An Orchard and Three Bad Apples

When America shuts down in 2020 to deal with the oncoming pandemic, twenty–year–old college student Mike Wilson travels to Michigan to give support to the hospitalized father who abandoned him as a child. The job he takes pruning an orchard on a struggling farm is soon complicated by the resident collie's discovery of a skeletal human foot buried among the trees. Mike falls in love with a beautiful jogger, and together they face the creepiness of the farm while everyone is pursued by the infectious disease. The contents of Uncle Tom's Cabinet represent the culmination of a dying airline pilot's life and affect the future of his nephew, Dan. Tom, the uncle who ruins Thanksgiving dinners with obnoxious behavior, resents his confinement in the Better Days Ahead nursing home. He solicits help from his gangster neighbor in an attempt to dissolve Dan's lousy marriage, and crime and subterfuge energize his final days. An old missionary nun is known to leave the Nazareth Home for the Sisters of St. Joseph to wander the streets of the city's Eastside on her painfully swollen elephantine legs. Locally known as the Elephant Lady, she is found dead by the side of the road by a paperboy. A mystery unfolds when the parish priest she knew as an anthropology student in a Costa Rican village gets a clue from the boy that she may have been murdered. Contents from the old woman's safe–deposit box unleashes a primal challenge to the priest's faith. Three months after college graduation in 1968, Ben gets a call from the mother of an old friend and is asked to write the obituary for her son who has been murdered. Ben has been drafted and is days away from induction, but as a part–time copy editor for the Gazette, he agrees to the task. A vivacious young woman gets him through the yellow tape around the crime scene, and he is soon involved in the story. He falls in love with the girl, and his last few days of freedom become the most exciting of his life.

-- Thomas Conrad