Episode 3: The Last False Alarm

Tonight, just after midnight, the desk receives eight names — and every one of them arrived behind a warning someone had learned not to hear.

Issue No. 3 of This Day in Deaths opens with the series' musical introduction and universal cold open, then returns to the obituary roll call: fictional deaths filed from Akron, Muncie, Pennsylvania hill country, Iowa, Tacoma, Burbank, St. Paul, and Fresno. Arrangements have been broken in a stairwell, behind a bowling alley, beneath a county school, on a street where a phone would not stop ringing, and in a garage where emergencies were rehearsed too often to be believed.

At the Wilbeth Arms, Marion Kells has heard the fire alarm nine times since September. By the tenth, she pauses — and disbelief enters as delay. In Muncie, Clyde  ...