The Man off the Bus

How the case begins

The Tuesday bus puts down one passenger at the Harmony crossroads: a lean man in a pressed Army surplus coat, carrying a duffel and a silence, who walks into Bly's General Store and asks, politely, for Mrs. Ada Bly. Ada's husband founded the store; her son Davey did not come home from the war; and the store's deed, as everyone knows, transfers on Founder's Day, three weeks off. The stranger takes the room above the feed store, pays cash, and says nothing about his business to anybody. By Friday the town has written his story for him: a drifter working an angle on a grieving widow, timed to the deed. He walks Ada home from church. He mends her porch rail without being asked. He takes something wrapped in cloth to the county seat and comes back without it, and the postmistress marks that his mail is answered from a pawnbroker's address. Horace Venn, who has wanted the Bly corner lot for a decade, is suddenly everywhere, being loud about protecting Ada's interests. The rumor grows the way rumors grow: fed by everyone, owned by no one, and pointed like a weapon at the quietest man in town.