At one minute past midnight on the first of January, 1985, the switchboard at Cinder Fork goes dark and the woman who worked it for twenty-two years becomes a woman nobody in that hollow will speak to.
Marion Culp loses his commission the same minute. He is twenty-nine, he is from Ohio, and he opened a sealed mine portal in December without authority and found a boy in eight feet of standing water. He was right, and being right has cost him the badge, the car, the office, and any road back into the case.
He has one thing left. A woman is alive in Ohio who has been dead in Rell County since 1973, and if she is alive then somebody else went into the ground under her name, and not one person in Cinder Fork has ever gone looking.
Her name was said once, in a drugstore, in the first week of December of 1973. After that it was never said again.
Culp works it the only way a man with no authority can. A payroll sheet in a shed with a tin roof. A nursing licence that lapsed for non-renewal in 1975 with no death certificate anywhere in the state. A general delivery card discontinued eleven days after a funeral. A landlady of eighty-one who heard somebody come down an outside stair one night in November and turned over and went to sleep with the wrong idea in her head.
And in a drawer in Wheeling, two letters postmarked Ashland, Kentucky, from a sister who wrote four pages every month for six years and started half of them by taking a piece out of her.
Two pages. Weather. A job.
They are polite, and polite is the one thing that woman never was.
Above the town, forty acres of black water sit behind an earthen dam nobody has inspected since 1972. Below it, four hundred people draw their water from wells that were logged in 1961 and never tested. There is a doctor on Depot Street who has kept a ledger since November of 1973 of everything he did not do, and he will answer any question anybody with authority ever thinks to ask him.
Nobody has asked. Nobody is going to, until something gives.
A POLITE LETTER LIED is the second book of The Cinder Fork Exchange, a slow-burning mystery of buried names and small-town complicity, set in a dying coal hollow where the truth is provable and nobody can prove it.