Serpents Rising. David A. Poulsen

to choose between major surgery that I was told had maybe a fifty-fifty chance of getting me back on the field or getting a job. I decided to find out if my journalism degree was worth the four years it had taken me to get it.

      Donna knew all of that, and more, about me. And I knew … not much about her youth. Which isn’t to say I knew nothing. I knew she’d gone to university, studied public administration, didn’t like it, left school without graduating, and got into retail and worked her way into management. I knew she liked to travel and had done the standard Europe thing and a couple of months in Australia after leaving Carleton.

      But as I compiled the list of who I could talk to about Donna’s life before I came on the scene, I realized it too was pathetically small.

      I knew none of her girlfriends from school (no, that was wrong — there was Kelly, though I knew her only from the note). I did know a couple of people from her college years, a couple more from the job she’d been working at when we met, Dr. Mike McCullers who had been her doctor from when she was a kid, the people who had attended the funeral — their names were listed on the guestbook that was somewhere in the apartment. Donna’s mom, Joan Leybrand. Donna’s father had passed away three years before the fire and Donna was an only child, no siblings.

      Short list.