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his frame into it. Had it been up to him, pretty much every piece of furniture in the cottage would have been hauled to the dump a long time ago, but he could make do for three months. He had a lifetime’s worth of experience of making do.
    He eased into the chair, cringing when its joints complained, and opened the cover on his electronic notebook. As he hit the On button, a movement to his right caught his attention. A dog with shaggy black-and-white fur trotted toward him. For a moment he tensed. Would the thing attack? But then he saw the dog’s tongue lolling from its open mouth and its flag-like tail wagging in a friendly swish.
    “Well, hi there.” Briley stuck out his hand and let the dog sniff it over. “You live around here?” Of course, the creature didn’t reply, but it gave his hand a swipe with its warm, velvety tongue, then flopped down on the stoop next to Briley’s chair and rested its head on its paws. Briley laughed, pleased more than he could explain by the dog’s presence. He gave its soft ears a quick scratch. “Sorry, fella, but I have work to do. You can stick around, though, if you want to.”
    The dog rhythmically
thump-thumped
its tail against the stoop as Briley propped the notebook on his knee. The evening air was cool but not overly so,sufficiently blocked by his leather bomber jacket. A single lantern mounted next to the door gave off enough light for him to see. He began typing, his process slow and deliberate as he chose the little squares representing letters.
    First impression of A.Z.—a little stuffy; cautiously friendly; dresses like a grandma.
    First impression of community—people curious and watchful; town small but neat …
    He typed a lengthy description of the businesses and of what he’d glimpsed through the windows. Len would laugh about all those oil lamps. Then he turned his attention to the farm that would be his temporary home.
    First impression of farmstead—quiet; neat; peaceful.
    The third descriptor stilled his fingers.
Peaceful
wasn’t something he’d experienced much. Not as a child being shuffled from foster home to foster home, and not as an adult living in the middle of a big, bustling city.
    He lifted his head and gave his current surroundings a slow examination. A long clothesline stretched from one end of the yard to the other, the wire shining in the moonlight. No trash blew across the ground or gathered along the house’s foundation. Lights burned behind windows in the farmhouse, several on the first floor and two on the second. The glow became a beacon as darkness crept across the landscape. The insistent chirp of a cricket—or maybe a herd of them—combined with the soft whistle of the wind. Scents he couldn’t recognize filled his nostrils. Earthy scents. Not unpleasant.
    Using the hunt-and-peck method, he tapped out
fresh-smelling
, then glanced at his list and chuckled. So far everything he’d recorded about the locale was exactly what Len said everyone wanted to believe.
“There’s gotta be dirt there, Briley,”
Len had told him during his last morning in the office, hisexpression earnest as he slipped into what Briley called his reporter mode.
“Find the dirt. Disprove all that peaceful, smiley, turn-the-other-cheek nonsense that makes people want to visit their communities and bow down in admiration. Let’s show the real truth of being trapped in the Plain lifestyle.”
    Sitting there with his new furry pal, drinking in the pleasant quiet, Briley wondered if Len might be wrong. He hoped not, because if he couldn’t uncover dirt, he wouldn’t have a story. And he desperately wanted the story. His first major byline. The teachers who shook their heads in dismay at his struggle to read, the foster parents who declared he’d never amount to anything, the class bullies who called him “big dummy”—wouldn’t all of them be shocked to discover how wrong they’d been about him when Briley Forrester’s name appeared under a lead