A Death Understated

Nobody lies in an obituary. They leave things out.

Nora Tierney has been home in Wren Lake for ten days, and so far the job is typing. The funeral home sends the words, the Weekly prints them, and nobody asks the obituary desk for an opinion.

Then Verne Ostrander dies, and Verne wrote his own.

Two hundred and six words, hand-delivered to the funeral home twelve years ago and sealed. Careful. Dated. Thirty-eight years at the water department, ten seasons at second base, a wife and a brother he outlived. And at the bottom, a request that memorial gifts go to the volunteer fire department, an organization that appears nowhere else on the page.

Everyone in town knows why. In February of 1973, a building on Main Street burned with two children asleep above the shop, and Verne Ostrander went up the back stairs twice.

He left it out. All of it.

Nora has one week and a rule she is not supposed to break: the paper runs what the family sends. What she finds is a story the whole town agrees on, four people who watched it happen and remember it four different ways, and someone who has been letting the wrong name stand since the winter it happened.

No body. One correction. And the last thing a quiet man ever tried to say.

A Death Understated is a prequel novella to the Last Word Mysteries, set in the days before Buried in Print. It can be read first or last. It gives nothing away.