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would not have deduced from her looks, her manner or her language this wild background she was portraying.
    "Then there were all the usual problems with drugs and alcohol," she said. "I have to admit I really put him through hell. No doubt about that."
    "Why is he so against you hiring an investigator for your daughter's murder?"
    "He thinks I'm the same unhappy, foolish girl who used to come in after curfew all the time and then throw fits when he confronted me. He's very sorry that Maryanne died, but he thinks I'm just wasting my money and my time by not letting the police handle it. 'Pathetic' was the word he used just the other day."
    "I'm going to do my best, as I said."
    "I appreciate that. And I apologize again for being so—"
    "—peevish."
    She laughed again. It was a nice, sweet sound. "I'll give you a phone service where you can leave messages for me. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And I'd appreciate hearing from you every few days."
    "You will. I promise."
    "Well, we'd better check out now. I have to go down the hall to Vic's room and pound on his door till he wakes up. He could sleep through a bombing raid."
    "I'll talk to you soon."

    Crayfish, shrimp tails, chicken entrails, hog melts, worms, night crawlers, live and dead chubs, coagulated blood, sour clams and frog pieces were all in my bait bucket when I went fishing that afternoon.
    Figured this would be my last chance for a time, so I took advantage of it, doing a little bit of what they call drift fishing, wading out to the middle of the stream and staying there a couple of hours.
    I saw yellow birds and red ones and blue ones, I heard dogs and owls and splashing fish, I smelled the rich dark spring mud of the riverbank and the piney scent of the woods and the aroma of hot sunlight on the denim of my shirt. I was on a gentle leg of the river that was almost a cul-de-sac. A doe stood in a clearing and watched me for ten full minutes and a water snake at least two feet long slithered up from a muddy hole, looked around, and vanished back into the hole again immediately, apparently not liking my company. A cow with cowy brown eyes and swinging cowy tits appeared in the same spot the doe had and took up the watch, trying to figure out just what it was this two-legged creature was doing out there in the middle of the gentle blue river.
    Easy to imagine the time when the Mesquakie Indians had laid claim to all this rich land. See the gray of their campfire smoke against the soft blue sky, hear the pounding messages of their drums echo off the limestone cliffs to the north. As a boy I'd combed these hills for buried arrowheads, almost obsessive in my search. In all those summer days I'd found only one. I still had it in my bureau at home. Kathy had always referred to it as "the start of my Indian museum."

    I got home just at dusk, just when the invisible birds in the trees were making enough noise to awaken every Mesquakie laid to rest in the burial ground three miles to the west.
    I got inside and turned the light on and said, "Damn."
    We've seen it in the movies so many times that we should be used to it: how a house looks after thieves have gone through it, trashing everything in their search for hidden treasure, your living quarters a jumble of scattered papers, neckties, overturned chairs, emptied desk drawers and magazines that had been riffled through and then tossed on the floor like so many dead splayed birds.
    I had a good notion of what my visitor had been looking for and it wasn't treasure. Not of the monetary kind, anyway.
    He'd wanted something germane to the investigation of Maryanne Conners's murder.
    I worked my way through the house room by room. By nine I had everything pretty much fixed up, shoving a stack of paperbacks under the end of the couch where he'd broken the leg, putting all the classical CDs that had been Kathy's back in their proper slots, wondering in a bemused moment what he thought of all my underwear and socks that had