OLD SIGN A Novel

In April of 2011 a girl was found dead in the grass beside Route 6 in Potter County, Pennsylvania.Nobody ever learned her name. She was buried that October under a flat gray stone the size of a sheet of typing paper, with a number cut into it instead.She was nineteen feet from the road.Ray Landis is sixty-four. He came north in April for a woman he had no business coming north for, and he is living in a house on Maple Street that is not his, and he is not police and never was. He is a retired welder who has read ground for forty years.Nineteen feet is too far. A shoe comes off at a place, and there is no place on that road.So he starts asking, and he does it the only way he knows, which is slowly, with a tape measure and a spiral notebook and two thousand miles of township road, in a county where everybody has already seen everything and nobody says so.The trooper who took that call in 2011 has carried the girl for thirteen years. She knows exactly what it will cost her to help him, and she knows it to the dollar, and she puts the file on the kitchen table anyway.Nobody ever called about her.Old Sign is the second Ray Landis novel and it stands on its own. It is a book about the gas boom that came through the northern tier and went, about what a small county quietly agrees not to look at, and about two people in their sixties who decide, late, that thirteen years of nobody doing anything is not the same as nothing to be done.For readers of quiet, hard, unhurried country fiction, and for anybody who has ever wondered who is left to ask about a person nobody claims.