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archive, where I read more of Wilmott’s reporting about various members of the town. It was fairly sleazy and one-sided, and while he obviously thought of himself as a purveyor of truth in a town of dishonest officials, he was quite plaintive and biased in his reporting. There were no photos of Carter except for those that accompanied his restaurant reviews, reviews that I hadn’t read prior to tonight’s online reconnaissance mission. I read the reviews dispassionately; this was a guy who clearly had a high opinion of himself and his culinary expertise. Then, I got to a post about my favorite restaurant, Sadie’s, and my unbiased opinion of him turned definitely sour. Sadie’s was the first place that Crawford had taken me and I had warm feelings toward it. To read that Wilmott had called it “a dive—at best” got my hackles up and I must have let out a little sound because Trixie picked her head up from the floor and growled at me in agreement. He continued: “… the ambiance is poor, the service even worse, and the food abysmal. The only good thing I can say is that I got drunk on the rotgut house wine but only because the owner bought me a carafe in the hopes of getting a good review.” I hadn’t realized that Wilmott was also a restaurant reviewer, but he took on every restaurant and eating establishment in town.
    Even delis.
    I clicked on the link that was titled “Tony’s—I’d Rather Eat a Can of Worms Than His Chicken Salad”—a most unoriginal title written by a guy with a limited knowledge of adjectives. Again, we returned to “abysmal,” “poor,” and “worst.” The commenters who weighed in below the post were split between outrage—“Tony’s is a village institution”—to complete agreement with Wilmott’s assessement. Me? I loved Tony’s, but since Tony loved me, in the romantic sense, I didn’t go there very often anymore. Add in the crazy, jealous wife he had recently acquired and I was staying away for good. But he didn’t deserve to be lambasted on this hack’s Web site, that was certain. Tony was a kind man with a good heart, and a wife I was pretty sure had created the torture technique we had all come to know as “waterboarding.” She was that mean. And she didn’t like me.
    But Tony’s chicken salad was the best. I knew that for sure.
    There was a picture of Wilmott standing outside of Tony’s; he was making a face that conveyed his disdain for the place. In his hand was a wrapped sub—chicken salad, I presumed—which he was in the process of pitching into a garbage can. I looked closely at the picture. Although he was dressed similarly to how he had been dressed that morning in his oxford shirt and khakis, they were clearly one or two sizes larger than the ones he had been wearing when I saw him. He was a husky and robust man in the picture, not the thin, almost frail-looking guy that I had met and watched die. I wondered if his wife had put him on a diet, because no man would want to go from the way he had looked in the picture to a ninety-eight-pound weakling. From the looks of things, he should have eaten that sub. He had obviously been wasting away.
    Or maybe Tony’s wife, Lucia, had been poisoning him. I wouldn’t put it past her.
    One of the most recent, and as it turned out, last entries was about the DPW and, specifically, George Miller. I could see why Miller might have a problem with Wilmott after he was described as having a “bulbous nose—one that could only belong to a full-blown alcoholic” and a “less than stellar record on environmentally sound methods of waste disposal.” Wilmott also took issue with Miller’s wife, saying that she was the most flagrant scofflaw in town when it came to recycling or lack thereof. Pictures taken of an unsuspecting Ginny Miller were posted on the blog in various stages of scofflawness. In the photos, she was shown throwing beer cans into the regular garbage and shoving plastic shopping bags down into