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think that?'
    'He knows all the words to "The Red Flag", maybe.' Waites turned away from me towards the door. 'How in Hell would I know what she saw in him, goddamn loser.'  
    'Where are you going now?'
    'Home.' He paused with one hand on the doorknob. 'To the lodge. I'm not going to let her ruin my vacation, I've worked too hard to run back to Toronto and say, "There there, poor thing."' He pursed his lips angrily and left the room before I could say anything.  
    I did the necessary policework. There was a telephone in the corner of the room and I rang Parry Sound police detatchment and spoke to the inspector on duty. 'We have a homicide here, Inspector. The deceased is a Parry Sound resident. A Carolyn Jeffries, around thirty, slim, blonde, no make-up. Apparently she and her husband Stuart run some kind of art supply shop in town.'  
    I was lucky. They have two inspectors and I'd struck the one of them who had experience in detective work. He asked the right questions and I was able to fill him in within a couple of minutes. He said he would send a car to the store and break the news to the husband, as well as checking to see if Moira Waites had arrived. He would keep me posted on developments, and send his own crime team down to examine the car and take over the investigation.  
    Dr McQuaig came back with his flask and I put the plastic evidence bags into it and had McKenney fill it with ice. It could go to the Parry Sound detectives when they arrived, one less headache for me. Then I headed out to make a house to house canvass around the lake to try and uncover any witnesses to the car's going into the water.  
    I started around the corner from the funeral home, in the town itself. Town is overstating it a little. Officially we're an incorporated village, the lowest form of urban life. We have a Main Street with the bank, bait store, grocery, liquor/beer store, a Chinese restaurant specializing in hamburgers and a cluster of houses, most of them taking in summer guests, and a couple of side-streets of houses which also rent rooms to tourists. The rest of the village is straggled around the shoreline of the lake, every fifty yards or so.  
    Main Street is wide with the Lakeside Hotel and Marina on the water and a bridge over the lock. It's an unmade street, dusty in summer and lined with parked cars and with a knot of kids listening to music and giggling together. Remembering the two hassles from the morning, I stopped to talk to the kids. This was the early teen crowd, at the age when self-confidence only comes with numbers, before they get to the pairing-off stage. The girls were more forthcoming than the boys who all acted supercool. A couple of them had seen the swarming at the bait store but they didn't know any of the kids involved in it.  
    'They're not from around here, Chief,' Debby Vanderheyden told me. 'Like, we wouldn't do something like that.'
    Her friends all giggled and said 'Oh no' with mocking innocence, all a joke. They wouldn't need to swarm a store, I thought, all of them already knew who they were. Gangs are made up of losers looking for a sense of belonging.  
    One of the bolder girls asked how my wife was and they all giggled again. It was hard for them to imagine how an old guy like me had caused a pregnancy.  
    I asked them to call the station if they saw any gangs of kids in town. It was good insurance, they would rather watch me tackling the situation than see another store ripped off. It wasn't that they were so very law-abiding, they just weren't sure what the cool reaction was when a gang came to town.  
    Gilles Perault was busy and I lingered with him until he had time to talk. He wanted to discuss his swarming but I slowly got him around to asking if he knew if anyone had been out fishing the night before. The occasional dedicated man will go out after dark for pickerel and there was a chance one of them might have seen the car go into the lake. Gilles told me