We were all miserable. Keith likes to be in charge and make things happen, but he was trapped by trivia. Spending bored days behind a desk, thinking they couldn’t go on forever, but they could. Josie was driving Keith’s pickup, backtracking to locate petitioners willing to take charge of the recall election. On Edna’s fourth tape, I finally pulled off my headphones, and stood up in disgust. I rifled through the printouts of her disconnected memoirs, trying to decide if some of the tapes were missing, or she was more addled than I had thought. She had just leap-frogged from her life in Iowa to her life in Kansas. My cell phone shrilled. I jumped, swore, spilled coffee, and made a mental note to change the ring. “Sam, here. Dimon called. Some news finally.” “Good? Bad?” “Neither. Just news. The poison was heavy duty. Totally unexpected. Off the wall. That’s what took the toxicologists so long.” My office phone rang.
