The Flower Sisters

by Michelle Collins Anderson

Genres: Coming of Age

Synopsis

From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention for readers of Kristy Harvey Woodson, Donna Everhart, Sue Monk Kidd, Jeannette Walls, and Rita Mae Brown.

“A vivid blend of sensorial writing, historical detail, and memorable characters await in this compelling, surprising, insightful story of the weight of long-held secrets and the resulting hunger for truth.” —Susan Meissner, USA Today bestselling author of Only the Beautiful

Drawing on the little-known true story of one tragic night at an Ozarks dance hall in the author’s Missouri hometown, this beautifully written, endearingly nostalgic novel picks up 50 years later for a folksy, character-driven portrayal of small-town life, split second decisions, and the ways family secrets reverberate through generations.

Daisy Flowers is fifteen in 1978 when her free-spirited mother dumps her in Possum Flats, Missouri. It’s a town that sounds like roadkill and, in Daisy’s eyes, is every bit as dead. Sentenced to spend the summer living with her grandmother, the wry and irreverent town mortician, Daisy draws the line at working for the family business, Flowers Funeral Home. Instead, she maneuvers her way into an internship at the local newspaper where, sorting through the basement archives, she learns of a mysterious tragedy from fifty years earlier…

On a sweltering, terrible night in 1928, an explosion at the local dance hall left dozens of young people dead, shocking and scarring a town that still doesn’t know how or why it happened. Listed among the victims is a name that’s surprisingly familiar to Daisy, revealing an irresistible family connection to this long-ago accident.
 
Obsessed with investigating the horrors and heroes of that night, Daisy soon discovers Possum Flats holds a multitude of secrets for a small town. And hardly anyone who remembers the tragedy is happy to have some teenaged hippie asking questions about it – not the fire-and-brimstone preacher who found his calling that tragic night; not the fed-up police chief; not the mayor’s widow or his mistress; not even Daisy’s own grandmother, a woman who’s never been afraid to raise eyebrows in the past, whether it’s for something she’s worn, sworn, or done for a living.
 
Some secrets are guarded by the living, while others are kept by the dead, but as buried truths gradually come into the light, they’ll force a reckoning at last.

Inspired by the true story of the Bond Dance Hall explosion, a tragedy that took place in the author’s hometown of West Plains, Missouri on April 13, 1928.

The cause of the blast has never been determined.

Release date: April 23, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

May 1978

I know what she’s doing down there.

I heard the hearse pull up to the basement garage around five this morning, when it was still dark outside. And now I can hear her, knocking around like a clumsy ghost, doing her dark magic on God-knows-who. Some old guy, maybe. She won’t bring him back from the dead, but she can at least make him look alive.

My grandma, the funeral director.

It’s bad enough I have to live with her; I barely know her. But on top of a funeral home? It’s so creepy, with disturbing sights, sickening smells and people showing up at all hours, bawling like babies about losing Uncle So-and-So or Grandma What’s-Her-Face. Maybe some are sincere. But from what I’ve seen, most of them can’t wait to get out of here. Get the corpse in the ground and get back to living—watching TV or eating Cheetos or complaining about Jimmy Carter and the price of gasoline.

Grandma says she actually enjoys it. That being a funeral home owner is her “calling.” She doesn’t mind dead bodies. In fact, she likes to say she puts the “fun” in “funeral,” and then laugh herself silly. I’ve been here a month and I’ve heard it a billion times, which really gets on my nerves.

“I ought to put that on a T-shirt,” she’ll say, wiping away a tear. “I’d be rich.”

I guess it could be considered a fun, party atmosphere around here—if you ignore the dead part. Like some weird spa weekend, with Grandma giving all her guests shampoos and shaves and manicures. She puts the old ladies in curlers and “Brylcreems” the geezers. Finishes them all up with a little makeup. Poof.

But it’s the other stuff that is super gross. That’s what she’s getting ready to do right now. Draining the blood. Pumping in the preservatives. Kind of like making a pickle out of a cucumber: It looks the same on the outside, but inside? All smelly, bitter vinegar.

