Last Call at the Wagon Wheel
Everyone in New Ghent called it a peaceful death. The retired fraud investigator who just moved home can't get it to reconcile.
Orv Detloff ran the Wagon Wheel Supper Club for forty-three years — every graduation dinner, funeral lunch, and Packers Sunday in New Ghent, Wisconsin happened under his roof. When he dies in his sleep the same weekend he was going to hand Dot Mercier something that belonged to her long-vanished mother, the county calls it a tired heart and the town starts grieving.
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Dot spent twenty-five years as an insurance claims adjuster, the last eight in the fraud unit. She knows what a file looks like when somebody's edited it. A pill organizer that doesn't match the bottle it was filled from. A supper club's beautiful books with a twenty-year rhythm underneath them. A deposit receipt printed nearly two hours after the woman who filed it says she was home in bed.
Between Friday fish frys, hot-flash nights at the clue board, and a sister who says the things nobody else will, Dot works the one case nobody hired her for — in a town where everyone loved the victim, everyone has a secret, and somebody has been lying to her about her own mother since 1989.
All chapters18
- 1Sunday Week6 min
- 2The Little Yellow Ones5 min
- 3Natural Causes6 min
- 4Come with the Wallpaper6 min
- 5Contents as Received6 min
- 6Nobody Audits Dirt6 min
- 7Arithmetic Is Free5 min
- 8An Exit, Not an Answer4 min
- 9Damp Wool5 min
- 10She Sent Postcards5 min
- 11The Glove-Box Envelope4 min
- 12Rounding Down5 min
- 13Which Boat4 min
- 14Some Accounts5 min
- 15Two Households Deep6 min
- 16Same as Ever5 min
- 17The Light at the Slot6 min
- 18Holding a Card6 min
