Status Updates From Cause of Death

But that, of course, is the essential task of our profession: to be detectives, sifting through the lies and errors and the misdirection so that, ultimately, we can arrive at the splendid reality - an approximation of how the events of the past truly unfurled.

I'm not altogether upset that, for a change, I have participated in history and not merely recorded and analyzed it.

Our tech people turned the autodial on your phone into a microphone and transmitter. Simple hack. For a hacker.

I had to get inside a prison. There, the cons don't mind if you beat on your woman. Actually, scores you points.

...if he is armed, I don't care. I was dead five minutes ago. Every moment is now a gift and even if he shoots me I'll finish him. Pax's murderer will die.

Professors are forever investigating students' possible plagiarism and cheating; we learn the body language of deceit early in our careers.

Greenville Station is an old town that teeters between shabby and quaint, the proportion hovering around sixty/forty. For every bakery and bookstore and antique shop, there's a dim former mill, a warehouse storing only dust, the eponymous train station, derelict and probably unused since the days of the steam locomotive.

Go learn something.

~~~~~~

New England can get as hot as the South.

A black-and-white Chihuahua, neck encircled with a studded collar, is brandishing its toy teeth.

I'm looking over the wreck. It's totaled. But the designers in Osaka or Detroit or Guadalajara know what they're about, and the roof stands as tall as on that dealership lot in Clemson when we signed the papers ...

Jon, I see this all the time.

What?

Mostly with car wrecks, fires, choking, drowning. God blinks, something stupid happens. The littlest thing, and a dad or mom or kid dies. Pointless. Everybody wants more. A human villain, that's what they want. Conspiracy's even better.

Only the one skid mark. The left front tire. Why not two?

You see that in a blowout, no marks.

But ... a blowout at the same time she hits a deer?

Maybe the tire blew because she braked? How old were the tires?

Less than a year. Not old.

I've slipped into my professorial mode. Historians are, at heart, detectives.

He's stocky in the way of men a dozen years past school linebacking.

The box isn't taped, but the top flaps are interleaved to make a seal of sorts.

(Interleaved ... I like that word.)

Do you know if your wife was on the phone at the time of the crash?

Why?

The state compiles stats on distracted driving. Same with speeding, DUI.

I haven't been following my "workout" routine; that is, the house and yard. Pax and I mountain biked occasionally but the bulk of my exercise is maintaining and renovating the rambling, three-story cornflower blue Victorian ...

A ski trip that ended in my visit to the ER, because I didn't know there was a left ski and a right ski.

(Is there really? I switch mine all the time, so as to balance the edge wear ...)

She followed the Warren Miller approach to skiing. "My sister told me you should never jump off a sixty-foot cliff, until you've mastered jumping off a forty-foot one."

And it's just as well she took over Pax's childhood and teens since what husband of five years retains - or ever knew - all the facts of the pre-spouse days? In Pax's case, that was twenty-five years of details: thirty minus those that we were together.