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Foods. The best proof of the political clout wielded by the corporation was the seven freeway exits in a town with about 20,000 residents.
    Having failed to RSVP, I essentially crashed the party, but nobody seemed to care. Some people had changed—gaining weight or losing hair—but I had no trouble recognizing who was a classmate and who was a mere spouse.
    I could tell by their talk. And it all came down to one word: Hormel.
    Anyone who grew up around Austin, Minnesota, pronounced the giant meatpacking company as HOR-mal, rhyming with “normal,” just the way founder George A. Hormel did more than a century ago. Outsiders called it Hor-MEL. The change came about when an advertising agency taping a radio commercial thought Hor-MEL sounded better. Most people in the area continued to pronounce it the same way their ancestors did, despite the rest of the country making the switch.
    “Riley Spartz!” A group of classmates flagged me over to the keg for a glass of foaming beer.
    I waved back, mouthing, “No, thanks.” I wandered over to the buffet table and saw a sad spread of sloppy joes and potato chips.
    “Good to see you after so many years.” A former cheerleader gave me a superficial hug, then glanced behind me. “Are you here alone?”
    I realized high school had ended long ago, but I briefly regressed back to my teenage days grappling with the question of why no one had asked me to prom yet. At this stage of my life, I sure didn’t want to admit I had no husband, no children, and not even a boyfriend. So I lied.
    “He had to work tonight.”
    The funny thing was, if Garnett and I had remained a couple, he would have insisted we attend my reunion. He was a family history buff and would have considered it part of my—and thus our—life story. He would have paged through my yearbook ahead of time, asking who was popular, who was smart, who were the bullies, and which boys I had crushes on.
    I shifted my thoughts back to the present when a former teacher mentioned seeing me on the news the other night. “How’s life on TV?”
    “Terrific.” I continued to lie, rather than rob him of the belief that one of his students held a glamorous job. “News is one thing we never run out of.”
    That halted a nearby discussion on the price of corn and opened a rant on what’s wrong with the media in America.
    “Every time I watch your station, you seem to be reporting on crime,” said Maureen Noterman, editor of the weekly newspaper. “Maybe you should try reporting good news. That’s what our readers want.”
    Easy for her to say since her coverage area was far removed from most real lawlessness. And there was no sense in trying to explain that good news wasn’t always real news, so I diplomatically agreed to pass that suggestion onto my boss and used the old ploy of needing to find a restroom to end our conversation.
    The community bulletin board in the lobby caught my eye. A flyer with a photo of a dog stood out from the upcoming rummagesales and church dinners. It read MISSING across the top, while the bottom offered REWARD in the same bold letters.
    It was a cute spaniel. Too bad.
    “That’s the second dog to disappear in two months.” Maureen had followed me. “No sign of either of them. Maybe you could put it on the news.”
    While I’d had considerable experience covering missing people, missing dogs were a whole different issue. Dangerous things regularly happen to dogs out in the country. They can be hit by cars. Or bullets. Even poisoned. Savage animals can tear into their hides and leave them bleeding to death out of sight.
    “Whose dogs?” I asked.
    “The Kloeckners and Mertens,” she said. “Not too far from your parents’ place.”
    Like most news directors, Bryce liked animal stories because viewers like animal stories. That’s why zoo babies get so much airtime. But I knew it would be an impossible pitch.
    For starters, two missing dogs were not a trend. For all we knew, they ran