Death Before Facebook

progress.”
    “You overestimate us. There are probably only about eight TOWNspeople in the whole city.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “It just seems like a lot because they’re all such busy-bodies.” He held out a hand, inviting her to sit in a beat-up rocking chair whose caned seat was rapidly coming unwoven. She perched gingerly.
    “They?”
    He smiled, accepting the jibe graciously. “All of us, I guess.”
    “It’s your first murder, I hear.”
    “But not our first death. Somebody committed suicide once, after making a lot of depressed posts and finally erasing everything he’d ever written.”
    Skip said nothing, trying to figure out what Pearce was getting at.
    “Thereby committing virtual suicide first.”
    “Oh, come on.”
    He shrugged. “That’s what people thought.”
    “Doesn’t anybody on the TOWN have a life?”
    “A lot of them don’t, though they’d say they do. It’s just that it consists of parking their butts in the same chair and staring at the same square foot every day all day. The TOWN selects for heavy mental artillery and poor social adjustment. Great verbal skills, not much else. We even joke about it. Did you ever see that New Yorker cartoon of the pooch at the computer terminal? The caption says, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.’ ”
    “I was wondering about that. But so far most of the people I’ve met seem fairly normal.”
    “You should have met Geoff.”
    “Oh?”
    “Sweet kid. Really sweet. But painfully shy; no idea how to talk to girls—or anybody for that matter. Just not social.”
    “He had a girlfriend.”
    “Yes. Lenore. I wonder if they met online. No, I think they knew each other before. Most of the local TOWNspeople did—that is, they talked each other into getting online. By the way, that suicide wasn’t our only drama. We had a threatened one once. Somebody broke up with a boyfriend—you know, I do believe it was Lenore; maybe she and Geoff did meet on the TOWN, because she had another guy at some point. He unexpectedly dumped her and she turned the TOWN into the Ashland Shakespeare Festival.
    “People from all over the country were sending her virtual chicken soup and giving her strokes and offering to fly out to keep her company—and I don’t mean just guys, either. All kinds of people—” He turned his palms up. “Out of kindness, it would seem.”
    “But you don’t think so.”
    “Oh, I do. I just think it’s a little odd—don’t you? I doubt any of them had ever seen her or talked to her.”
    “Yes.” Skip sat back in her chair.
    “Yes what?”
    “Yes, I think it’s extremely odd.” That didn’t begin to describe what she really thought of it. “Who was the boyfriend?” she said.
    “Lenore’s? I don’t know if she ever said.”
    “It could have been Geoff, then.”
    He considered. “I suppose. But I really didn’t get that impression.”
    “Or it could have been someone else on the TOWN.”
    He grinned at her. “You’ve got a real talent for small-town, gossip. You’d fit right in.”
    “Actually, it’s my job.” Annoyed at the concept she kept running into—that of TOWN as entire world—she made her voice crisply professional, slightly icy. “Did you know Geoff well?”
    “I guess. The local folk get together now and then.”
    “You’re sort of their guru, I hear.”
    He grinned. “Modesty forbids comment.”
    “I was wondering if Geoff talked to you—about any of his problems, for instance.”
    “He did now and then. Why?”
    “Did he talk about this memory he was trying to retrieve? The murder?”
    “No. Never.”
    “Where were you the morning he was killed?”
    “What is this? I thought you came to ask me about the TOWN.”
    “Oh, I did. And you think somebody on the TOWN murdered Geoff Kavanagh, don’t you?”
    “Young lady, I don’t think I like your tone.”
    “I wonder if you’d answer the question.” She owed him no apology, but she didn’t like her own tone. She had no idea why she was being so rude—it was something about the man’s arrogance, a coldness she sensed, a failure to connect with Geoff and maybe others that was getting to her.
    “I can’t say where I was.”
    “Why not?”
Don’t you remember
? she wanted to add.
    “It could compromise someone.”
    Skip frowned, but forebore to say anything. Let him stew.
    “I’m really surprised you’re taking this line of questioning.”
    “I have to ask everyone the same thing. But you know