A Dime a Dozen by Mindy Starns Clark

exhaled loudly, patting Luisa on the arm.
    “Now you’re talking,” he said. “We’ll even pay for the tickets to get them there, if you need.”
    The police arrived at that moment, so while the three of them talked about the logistics of sending away the kids, I walked over to meet the officers who had pulled into the driveway. The way I saw it, this case didn’t begin with today’s fire or even with last night’s murder.
    It started last fall, the day this woman’s husband disappeared.

Eight

    Talking with the uniformed officers who responded to the call, I was disappointed to learn that June Sweetwater, the detective in charge of the murder investigation, wouldn’t be coming. When I suggested that perhaps she should, they told me she was in Asheville at the medical examiner’s office and wouldn’t be back for several hours. In any event, they said, since this was a fire, the fire marshall was on his way and he would be the one to investigate. Detective Sweetwater would be fully apprised of the situation when she returned.
    Sure enough, the fire marshall showed up a few minutes later and began taking some digital photos of the scene for the records. While he worked, he fired off questions to Luisa about what had happened. The cops took notes, and Dean gave them the business card of the tow truck driver to corroborate Luisa’s story. I mostly hovered around the fringes, watching and listening.
    It seemed to me that everyone grasped the gravity of the situation and its possible connection to last night’s murder. The cops were obviously familiar with Luisa’s plight and the missing persons search for her husband, though they didn’t seem convinced that the fire was related in any way to his disappearance. One cop actually wondered aloud if perhaps the person who started the fire was her husband, now back from wherever he had been hiding and ready to make trouble. Though Dean spoke out in the man’s defense, I had to admit I had been wondering the same thing as well.
    Once the fire marshall collected all of the half-burnt matches and the discarded auto flare, the men wrapped up their questioning and thanked us for our cooperation, telling Luisa she could come down to the police station anytime after noon tomorrow to pick up a copy of the report if she needed one for insurance purposes.
    She began to express her worries about money after they were gone. The cost of repairing the fire damage hadn’t occurred to her before now, and she was afraid that the kind-hearted local who had loaned her the trailer would hold her responsible for the expense. From what I could gather, the trailer belonged to Butch Hooper, the big man with the booming voice I had met at my welcoming party. Dean assured Luisa that Butch undoubtedly had insurance on it, since he was in the construction business and owned a number of rental properties. What Dean didn’t add was that the whole trailer couldn’t be worth more than a few hundred dollars at best anyway.
    As we prepared to leave, it crossed my mind that concepts like insurance and mortgages and home values were probably so far removed from Luisa’s life as an itinerant migrant picker that she might not even understand how they worked. What would it feel like, I wondered, to have no home, to own nothing more than what could be carried around from job to job in your car? I had a feeling it was that very mobility that had probably complicated the search for the missing husband. There weren’t many ways to trace a man who owned no property nor had any assets.
    Dean and Natalie and I were starving by the time we left, but with so much happening, we didn’t want to take the time to go back to Auntie’s Country Kitchen for a full meal. Instead, we stopped at a fast-food restaurant on our way back to town and had a quick late lunch. Over hamburgers we talked about Luisa.
    Though I felt sorry for her and her children, my own personal concern was more for how her troubles were affecting