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old?”
    â€œYup,” said Calhoun. “Pretty beat up on the outside, but those old Power Wagons are indestructible, and Lyle keeps it humming. It would’ve been full of fishing gear. Trout Unlimited, Ruffed Grouse Society stickers on the rear window.”
    â€œYou don’t have a registration on it, do you?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWell, there can’t be a helluva lot of sixty-three Power Wagons left on the road. Hmm . . . Uh-uh. No Power Wagon on my accident report here. Not in York County any time yesterday.”
    â€œWhat about Cumberland or Oxford? He might’ve been up there.”
    â€œI don’t have them right in front of me,” said the sheriff. “I can check for you, if you want.”
    â€œPlease.”
    â€œYou want me to get back to you? I can pull ’em up here on my computer, but it’ll take a minute.”
    â€œI’ll hang on,” said Calhoun. “If you don’t mind.”
    He sipped his coffee, and several minutes later Dickman said, “Sorry, Stoney. Nothing in Cumberland County, nor Oxford, either.”
    â€œWell, don’t be sorry. It’s a relief.”
    â€œIf I hear something, I’ll let you know.”
    â€œI’d appreciate it.”
    â€œIt’ll cost you a day of fishing,” said the sheriff.
    â€œYou got it. Just name the day.”
    Calhoun put the phone on the desk, stood up, and went out into the shop. Kate was at the front counter paging through the shop’s logbook. She looked up. “Well?”
    He recounted his conversations with Penny Moulton and Sheriff Dickman. “I don’t know what else to tell you,” he said. “I guess if something happened to him, the sheriff would know it.”
    â€œThat’s a comfort,” she said. She shook her head. “I’ve been looking back through the log, trying to figure where Lyle might’ve gone yesterday.”
    â€œHe said he was heading for someplace that Mr. Green knew of. Someplace new for him.”
    She sighed. “I know. It was just a thought.”
    â€œAll we can do is wait,” said Calhoun.
    She looked up at him and smiled. “You know,” she said, “I can sit for hours beside a stream and wait for the mayflies to start hatching and the trout to rise, and I don’t have any trouble waiting for the tide to turn and the stripers to move up onto the mussel beds. Some things, I’m pretty damn excellent at waiting for. But I have a good deal of trouble waiting for a boy to show up when I just know goddam well something bad’s happened to him.” She shook her head. “What’re we gonna do, Stoney?”
    â€œNothing we can do,” he said.
    Calhoun spent most of the morning taking inventory while Kate did some ordering on the phone. Every time somebody pulled into the parking area out front, Kate twisted around and peered out the window. Then she turned, looked at Calhoun, and shook her head.
    A few customers came in, poked around, bragged about their angling prowess, tried to weasel secrets out of the shopkeepers, bought some flies.
    At noon, Calhoun got into his truck and drove over to the new Thai restaurant at the mall for takeout, that spicy noodley stuff with baby shrimp and hunks of chicken that Kate liked. They ate it with chopsticks and washed it down with Coke, sitting on the front porch outside the shop.
    Kate had a half-day guide trip in the afternoon. Her clients—a father and his twelve-year-old son who’d driven over from Rochester, New Hampshire—showed up around one-thirty. Neither of them had ever caught a striped bass before. This was the boy’s birthday present. They were bubbling with eagerness, the father as much as the boy, and Kate put on a good show of enthusiasm, though Calhoun could tell that she was still preoccupied with Lyle.
    He helped her get her trailer hitched up and her Blazer loaded with gear. The man, who turned out to