Hi, friends –
It’s been a busy week in Kitaree.
The town’s still rebuilding from this spring’s freak storms. There’s a constant hum over Kitaree, a buzz of power tools and construction equipment that sometimes goes late into the night. It’s comforting, almost, and almost makes up for the lack of cricket song.
Some folks complain that the hum lasts all night, keeps them from sleeping, but it’s got to happen. The storm blew trees from the Ashton forest preserve as far in as the downtown square. Dragged them through the streets, too, judging by the odd marks. Don’t believe a certain Web site (which shall remain nameless) that claims those are drag marks, that the trees somehow crawled through the streets. People saw — or mis-saw? misunderstood what they saw? — a lot of weird things in the dark and the wind.
Still, those damn trees tore up the streets. The town’s been rebuilding almost from the ground up. You’d barely recognize it anymore. Sorry to say, Jules, that the Yellow Rose burned down a few days after the storm. You’ll need to find somewhere else to stay next trip down.
I think you were right, Jennie, about Sheriff Frederickson and his deputy. (Former deputy, now! She quit after the storm and is running some antiques shop on the downtown square.) I caught both of them at Ruby’s Diner. They weren’t together, but they were making eyes like nobody’s business. Deputy Once — ugh, sorry, just Helen now — got her order to go and got out of there before I saw them actually say anything. Pretty sad. Chev looked so sad, I figured he’d go after her, but he sat and nursed a coffee for a while before cashing out and hopping into his nice new Sheriffmobile.
Ruby’s is fine, by the way, but the courthouse is all sorts of messed up. The storm dragged all of the trees here, like the courthouse was the middle of the tornado or the… I don’t know, whatever’s the opposite of the eye of a storm. It’s been months, and guys are still cutting branches free of the windows. They were shoved in there really good, like the trees were trying to get inside out of the wind.
That’s good news for underemployed folks like yours truly, by the way. The state’s contracting out all sorts of cleanup work, so I’m going in for an interview today. Yeah, it’s grunt work, hardly making use of my college education, but a paycheck’s a paycheck at this point. And hey, Kitaree needs me.
I’ll write more later. Keep your fingers crossed!