I hate pickles.

Then there’s the clothing. People don’t usually die in their Sunday best but that’s what they’re buried in. I can’t imagine trying to wrestle some cold, naked grandpa into his boxers and bowtie or wriggle a stiff old lady into a pair of pantyhose. Even Grandma has to have extra help with that part, which is where Roger comes in. He is her “right hand man,” she says, a big, barrel-shaped guy who does all the heavy lifting: body pickup and delivery, funeral setup and cleanup, maintenance, janitorial and even chauffeur services. Roger’s a regular jack-of-all-trades in the funereal arts.

He and Grandma go way back. She says Roger will take over the funeral home someday, but as she puts it, he’s no spring chicken, either. Roger started working here when Grandma’s husband died back in the ’50s and left her in charge of the family business: Steinkamp & Son Funeral Home. I saw the old rusted sign in the basement, painted sheet-metal with black, Old English lettering. Grandma married “Son.” She changed everything to her maiden name, so it’s Flowers Funeral Home now. My mom was long gone by then.

The tarnished brass clock with the glow-in-the-dark hands says it’s nearly eight. I haven’t even gotten up yet and I’m already bored.

I’m in the old mahogany canopy bed that used to be Mom’s. Right now, I’m rereading To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve already read everything on her bookshelf, which is a mix of Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, The Five Little Peppers and the Anne of Green Gables books. All a little Goody-Two-shoes. But tolerable if your life’s as much of a yawn as mine. All I’ve done since I got here a month ago is read books and go to the library. And write letters to Mom, begging her to rescue me and take me to California, too.

She is being unreasonable. I mean, she has never said anything good about this town. Or much about Grandma, except that they’ve “had their differences.” No details on that. But it’s pretty crappy of Mom to leave me in a place that she hates with a person she’s been determined to stay away from all these years. It really pisses me off.

Because we’ve always been a unit, the two of us, whether she’s had a boyfriend or not. I’m not some little kid who needs a babysitter. I’m fifteen. And a half. But Mom left me here for the summer because she said she “needs some space.” Apparently that means running off to California with her boyfriend, Ron, who has to “work up to the idea of fatherhood” before I move out there, too. I can’t figure out anything good about “space” that includes Ron but not me. He’s the kind of guy who tapes notes on his bottles of Pepsi and Snickers bars when he puts them in our fridge—in an apartment where it’s just me and Mom—so no one else will take them. When she dropped me off, Mom said it might take a while for her and Ron to find the right place. Plus good jobs. But she loves me. And they’ll send for me just as soon as they’re all set up.

Yay.

The sun is shining onto my pillows now, making it tough to stay in bed. But I don’t feel like going anywhere or doing anything. I don’t know a soul in Possum Flats, Missouri, except Grandma. She says if I don’t get out and do something, I’ll be white as a sheet when school starts. Mom had better be back to get me by then, because I refuse to start school in this nothing place. In the meantime, I’ll stay in my room and read. Write my letters. And draw the shades. Like some weird female Boo Radley.

I’ve already seen everything there is to see outside these windows. Flowers Funeral Home faces Main Street in downtown Possum Flats and my upstairs room overlooks the back alley, where Grandma takes her “deliveries” twenty-four hours a day. Not much there but dumpsters and stray cats, and, over the buildings, the tip-top of a church steeple. From the front sidewalk of the funeral home, you can see east down Main to the downtown square that has banks on opposite corners and a boring limestone courthouse in the center with a silver flagpole waving the U.S. and Missouri flags.

Possum Flats. Seriously? It sounds like road kill—and it’s every bit as dead.

Just a few blocks west from us on Main is The Possum Flats Picayune, the daily newspaper, with the police station across the street. Beyond that, the library, the post office and the Dog ’N’ Suds. Apparently, that’s a drive-in restaurant for hot dogs and root beer, not a dog-grooming establishment, like I first thought. Even now, I can’t help picturing soapy pink hot dogs.

