ABSTRACT
He had been missing for nearly 20 years. It wasn’t often that people
from the Town of Chadwick commented on the whereabouts of
their residents, and he was no exception. No one made reference
to his absence as he walked through the town, passing by familiar
landmarks and faces. The lack of responsiveness had nothing to
do with quaint New England stoicism or discretion, but plain old-
fashioned indifference to someone regarded as a stranger. The only
people who remained in “TC” (as the townies called it) past high
school graduationwere the peoplewho had nowhere else to go. They
had played too hard in school and had failed to gain admission to
the large state university (usually so forgiving of its native sons and
daughters), so they had nothing to look forward to but a life of hard,
dull, low-paying work in a town where the largest employers were
a large convenience chain and high-tech maximum security prison.
TC folks married their so-called high school sweethearts, had three
kids, one dog, and a mortgage they couldn’t pay off until they were
practically ready to retire from either work or life itself. Idle gossip
about residents in TC was a trade industry like movies in Hollywood
or politics in D.C., but it is said that only TC’s undertaker knows
where the real bodies and secrets are buried. TC has always been
that kind of dead-end town.