Free New Title 1 by Ed Gorman

its own acre lot on the edge of a residential area. The grass was in need of a quick trim.
    In the front yard, a slender woman with a blonde ponytail sat next to an aluminum tub where she was bathing a feisty young kitten. I couldn't see her face but something about her blue work shirt and jeans and the heavy Navajo turquoise earrings signaled me that she was going to be young—no more, say, than thirty.
    I walked over and watched the kitten shake off water and soapsuds. The woman laughed most pleasantly, then looked up at me.
    Her eyes were young, brown and quick and intelligent, but the skin of her face was deeply lined and aged.
    A momentary sadness shone in her eyes, as if she was used to people being surprised by how old her face looked when they finally saw it. The odd thing was that she was very pretty, even with the wrinkles and grooves in her face.
    The kitten, who was calico and very young—four pounds of kitty at most—was covered with suds and water that made her fur stand straight up like spikes. She made a lot of mad little noises, her eyes chiding me for not taking her away from this murderous woman who imprisoned her.
    "She hates it, Ayesha does," she said, wrapping the wriggling kitten in a nubby white towel.
    "Ayesha, that's a great name."
    "From H. Rider Haggard," she smiled. "I was one of those girls who always liked boys' books better than the ones for girls. Ayesha was the eternal goddess in She ."
    "That's right, I forgot. I used to read Haggard, too."
    "Give me a minute—I'm going to run her inside."
    While she was gone, I walked to the edge of the small hill the house sat on and looked at the blue river in the yellow sunlight. There was a breeze, one scented up with apple blossoms, and as I watched the river I thought of how white pine had been rafted down these waters to the eager mills. For fifty years, just after the Civil War, the towns in this part of the state had boomed with furniture factories. But then in Burlington, which was the center of all this activity, a fire had destroyed a full five blocks of factories. Business never quite recovered, and the sight of white pine being ridden by lumberjacks down the blue, blue waters was seen no more.
    "She's still mad at me," she said when she got back. She put out an elegant hand that felt of hard honest physical work. "I'm Joanna, by the way."
    I told her my name and gave her my pitch.
    "I guess that's the trendy phrase for it now, huh? 'Bedroom communities'?"
    "I guess so," I said. I nodded to the house. "This is quite a place. Really well kept."
    "Interesting history, too."
    "Oh?"
    "I don't know if you know anything about this part of the state, but back in the 1840s and 1850s people around here hid runaway slaves. A lot of slave hunters—they were pretty much like bounty hunters—combed this area looking for runaways. They came up from the South; you know, hired by the plantation owners. That's why people had trapdoors and sub-basements for slaves to hide in."
    Her enthusiasm made me smile. She was a girl again, eager to share a story. I liked her. "One night a couple of slave hunters killed a little slave girl in cold blood. They were trying to impress all the slaves with how merciless they were. But they didn't count on the people of the town here. Six men from New Hope got together and spent all night tracking the slave hunters. They found the hunters in the morning and lynched them on the spot. Left them hanging for five days. The bodies probably looked pretty awful by then."
    "So much for the theory that nothing ever happens in nice little Iowa towns. Or used to, anyway." I looked at her and smiled. "But you were telling me about your husband and this being a bedroom community."
    "Well," she smiled but it was a smile that bore more pain than pleasure, "he certainly travels a lot." She hesitated, then said, "As women throughout the Midwest can attest."
    I didn't know what to say so I immediately went to the inane. "You've really got a