All of a sudden, there’s a scream from the basement, followed by a clanging sound, like something has fallen over. I should check on Grandma, but I hesitate a second. I’ve seen a couple of her “clients,” and that was more than enough to make me want to keep my distance.

The steep stairway opens up into the dim viewing room, all deep burgundy carpet and velvet drapes. Then there’s a narrow hallway with a bathroom on one side and the door to the basement at the far end. There, I practically collide with Roger. His thinning hair, combed into neat slick furrows with pomade, frames an expansive forehead shiny with sweat. He’s in a big hurry to get to Grandma, too.

“What’s going on?”

“Dunno.”

Roger doesn’t say much. Which is fine, given most of the people he works with are dead. Grandma says he needs to work on his social skills for the loved ones’ families, who still require conversation, because she won’t be around forever. But my opinion is that Roger is not going to change.

Roger leads the way, much to my relief, but I am hot on his heels on the rickety wooden staircase.

At the bottom, I peer around Roger and take in a gruesome sight: a naked senior citizen is laid out flat on one of the gurneys, the top of his head toward us. A hose dangling from his upper body is dripping fluid. Worse: my grandma is holding a crumpled sheet in her hands, sitting on the floor in a puddle of putrid ooze. She is laughing like a loon, an overturned folding chair beside her.

“Are you all right?”

Roger reaches out a hand and pulls Grandma vertical, all five feet of her. She’s a little bit of a woman, but it’s easy to forget how small she is since her personality is so big. I wasn’t sure what to expect when Mom dropped me off. The only grandparents I knew were from books. And believe me, she’s not your sugar-cookie-baking, warm-and-fuzzy classic. People around here seem intimidated by my grandma.

“Oh, yes. Damn the mess and everything, Roger. I needed to sit down all of a sudden and I missed the mark.” She shakes her head. “After fifty years in the business, you would think I’d have lost my ability to be surprised.”

She raises an eyebrow and gives Roger a stern look that would have withered a lesser man. “You could have warned me,” she says. “That would have been the decent thing to do.”

Roger’s eyes bug out a bit and he swallows hard. His entire head is turning red, including his scalp, broken up by the tidy strips of hair. “Sorry ’bout that, Rose. But you know it was four in the morning when I rescued the Mayor.”

Rescued? The mayor? How do you save a dead person?

I turn my attention to the body on the gurney and immediately understand what the excitement was about. Below the bald pate and the sunken, hairless chest and stomach, I see that the corpse is “excited,” too. The Mayor has a boner.

Ugh.

Grandma shakes out the sheet in her hands with a snap and moves to cover the alarming appendage. When the Mayor is suitably hidden from the waist down, she turns to me, clearing her throat.

“Daisy, this is Bartholomew J. Watson, AKA ‘the Mayor.’ Lifelong resident of Possum Flats for the entirety of his ninety-five years and its mayor for close to forty. Not large in stature but a giant in terms of status and charm. Never met a stranger. Respected by his fellow men. And boy howdy, did he love the ladies.”

“Loved ’em to death,” chimes in Roger, deadpan.

“Apparently.” Grandma pulls a face.

“What do you mean?” I ask. This is the most interesting thing I’ve seen or heard since I’ve been in Possum Flats.

“Well, we got a call this morning that the Mayor had died in flagrante.”

“In what?”

“In the act, as it were.”

“Was he married?” I’m curious now.

“Yes, he has a darling wife, Ruby Rae.” Grandma pauses. “They were married more than seventy-five years, I believe.”

This is confusing. “Um. I guess I’m not sure why she would need to tell you exactly how he died?”

Grandma and Roger exchange a look. He shrugs. She does, too.

“Well, the thing is . . . she isn’t the one who called.”

Now she has my full attention.

“I don’t want to get into details, but suffice it to say that Roger did a backdoor pickup at the pharmacy. Under cover of darkness.”

“So . . . he was clearly with someone other than his wife.”

Grandma and Roger neither confirm nor deny my theory.

“But did someone tell her?”

