At nine o’clock, I walked down our long gravel driveway toward the county road where the bus stopped. I’d been taking the same bus into town every Tuesday and Friday for five years, ever since my husband, Frank, passed. The routine was comforting. But today, there was no bus.

Instead, there were police cars, four of them, their lights painting the gray morning in urgent reds and blues. Yellow tape stretched across the bus stop shelter where I’d waited countless times.