Mrs. Lenora Pike, neighbor, east road — measured, unsettled

“He never talked about it unless you asked him first. That was the thing that bothered me most, I think. A man who ran that kind of practice quietly was harder to dismiss than one who went around telling people about it.”

Thomas Vale, feed merchant — skeptical, but uncertain

“I saw his advertisement three or four times over the years. I always read it twice. I never went in to see him. I told myself it was because the whole business was nonsense, but that wasn’t quite it.”

Deputy Ellis Crane, county marshal’s office — official, dismissive

“We had no reason to interfere. He wasn’t defrauding anyone we could establish. He gave written estimates and charged a dollar fifty. If someone felt cheated, nobody came to us.”

Clara Holt, postmistress — observant, quiet

“He collected his mail like any rancher. Sometimes a letter came from a name I didn’t recognize—not local. I always wondered if those were clients writing back to him.”

Vernon Stagg, rancher, north section — reluctant respect

“I asked him once what he did when the morning felt like it could go either way. He said he recorded what the evidence showed, wrote the time in the bracket, and moved on to work. I didn’t have any answer to that.”

Minnie Stoddard, wife of the county recorder — quietly awed

“My husband said the notebook was the strangest thing he’d ever held. Not for what was in it. Just for how much of it there was. Page after page, all the same hand, all the same layout. Twenty years of believing you’d figure it out today.”

James Crowley, dry goods proprietor — businesslike, observant

“He placed those advertisements for years. I sold him the paper space. He always paid on time and never asked for a special position on the page. He wanted Notices, always Notices—not Personals, where it might seem theatrical.”

Ruth Alderman, schoolteacher — precise, unresolved

“The part I could not let go of, afterward, was the twenty-three minutes. If he’d been wrong by hours—by a whole day, even—you could put it to rest. Twenty-three minutes is close enough to ask questions and far enough not to answer them.”

Oscar Fenn, traveling livestock buyer — distant, troubled

“I never met him personally. Only knew him by the advertisement. But when I heard that the notebook had named the right day, I went cold for a minute. Then I told myself that out of twenty years of mornings, you’d eventually name every day. Then I told myself that wasn’t quite the right way to think about it either.”

William Hatch, neighbor, east road — level, fair

“He was a good rancher. Kept his stock in better condition than most. That’s what people forget when they talk about the notebook. He was a working man with a working operation. The notebook was something he did in the mornings before everything else. It didn’t make him strange in all ways. It made him strange in one particular way and ordinary in all the rest.”