Roger busies himself by reinserting the end of the loose, dripping hose into a bucket. Grandma sighs. “Yes, that was my unfortunate lot a little while ago. Ruby Rae will be here with his burial suit later this morning, so we’ve got to get him in decent shape. And I do mean decent. Roger, can you hand me the duct tape, please?”

This is my cue to leave. I really don’t want to know what she is going to do with that thick gray tape. But I can’t let this go. “What did you say to her?”

Grandma puts her hands on her hips and frowns at me. “Why, absolutely nothing, Daisy. Except to give her my most sincere condolences. The dead share all sorts of secrets with me and it is my bounden duty to keep them. Like client privilege with a lawyer or a doctor. Or a priest.

“Believe me, Ruby Rae knows enough. Bless her heart.”

I nod, but I’m still unsure. This is fascinating stuff. Maybe Possum Flats isn’t quite as dead as it looks. Part of my present company excluded, of course.

“I will not—we will not—tell a soul,” Grandma continues, raising a meaningful eyebrow at me and Roger. Mostly me, since Roger rarely opens his trap. She reaches up and tucks a long, stray hair behind her ear. I can see why she never cuts it. She has the most gorgeous long white hair that she wears in a single fat braid down her neck and back. I hope I got that hair gene. My own is boring, straight and dark.

“Alrighty, then.” Grandma smooths her gray dress and the plastic apron she wears when the going gets messy. “Back to business.”

When it is just me and Mayor Watson again, I breathe a sigh of relief.

That was way too much action for this old lady.

Obviously, the Mayor had more action than he could handle, too.

I’d say that’s what he gets for running around with younger women, but I’m not sure making whoopee with a seventy-something-year-old qualifies as “robbing the cradle.” Normally, I wouldn’t consider it any of my business. But since Roger had to actually pry old Barty here off of Ginger Morton this morning, it sort of became my business.

I’m not going to lie: I enjoyed her desperate plea for help at four a.m. No one loves being woken out of a dead sleep—ha! But when you discover your old archnemesis is stuck in a compromising position and you’re the only one she can call for help? That’s a delicious moment of schadenfreude.

After the Mayor took his last gasp, Ginger was stuck beneath him for about four hours until she wriggled one arm free and reached the bedside phone. Lucky for her, my number is easy to remember: 356-9377. FLO-WERS.

“Hello? Flowers Funeral Home.” I had said it so often, I could do it in my sleep. Case in point.

“Rose?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. Little did I know she had about a hundred and fifty pounds compressing her chest and lungs at that moment. “It’s Ginger. I’ve got a . . . situation.”

“At four a.m.? Must be a hell of a situation,” I said. Like I said, Ginger isn’t my favorite person and certainly not someone I’d choose to talk to at that ungodly hour.

She didn’t waste any breath getting to the crux of it. For obvious reasons.

“And please, Rose,” she said before hanging up. “Could you keep the details quiet? I’d appreciate it.”

“You know me, Ginger. Silent as a tomb.”

“Hmmm.”

Then dial tone.

Of course, I rang up Roger immediately and sent him right over to her place, a spacious apartment above her pharmacy business. Not even a mortal enemy should be pinned to her bed by a dead body.

I give the Mayor the once-over. Where to begin?

Thankfully, Roger helped me with the deceased’s most critical problem. There’s a term for the Mayor’s condition, of course: “angel lust.” I’ve only seen it once before—many years ago—and that was a suicide. By hanging. A farmer who was about to lose his considerable acreage to the bank, property that had been in his family for a hundred years. Heartbreaking. I felt doubly sorry for his poor wife, who found him dangling in the barn that morning, neck snapped but somehow in a state of corporeal excitement. As if finding your husband swinging from the rafters isn’t bad enough.

I’d venture to say the Mayor’s issue is more a result of gravity than a trick of the central nervous system. Being dead facedown for a few hours pools the blood in all available nooks and crannies while rigor mortis set in. Unusual? Yes. Fitting? I would say so. Ginger Morton may have been the unlucky last, but she was by no means the first woman with whom Mayor Watson had a dalliance. It was no secret around Possum Flats that Barty could not “keep it in his pants.”

