The morning Maplewood found a body was the same morning I discovered my coffee maker had finally given up on life. I took that as an omen. Small towns like ours thrived on bad coffee and good gossip, and I was about to get plenty of both.
The town of Maplewood sat quietly between two highways that nobody cared to name, the kind of place where time seemed to shuffle its feet. We had one diner, one grocery store, and one bar that pretended to be a restaurant on weekends.
