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would you do that?”
    “To keep you honest. I learned long ago you leaned one way, me the other. You were always wrong, I was always right. I hate liars.”
    “‘Optimists’ is the word you want.”
    “No wonder I hate you. The world’s a cesspool and you keep swimming in it, heading for shore. Dear God, where is the shore? You’ll never find it because the shore doesn’t exist! We’re rats drowning in a sewer, but you see lighthouses where there are none. You claim the Titanic is Mark Twain’s steamboat. To you Svengali, Raskolnikov, and Hitler were the Three Stooges! I feel sorry for you. So I’m here to make you honest.”
    “Since when have you believed in honesty?”
    “Honesty, currency, and common sense. Never play funhouse slot machines, don’t toss red-hot pennies to the poor, or throw your landlady downstairs. Fine futures? Hell, the future’s now , and it’s rotten. So, just what are you up to in this jerkwater town?”
    McCoy glared around the deserted station.
    Cardiff said, “You’d better leave on the next train.”
    “I got twenty-four hours to steal your story.” McCoy squinted at the shut sunflowers that lined the road into town. “Lead the way. I’ll follow and trip over the bodies.”
    McCoy hoisted his bag and began to walk, and Cardiff, after a beat or two, jogged to catch up with him.
    “My editor said I’d better come back with a headline—one thousand bucks if it’s good, three if it’s super.” As they walked, McCoy surveyed the porch swings motionless in the early morning breeze and the high windows that reflected no light. “You know, this feels like super.”
    Cardiff trudged along, thinking: Don’t breathe. Lie low.
    The town heard.
    No leaf trembled. No fruit fell. Shadows of dogs lay under bushes, but no dogs. The grass flattened like the fur on a nervous cat. All was stillness.
    Pleased with the silence he sensed he had caused, McCoy stopped where two streets intersected, panoplied by trees. He stared at the green architecture and mused, “I get it.” He dropped his bag, pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket, which he licked, and began to scribble in a notepad, pronouncing the syllables as he wrote. “Leftover town. Stillborn, Nebraska. Remembrance, Ohio. Steamed west in 1880, lost steam 1890. End of the line 1900. Long lost.”
    Cardiff suffered lockjaw.
    McCoy appraised him. “I’m on the money, right? I can see it in your face. You came to bury Caesar. I came to stir his bones. You followed your intuition here; I came thanks to an itching hunch. You liked what you saw and probably would have gone home and said nothing. I don’t like what I see, past tense.” He stuck the pencil behind his ear, jammed the notepad in his pants pocket, and reached down to heft his bag once more. As if propelled by the sound of his own voice, he continued striding down Summerton’s streets, proclaiming as he went, “Look at that lousy architecture, the gimcrack scrimshaw rococo baroque shingles and hangons. You ever see so many damn scroll-cut wooden icicles? Christ, wouldn’t it be awful to be trapped here forever, even just two weeks every summer? Hey, now, what’s this ?” He stopped short, looked up.
    The sign over the porch front read, EGYPTIAN VIEW ARMS. BOARDING.
    McCoy glanced at Cardiff, who stiffened. “ This has got to be your digs. Let’s see.”
    And before Cardiff could move, McCoy was up the front steps and inside the screen door.
    Cardiff caught the door before it could slam and stepped in.
    Silence. The obsequies over. The dear departed gone.
    Even the parlor dust did not move, if there ever had been any dust. All the Tiffany lamps were dark and the flower vases empty. He heard McCoy in the kitchen and went to find him.
    McCoy stood in front of the icebox, which was opened wide. There was no ice within, nor any cream or milk or butter and no drip pan under the box to be drunk by a thirsty dog after midnight. The pantry, similarly, displayed no leopard