how family and friends thought of Janie Lynch, framed in their minds by her stature and disposition. In many ways, she was like her mother. She had inherited her mother’s size, for one thing, a petite five-foot-two, and, as she approached forty, still wore a size three dress. Her mother’s outgoing nature was hers as well. Perky, bubbly, and vivacious were words frequently used to describe Janie, although she also harbored a certain reserve that sometimes made her seem cool and distant, hard to get to know. Once that reserve was breached, she was witty and charming, fun to be around, just as her mother frequently was. In one crucial aspect, though, Janie was very much unlike her mother. She was without her mother’s abrasiveness and guile. Underlying Janie’s character was a sincere sweetness that endeared her to all.
    For the past year, however, Janie had not been her usual self. She was in the clutches of a malaise she couldn’t escape. She tired easily, became quickly irritated, was plagued with vague aches. She complained of having no energy and feeling bad all the time.
    Anemia, the doctors told her, and she had been to several. They seemed to think that her complaints were related to the stress of her final year in dental school. They gave her thyroid medicine and vitamin shots and sent her on her way. Stress from school no doubt was part of the problem, but those who knew Janie best suspected something deeper. Once again, she was approaching one of those points in her life that she dreaded and sought to avoid: a time for decision making, for setting a course.
    Janie never had been able to figure out what she wanted from life, and now, after four years of striving for her latest degree, her third, and only a few months from turning forty, she again was questioning. She had talked of moving to Albuquerque and joining her brother in his dental practice, of starting a practice near Louisville, of moving to some other state and making a whole new start, but she had seen drawbacks in all of these options and wasn’t really drawn to any one of them.
    Her mother told her not to worry. Just move in with her, rest, recover her health, then decide. That was the course Janie chose, the course of delayed decision, a non-decision that would be the most decisive of her life. Delores couldn’t have been happier about it. Her friends knew that she had Janie exactly where she wanted her.
    Delores had flabbergasted Janie’s fellow students at dental school with her