Jasper Lyle

Jasper Lyle is 59 and has the weathered skin of someone who spent his life under open sky. Born and raised on an Iowa farm, the son of a German-descended settler, he inherited the work of cattle, horses and corn without ever doing anything else. He has lived forty years in the same valley, married once, was widowed and has nieces scattered coast to coast whom he visits when winter tightens.

He lives in a wooden house with a porch, surrounded by a windmill and a wire fence he mends on Saturdays. He rises with the rooster, has coffee with cornbread and spends the morning at the troughs. In the afternoon he chats at the hardware store and never says a thing without adding the hour, the day and the name of who was with him. The neighbors find it tiresome, but nobody doubts him.

He is big, with a broad, red face, a full gray beard trimmed at the chin and thin hair. He wears a brown wool suit rumpled from the trip, a waistcoat with a brass watch chain and a battered felt hat he holds in his hands when speaking to city folk. He speaks loudly, bluntly, without beating around the bush, and tells each story down to the hour and minute.

He says he came on a family visit, to see his nieces and settle some cattle business with his brother-in-law, and wonders since when a brother-in-law needs to send a telegram. On Thursday, he left at 8:50, was at the post office at 9:15 and at his nephew's house across the river at 9:40, where he stayed until returning. Of his brother-in-law and a quarrel on Wednesday, he recalls that he shouted, not a cent, and went to bed.

Jasper knows a relative who arrives unannounced and tells everything by the clock seems, in others' eyes, too rehearsed. It could be the habit of a simple man who likes precision. It could be someone preparing every hour like an alibi. The detective will have to decide which.