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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Newcomers
The first time Bree Lowell saw Scott Kimball, he was buying peaches.
It was a Saturday in late June, the kind of morning that made Dunmore look like it belonged on a postcard—white church steeple sharp against a cloudless sky, the farmer's market sprawling across the town green with its canvas tents and hand-lettered signs. Bree was standing at the coffee cart, waiting for her usual dark roast, when she noticed the tall man three stalls down. He was holding a peach up to the light, turning it slowly, and the woman beside him was laughing at something he'd said.
Bree's stomach dropped.
She knew that face. Not from Dunmore—from the news. From the kind of story that runs for three days on every cable channel and then vanishes, replaced by the next outrage. Scott Kimball, thirty-eight, formerly of Manhattan, had been accused six months ago of assaulting a female colleague at a consulting firm on Lexington Avenue. The charges were dropped. The details were murky. Bree remembered the coverage because she'd been between assignments at the time, sitting in her rented apartment above the hardware store on Oak Street, watching CNN with a glass of wine and wondering if her own career would ever recover enough for her to care about someone else's scandal.
Now here he was. Buying peaches in her town.
The woman beside him—his wife, Laura, Bree assumed—was striking in a way that didn't announce itself. She was maybe five-six, with auburn hair pulled back in a loose knot and the kind of face that looked better without makeup, which she seemed to know. She wore a white linen blouse and faded jeans, and she moved through the market with an ease that suggested she'd been coming here for years, not weeks.
Bree watched them work the crowd. Scott shook hands with Tom Fielding, who ran the hardware store. Laura crouched down to admire a toddler's shoes, then straightened and said something to the mother that made the woman beam. They bought honey from the Pattersons, bread from the Mennonite stand, and a jar of pickled something from old Mrs. Delaney, who never sold anything to anyone without a twenty-minute conversation about the weather. Laura managed it in five, and Mrs. Delaney looked delighted.
They were good. Bree had to give them that.
She took her coffee and walked back to the office.
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The Dunmore Register occupied the ground floor of a brick building on Main Street that had been, at various points in its 140-year history, a bank, a dentist's office, and a failed yoga studio. The newsroom—if you could call it that—consisted of three desks, a conference table covered in back issues, and a wall of filing cabinets that no one had digitized. Bree shared the space with Phil Rayburn, who covered sports and municipal meetings with equal enthusiasm, and Denise Cho-Hartman, who handled everything else: classifieds, obituaries, the community calendar, the occasional feature about a local veteran or a barn renovation.
Their editor was Walt Phelan, a sixty-two-year-old former Albany bureau man who'd bought the Register fifteen years ago with his retirement savings and a loan from his brother-in-law. Walt had a white mustache, a permanent coffee stain on his left shirt cuff, and a philosophy of local journalism that could be summarized as: cover the news, don't make it, and for God's sake don't alienate the advertisers.
Bree dropped into her desk chair and pulled up the browser on her aging desktop. She typed Scott Kimball assault Manhattan into the search bar and started reading.
The story was straightforward, at least on the surface. Scott Kimball, a senior consultant at Hartfield & Associates, had been accused of grabbing and shoving a junior colleague named Andrea Gifford during a late-night meeting at the office. Andrea had filed a police report. Scott had been arrested, photographed in the perp walk that every news outlet ran on loop for forty-eight hours, and released on bail. Three weeks later, Andrea recanted her statement. The charges were dropped. Scott resigned from Hartfield & Associates. His lawyer issued a statement about the toll of false accusations. Andrea disappeared from public view.
The coverage had a familiar shape: outrage, then counter-outrage, then silence. The kind of story that left everyone with an opinion and no one with the facts.
Bree pulled up the Dunmore property records. Scott and Laura Kimball had purchased a four-bedroom colonial on Birch Hill Road six weeks ago, paying cash. The house had been on the market for two years—too expensive for most locals, too far from the city for weekenders. The Kimballs had snapped it up at a discount and, according to the permits filed at Town Hall, were already renovating the kitchen.
She sat back and stared at the screen.
There was no story here. Not yet. A man had been accused of something, the accuser had taken it back, and now he and his wife had moved to a quiet town to start over. It happened all the time. People reinvented themselves. Bree, of all people, understood that.
But something nagged at her. Not the facts—the performance. The way the Kimballs had moved through the farmer's market like they'd rehearsed it. The way Laura had positioned herself at every interaction, always slightly forward, always the one to initiate, always guiding the conversation while Scott stood half a step behind, smiling his gentle smile.
It looked like a couple recovering from a public ordeal.
It also looked like a show.
Bree closed the browser and opened her assignment for the day: a feature about the new splash pad at Riverside Park. She wrote it in forty minutes, filed it with Denise, and went home.
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Her apartment was small and functional—a living room that doubled as an office, a bedroom barely big enough for the queen bed she'd brought from Chicago, a kitchen with a gas stove that worked when it felt like it. The windows looked out over Oak Street, and in the evenings she could hear the bells from St. Catherine's and the occasional rumble of a truck heading north on Route 28.
She'd been in Dunmore for fourteen months. Long enough to know the rhythms of the place, short enough to still feel like an outsider. The locals were friendly but cautious, the way small-town people are with newcomers. They'd accepted her at the Register because Walt vouched for her and because she wrote clean copy and didn't ask too many questions about things that weren't her business.
They didn't know about Chicago. Or if they did, they'd decided not to bring it up.
Bree poured herself a glass of water and sat on the couch. She picked up her phone, scrolled through her contacts, and stopped at a name: Mitch Garrity. Mitch was a detective she'd known in New York, back when she'd been a reporter at the Tribune and he'd been working organized crime in Brooklyn. They'd had a professional friendship—she'd never burned him, he'd never lied to her—and when she'd left Chicago in disgrace, he was one of the few people who'd called to say he was sorry.
She typed a text: Hey Mitch. Quick question. You still have contacts at Manhattan South?
Three dots appeared. Then: Bree Lowell. Thought you were retired.
She smiled. Not retired. Relocated. I'm looking at something. Guy named Scott Kimball, arrested six months ago for assault, charges dropped when the victim recanted. Anything beyond what made the papers?
A pause. Then: Let me ask around. No promises.
Thanks, Mitch.
She set the phone down and looked out the window. The sun was dropping behind the hills to the west, turning the sky the color of a bruise. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice and went quiet.
Bree told herself she was just curious. That it was habit, the old reporter's reflex, the inability to see a story and walk away. She told herself she wasn't looking for redemption, wasn't trying to prove anything, wasn't using someone else's trouble to fix her own broken career.
She almost believed it.
