Growing up in the “Most Haunted Town in America” had been fun when he was a kid, especially when the Dead Days festival came around. But by the time he was in high school, he had grown tired of living in a perpetual spook show, as so many Exeter teens did, and more than a little embarrassed by it. So after graduation, he took classes at Tri-County Community College for a year before moving to Indianapolis to enroll in the police academy. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to be a big-city cop as that he just wanted to get the hell out of Exeter and never return. He was the youngest of four children, all of whom had moved out of town as soon as they could. His mom died of breast cancer when he was in junior high, and his dad remarried during Peter’s first year of college and moved with his new wife to Florida. So it wasn’t as if he had anything or anyone to tie him to Exeter. And then he met Beth. She had been working at a Steak and Shake in downtown Indy back then, and Peter ate there often, partly because it was the best he could afford but mostly so he could see her.