Yet he and Ruby Rae stayed together. Despite losing a child. Despite his shenanigans. I marvel at that. There’s a chance she didn’t know what he was up to. I remind myself that no one really knows what goes on in a marriage except for the two people in it. I should know. But still: How could a person live with someone for three-quarters of a century and not know all of their secrets?

We had fewer than twenty years together, yet my sister and I knew everything about each other. But then, we were twins, and that is something special. I’ve read a lot about it, and the experts say that identical twins often know what the other is thinking or feeling or about to do without being told. That’s how it was for us. Rose and Violet. Violet and Rose. The Flowers girls. The flower sisters.

How could a parent christen us with such unapologetically floral names given the verdant nature of our surname? My mother made no apologies. All she would say was that she couldn’t help herself; we were such delicate beauties when we were born. We fit neatly in the palms of her hands, a veritable baby bouquet. And absolutely identical: same size, same coloring, same smile. The only difference was the minuscule bluish-purple birthmark at the top of one slender neck. Violet, of course. It was the only sure way our mother had of telling us apart before our hair grew in, dark and long. Then she tied a ribbon around my wrist, until our separate personalities began to emerge, just as one might predict: Violet, the adventurous, the secretive. A wild child who loved to be in a bunch, surrounded by friends and noise and fun. And Rose: prim and proper, stubbornly keeping to herself, and stuck on a single, thorny stem of her own making.

Ouch. It hurts sometimes when I think about all the ways I’ve made my life harder than it had to be. More complicated. Painful.

But clearly, I’m not alone in that. The Mayor here has made quite a mess of things, although he won’t be the one to suffer the consequences. And when I get finished with him, he will look like the fine upstanding citizen and human being that he mostly was.

Upstanding. Ha!

After Roger and I finished up with the duct tape, he inserted the trocar near the Mayor’s navel to get the insides punctured and liquids emptied out—stomach, bladder, large intestines. I can still stick that knifelike metal tube in and poke around if I have to, but it’s more of a struggle than it used to be and Roger doesn’t seem to mind. I’ll fill the abdominal cavity back up with embalming fluid next. Then: bath time for Barty.

Meanwhile, I swipe a thick slick of Vicks VapoRub under my nostrils to kill the smells. And I wait.

The Mayor looks pretty peaceful. He died happy, I guess. This is my favorite kind of client—besides the matter of his unfortunate little surprise, I mean. I like the ones who die of “natural causes,” who have lived to a ripe old age and then some. But no matter how many decades I do this work, I never get used to the ones who weren’t ready or old enough to go. The car accidents. The heart attacks and strokes. The incurable disease. Suicides. And the babies; the children. Those still manage to break my heart, just chipping away at it. I wonder at the end of some days if I have anything left inside me. Anything besides a hard, black little heart-shaped stone. Obsidian, maybe. Something that has been through great fire and retained some strange vestige of beauty.

Of course, if you’ve already buried your twin sister and your husband, and as good as lost your only daughter . . . how could anything ever touch your heart again? Like that girl upstairs. What do I do with her? I’m nearly seventy years old, and I sure didn’t get it right the first time.

Mayor Watson’s hands are folded neatly across his heart, something I took care to do right away, before he was completely cold. I want to work some lotion into the creases and lines around his large, knobby knuckles. I always use Jergens, not some off-brand or commercial grade stuff. Little details are what keep Possum Flats families coming back to Flowers Funeral Home. I’m a real stickler for getting everything just right with the dead. Sort of helps to make up for what I haven’t been able to put right with the living.

Daisy. Maybe I could start there. Try to be a grandma to her. She’s never had one. I’ve never been one.

I guess that makes us even.

I know she misses her mama. I’ve been biding my time, letting her be mad at Lettie for kicking her to the curb. Giving her a chance to get used to living here. Get used to me. But it’s time for her to get out of the house.

Maybe after I meet with Ruby Rae, I’ll take Daisy to lunch. I need to get the service info over to The Picayune this afternoon so they can run the obituary tomorrow. Not that everyone in town hasn’t heard the news. But we love our obituaries in Possum Flats. Everyone reads them first, before the front page, sports or comics.

