Sublime

To a certain cross section of clerks in that city of rubber stamps, carbon paper, and spindles, he had become a familiar figure, a slender, tall twenty-year-old with nice manners and a rumpled suit, appearing in the middle of a stifling afternoon, looking painfully cheerful. He would doff his hat. The clerk or secretary—a woman, more often than not

emaciated

“Lock him up,” Beckett mutters from the corner. He’s backed himself into the space next to my office tree, cloaked half in shadow. He looks like the Grinch, sounds like him too. “Throw away the key.”

him

When

didn’t know Lee Adams or his family, but as far as we were concerned, after Johnny Appleseed (who had lived briefly in our town), he was the most famous person to have emerged from Mansfield.

surmise,”

They knew about the blueberry, but not the pie,

obfuscation.