Chief of Police Douglas Raymer attends the internment of Judge Barton Flatt at Hilldale Cemetery in North Bath. He is returning, reluctantly, to the burial ground for the first time since his wife Becka’s funeral. He arrives slightly late because he had to stop off to retrieve Mayor Gus’s mentally ill wife, Alice, who further unsettled him by claiming to be talking to Becka on a cordless phone.

The following week, Raymer will be expected to speak at a ceremony in honor of the town’s eighth grade teacher, Beryl Peoples. Peoples used to draw the “rhetorical triangle” (subject—audience—speaker) on the margins of Raymer’s essays. Raymer remembers being particularly baffled by the question she always scrawled within the “speaker” section: “Who are you?” At school, Peoples took a special interest in Raymer, constantly giving him books, none of which he read.

Raymer’s wife, Becka, was a beautiful actress whom he met when he pulled her over for speeding on the way to an audition. On the day of her accidental death, she was leaving him for another man. While selling her car, he discovered a remote control for a garage door. Against his secretary, Charice’s advice, Raymer has been trying the remote on garages around town, hoping to figure out whom Becka would have left him for.