I like to think we have our priorities in order.

“Don’t you agree, Barty?”

Still so much to do here. Shave. Shampoo. Trim the nails. Dress the Mayor in his suit, socks, shoes and trademark bow-tie. Makeup.

Some of this can wait until Saturday. Tomorrow. The makeup I will do Sunday morning, so he will look as “fresh” as possible before the funeral at two.

But what I can’t put off much longer is my meeting with Ruby Rae. Despite what people might think, dealing with the living is the toughest part of my job.

“And you’re making it even harder, Mayor,” I say. I laugh, embarrassed, even though I’m essentially alone. “Oops. More difficult, I mean.”

When Grandma invited me to run errands and grab lunch, I jumped at the chance. But I had one condition.

“Anywhere but Dog ’N’ Suds,” I said.

“Good heavens.” Grandma chuckled. “I agree. And after the morning I’ve had, I need somewhere with good atmosphere and an even better cheeseburger.”

True to its name, the Sunnyside Diner is bright and cheerful inside, with egg-yolk-yellow walls, and a floor tiled in black and white squares. It’s like a perfectly preserved slice of the 1950s, from tall sculpted milkshake glasses to the jukebox loaded with Elvis and the Everly Brothers. Every possible surface—from the shelves to the counter and each individual table or booth—is topped with unusual pairs of salt and pepper shakers. Grandma picks out a small table by the door that has dill pickle salt and pepper shakers.

I hope this is not a bad omen.

The smells coming out of the kitchen are amazing. Through the open window behind the counter I can see the one deviation from the ’50s vibe: a stringy-haired old man with a tie-dye T-shirt and apron, at the grill, sweating as he turns translucent onions, hamburgers, and even a couple of late-breakfast pancakes. A cigarette hangs precariously out of the side of his mouth and I try not to think about the possibility of ashes in my food. My stomach is growling and I feel a deliciously naughty feeling inside because I know I am going to order a cheeseburger and that if my mom was here, she would completely freak out. She is a vegetarian, which means I’ve been one, too—mostly out of habit rather than philosophy—choking down tofu my whole life. I don’t think I could find a single solitary chunk of the stuff in Possum Flats.

Grandma nods to people at other booths, and they return the greeting. A few say, “Hey, Ms. Flowers,” and nod at me, too.

Elvis comes on with “All Shook Up,” and somehow it feels right—although I’m not in love, just feeling the effects of living in Possum Flats. I am not used to everyone knowing who I am and it makes me feel off-balance, like they already have the upper hand and we haven’t even met. I wonder if Grandma ever gets tired of everyone knowing every last thing about her.

Grandma waves over the waitress. There’s only one for the whole restaurant, but she has a no-nonsense look that tells me she’s got everything under control, from the hairnet to the apron with everything in it—order pad, pencil, pen, packets of sugar and Sweet’N Low, a handful of paper-wrapped straws—to the unglamorous white shoes with soles of chunky white streamlined foam.

“What’ll it be, ladies?” The bored voice is part of her schtick, I think. Her eyes, enlarged by her bifocals, are kind.

“The usual,” says Grandma, with a sly wink. “And Betty, this is my granddaughter, Daisy. She’s staying with me for the summer.”

“Is that right?” Betty laughs. “I may have heard something about that. How’s our Lettie Steinkamp?” She is looking at me.

“Um. It’s Flowers. And fine, I guess. She’s in California.”

“Flowers, eh? Just like her mom.” Grandma flinches the slightest bit. “Married?”

“No.” I find myself getting a little defensive. “But she’s got a boyfriend.”

“That’s Lettie all over.” Betty shakes her head. “Keeping those men on a string, never settling on just one. And who can blame her, right?”

“It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind,” says Grandma.

