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to see. And I'm not long on theories either. Don't know anyone round here well enough to say whether or not they might kill someone. How about you? You being the man who should have won the election and all, you must know somebody who'd want old Jarrold dead and gone.”
    Ellstrom's face set into a scowl. Ignoring her, he reached for the microphone of the radio and called in to tell someone named Lorraine that he was bringing in an important witness and she had better have everything ready. Elizabeth settled back in her seat. Deputy Ellstrom's loquaciousness was apparently not going to extend beyond bad-mouthing his boss. Figured. If he spouted theories on suspects, he might actually have to back them up with something other than hot air.
    Still Creek had closed up for the night. The imitation gaslights that lined Main Street cast a hazy pinkish glow on the shop fronts that shouldered up against one another on either side of the wide main street. The ornate facades of the buildings that had been constructed in the early 1880s stood like silent sentinels, dark windows staring blankly as the police car cruised past.
    A tidy little town, Still Creek was kept spit-and-polish clean out of midwestern habit and for the benefit of the tourists being lured to take in the bucolic scenery and the sights of the many Amish farms in the area. There was no trash in the gutters, no shop fronts in need of paint. Wooden tubs of geraniums sat curbside at regular intervals. The occasional spiffy red park bench tucked up against a building offered respite for those weary of walking from gift shop to gift shop. Windows were decorated either with austere Amish artifacts and quilts that were like works of graphic art or with gaudy Scandinavian rosemaling painted on the window glass in colorful curlicues like frosting on a bakery cake. A banner had been strung up above Main Street advertising the annual Horse and Buggy Days festival that would begin in one week.
    The cruiser rolled slowly past the old building that housed the Still Creek
Clarion
. Like its neighbors to the north and south, it was built of dark brick two stories high with fancy dentils and cornices along the front belying the fact that it was really just a plain old square commercial building with a wet basement and dry rot in the floors. The gold letters arching across the wide first-floor window had been there for ninety-two years, proclaiming to one and all that the
Clarion
printed the truth.
    Elizabeth thought of the hours she would put in the next day working on the story of what had happened to her that night. The truth. Looking around her at the sleeping town, she knew instinctively that the truth was going to go far beyond the death of Jarrold Jarvis, and Still Creek would never be the same. But the truth was what she had come here to print. The truth, unadorned and unadulterated.
    The courthouse squatted like an enormous toadstool smack in the center of town, surrounded on three sides by Keillor Park. Built in 1882, the year the railroad had come through and Still Creek had won the title of Tyler County seat, it was constructed of native limestone, big square blocks of it stacked stone upon stone by Norwegian and German immigrants whose descendants still lived here. The old-time town square had forced Main Street to skirt around it and, while it was a picturesque arrangement, it wasn't conducive to traffic flow, explaining why the state highway had swung off to the west, missing the heart of Still Creek altogether.
    Ellstrom pulled the cruiser into the parking lot and nosed it into a slot up against the side of the building that was marked SHERIFF JANTZEN . Elizabeth felt a smile threaten, but she ironed it out. Whatever this antagonism was between the sheriff and his deputy, it wasn't cute. The gleam in Ellstrom's eye was too malicious to be mistaken for cute.
    He led the way into the building through a side door marked TYLER COUNTY LAW ENFORCEMENT CENTER and down a set of