The Great Accident

A sanctimonious prohibitionist, Winthrop Chase, sermonizes against the bottle while his carousing son Wint ricochets through speakeasies, staining the family crest with every stagger. Joan Caretall—her gaze a mix of scorn and yearning—hovers at the edges of Wint’s delirium, her father Amos the puppet-master who inverts the ballot overnight, swapping patriarch for prodigy so that dawn breaks on a hung-over joke: Mayor Wint, bleary-eyed, confetti on his collar, the town crest clutched like a bar tab. What follows is a civic miracle stitched from contrails of redemption: lamp-lit ordinances, smashed gin barrels bleeding into gutters, a choir of saloon-keepers hissing vengeance. They dispatch Hetty Morfee—school-desk memory turned siren—to drape a bastard-baby lie across the new mayor, a velvet shroud meant to smother reform. Yet at the crescendo, inside the echoing marble council chamber, Hetty’s voice fractures into truth; the lie slithers away, father and son clasp in chiaroscuro, Joan’s smile ignites like a match struck against midnight, and the town’s last tavern sign flickers out, its neon sigh a requiem for the old, drunken century.