And change it, and change it, and change it, I think. I have moved around a lot in my fifteen years: St. Louis, Denver, Houston, Chicago. When I was younger—like in elementary school—I used to write letters to the friends I left behind. I was the pen-pal-iest person ever. But they rarely wrote back and even if they did, it was only once or twice. By the time I was in junior high, I had decided it was easier to stop making friends. What was the point? I knew where things were headed.

“And what would you like, Daisy?” Grandma asks, deftly moving off the topic of my mom. She seems to understand that I’m a little prickly on the subject.

“A cheeseburger, please.” My heart is beating fast, like I’m committing a crime.

“And what would you like on it?” Betty asks.

“Um . . .” What does she mean? “A bun?”

“Ha! I see she’s got your sense of humor.” Betty shakes her head at Grandma and reels off my choices: tomato, lettuce, onions, pickles, mayo, mustard, ketchup.

“I want everything,” I say. “But please hold the pickles.”

The front of the newspaper building is all plate glass, painted with gold scrolly letters that read THE POSSUM FLATS PICAYUNE: WE “NOSE” OUR NEWS.

Oh, brother.

As soon as Grandma opens the door for us, the dark metallic smell of newspaper ink hits my nose and I can hear the presses running in the back room, a thundery rolling, galloping sound that is muffled by the doors into the front office. There is a reception desk occupied by a plain-looking girl in long braids and even longer denim skirt who waves us past with a shy smile. She ducks her head to some task before her, peeking up at me as I go by.

There are no offices, just lots of desks turned this way and that in clusters. The people are just as casual. One man in jeans and a short-sleeved button-up shirt is propped on the edge of his desk, talking on the phone; two others stand nearby, chatting and drinking coffee. A thin old man hunches over a stack of black-and-white photographs on his desk. As we pass, he raises his white head to reveal a beakish nose and a strange, black-ringed magnifying lens over one eye. The enlarged blue eye makes him look what Mom would call “batshit crazy.”

Grandma makes her way through the maze of desks to a fifty-something woman with platinum-blond hair framing her face in a heart shape. Up close, all I can see are the big black cat-eye glasses and the bright red lipstick. She is extending a manicured hand, nails the same shade of red.

“You must be Daisy.” Her smile reveals teeth with the slight brown tinge of a serious coffee habit. “Another gorgeous bloom in a long line of Flowers girls. Sorry, I just can’t help saying that. Right?” Here she nods at Grandma. “Tell her, hon. For someone who calls herself a newspaper reporter, I tend to go through my days completely unedited.”

I take her hand, but squeezing it is like holding a kitten too tightly—I feel a bunch of tiny bones barely covered with skin. “Hi.”

“Don’t be fooled,” says Grandma with a wink. “Myra here is the society page editor and has been practically forever. She’s trying to get you to let down your guard. Before you know it, you’ll be sharing your deepest, darkest secrets.”

She and Myra laugh, then turn to Grandma’s notes for Mayor Watson’s obituary. Soon they are onto other topics: the weather, Grandma’s recipe for Watergate salad and how the irises are blooming late this year.

My mind wanders. My eyes, too.

The back wall of the newsroom is lined with large, framed black-and-white photographs. I am fascinated by what I see. The first shows a farmer standing close to the camera, while in the background an entire herd of spotted cattle lies dead and bloated beneath a giant oak, stiff-legged, bellies stretched to the bursting point.

The farmer’s sun-darkened face reminds me of a raisin. It’s hard to see where the worry lines end and the frown begins. In the corner of the photo is a handwritten title in quotation marks: “Lightning Strike, 1949.” The farmer looks beaten down and his black eyes seem to say, “Well, what did I expect, anyway?”

The adjacent photo shows a man with his head lying on a bar, his face turned toward the camera with his outstretched arm clutching a drink. It takes a minute to register the small bullet hole between his curling bangs, with one drip of blood halfway down his forehead. “Payback at the Elk’s Lodge, 1957.”

Next is a shack with fire blazing out of both small windows on either side of the door, making it look like an angry face. A man and woman stand with their backs to the camera; his arms grip her blanket-wrapped shoulders. She obviously wants to run back into the house, and her head is thrown back in grief. This one is call. . .