Belinda lifted a skeletal hand.

“I miss things,” she said.

For a moment, I thought she was referring to the general bane of old age, things getting past her: conversations, names, dates.

She wasn’t. She was referring to that other bane of old age.

“People have gone and died on me,” she said. And she smiled, half wistfully, but half, I think, because she was flirting with me.

The feeling was mutual. Objectivity or not, I kind of liked her.

Belinda was black, a true rarity in Littleton-Latinos yes, blacks virtually nonexistent-deep black, like ebony. This made her milky eyes pop-the palms of her hands, too, pink as cat paws.

She beckoned me with one of those gnarled, ancient hands.

I wondered what had gained me this special privilege? Probably no one ever talked to her anymore, I thought. Except to tell her to take her meds, turn out the light, or put on a stupid hat.

“People have gone and died on me,” she repeated, “but one, he came back.”

“Came back?”

“Sure. He said hey.”

“Who was that?”

“Huh? My son.”

“Your son? Really. Where did he come back from?”

“Huh? Told you. He passed on… long time ago, but he came back to say hey. He say he forgive me.”

“Oh, okay. Got you.” I was tempted to ask what she’d done that needed forgiveness, but really, what was the point? Belinda was feeling her age, after all. When I looked up, one of the attendants shrugged, as if to say, what else would you expect? The woman in capris, evidently there to visit one of the other residents, threw me a wan smile that seemed mildly encouraging.

“Looked old as me,” Belinda said.

“Your son?”

“Yeah. He looked sickly.”

I almost made the kind of wiseass comment I was given to uttering in the old days, when I hung with the kind of crowd that conversed mostly in cynicisms. Back before I became a national punch line. I almost said: considering he’s dead, sickly’s a step up.

I didn’t.

I said: “That’s too bad.”

Belinda laughed, a soft knowing laugh, that made me feel a little embarrassed, and something else.

Nervous.

“I ain’t fooling wit’ you,” Belinda said. “And I ain’t crazy.”

“I didn’t say you were crazy, Mrs. Washington.”

“Nah. But you nice.”

I changed the subject. I asked her how long she’d been a guest of the home. Where was she born? What was her secret to longevity? All the harmless questions you learn in high school journalism. I avoided asking her what family she had left, since, with the possible exception of her dead son, none had bothered to show.

After a while, I became cognizant of the smell permeating the room-stale and medicinal, like a cellar filled with moldering files. It became impossible to ignore the ugly stains in the linoleum floor, the melanoma-like cigarette burns in the lopsided card table. Mrs. Washington was wearing a polka dot dress that smelled faintly of camphor, but the rest of them were dressed in yolk-stained robes and discolored T-shirts. A man had only one sock on.

I felt like leaving.

Mr. Birdwell snapped a picture of Belinda enclosed in a gleaming thicket of wheelchairs and walkers. I stuck my hand in and said bye.

“One more,” Mr. Birdwell said. “And this time I want to see a smile on our birthday girl.”

The birthday girl ignored him-evidently she wasn’t in a smiling mood. Instead, she grabbed my hand and squeezed tight.

“Yeah, you a nice fellow,” she said.

Her skin felt ice cold.

We had a terrible accident just outside town.

That’s what Hinch’s secretary said-scratch that-his assistant, political correctness having intruded 150 miles into the California desert. Stewardesses were attendants now, secretaries were assistants, and occupying armies in the Middle East were defenders of freedom.

It’s a measure of fast approaching my second anniversary there that when Norma said we-I thought we. It was official: Tom Valle, one-time denizen of SoHo, NoHo, and assorted other fashionably abbreviated New York City neighborhoods, had become a true Littletonian.

“What kind of accident?” I asked her.

“A smashup on 45,” she said. “A goddamn fireball.”

For a dedicated churchgoer, Norma had a strange affinity for using the Lord’s name in vain. Things were either God-awful, Goddamned, God-forbidden, God help us, or God knows.

“Aww, God,” Norma said. “You kind of wonder how many people were in that car.”

The sheriff had just phoned in the news, assuming Hinch might be interested in a suitably gory car crash. If it bleeds, it leads, and all that. Hinch was currently at lunch. The other feature reporter, Mary-Beth, was on ad hoc maternity leave. When she got tired of watching her unemployed husband down voluminous amounts of Lone Star beer, Mary-Beth showed up. Otherwise, no. There was an intern on summer break from Pepperdine, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Maybe I should go cover it.”

Norma, who was not the editor, but the editor’s assistant, shrugged her shoulders.

This time I took a camera.

I WASN’T FOND OF ACCIDENTS. SOME ARE.

The smell of blood excites them. The aura of death. Maybe the simple relief that it happened to someone else.

The problem was I felt like that someone else.

Like the unfortunate victim of a car accident. The fact that I was the driver, that I’d soberly taken hold of the wheel and steered the car straight off a cliff, didn’t do anything to alleviate the uncomfortable empathy I felt in the presence of a wreck.

Norma was right about the fireball.

The car was still smoldering. It looked like a hunk of charcoal that had somehow fallen out of the backyard grill.

One fire engine, one sheriff’s car, and one ambulance were parked by the side of the two-lane highway. Another car was conspicuously present, a forest green Sable. Its front fender was completely crumpled, a man I assumed to be the driver leaning against the side door with his head in his hands. Everyone was pretty much watching.

Sheriff Swenson called me over.

“Hey, Lucas,” he said.

I’ll explain the Lucas.

It was for Lucas McCain, the character played by Chuck Connors in The Rifleman. After The Rifleman, Chuck moved on to a series called Branded, where he played a Union soldier who’d allegedly fled from the Battle of Bull Run and was forever after branded a coward. He drifted from town to town where, despite selfless acts of heroism, someone always discovered his true identity. You might imagine that’d be hard to do in the Old West.

Not in the new west.

Sheriff Swenson had Googled me.

He couldn’t recall the character’s name in Branded, so he called me Lucas.

It was better than liar.

“Hello, sheriff.”

Sheriff Swenson didn’t look like a small-town sheriff. Maybe because he’d spent twenty years on the LAPD before absconding to Littleton with full pension. He still had the requisite square jaw, bristle cut, and physique of a gym attendant, the palpable menace that must’ve made more than one Rodney King spill his guts without Swenson ever having to pick up a stun gun.

Today he looked kind of placid.

Maybe the dancing flames had mesmerized him. He had that look you get after staring into a fireplace for longer than you should.

There was something worth mentioning beside the burning car. Something everyone was politely declining to acknowledge, like a homeless relative who’s somehow crashed the family reunion.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of smelling burnt human, it smells like a mix of honey, tar, and baked potato. One of the truly worst smells on earth.

“How many were in there?” I asked the sheriff.