The Ballot Bandit

Milo Baxter had never imagined he'd retire to a place like Redwood Heights. For decades, he'd wandered the echoing streets of San Francisco, chasing cheating spouses and missing pets and, sometimes, real criminals, always beneath the city's bracing fog. But lately, the city's sharp corners had started to wear him down. The noise made his teeth feel loose. So, when a friend from his old precinct sent him a brochure for Redwood Heights—a jam jar of a town nestled among the redwoods, where the most pressing crime was a parking ticket gone unpaid—Milo laughed, then started packing.

The move was easier than expected. He liked the way the forest made every morning smell like possibility, or maybe just moss and dirt. The town center was nothing to look at: Three intersecting streets, a post office with a mural of jubilant children, a library shaped like a barn, and a coffee shop named Brewed Awakening, run by a pair of identical twins who finished each other's sentences and always wore matching fleece vests. The rest of the town fanned out into quiet neighborhoods where the houses all had porches and most of the porches had wind chimes.