I returned to the cabin, with some trepidation, to tell Dad that Lawrence and I were heading off to do real live detective work, but he was in his study, on the phone, speaking in low tones. The mess on the floor had been cleaned up, the salt and pepper shakers put back on the kitchen table. I tried to get his attention, poking my head in, but he swiveled in his office chair so he wouldn’t have to look at me.
“I’ll catch you later,” I said to his back, and left.
We took Lawrence’s Jag, which was not exactly an undercover car. In Braynor, you saw a lot of Fords and Chevys and Dodges, often in the shape of pickups and SUVs, but not a great many Beemers, Saabs, or Jags. There was a small Ford dealer on the south side of town, heading in, with a one-bay service garage and barely half a dozen new vehicles out front, and the GM dealership on the north side wasn’t much grander.
At the co-op, we found the owner, a woman named Grace. I introduced myself as a reporter, and Lawrence identified himself as a private detective, but artfully declined to divulge on whose behalf he was working. We were, truth be known, just being nosy.
“This was where Tiff died,” Grace said, taking us out to the warehouse and leading us down an aisle where stacks of bagged goods—topsoil, feed, and fertilizer—were stored on pallets. There was nothing much to suggest that this had been a murder scene only a day and a half earlier. Traces of sawdust, presumably remnants of what was used to soak up Tiff’s blood, dusted the concrete floor. There wasn’t a lot to see.
“What have the police told you?” I asked Grace.
“Orville?” she said. “Are you kidding? He couldn’t find his ass in a snowstorm, let alone Tiff’s killer.”
“You got any ideas of your own?” Lawrence asked.
Grace shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. A few bags of fertilizer, a plastic drum, why the hell would you kill someone to get that?”
Lawrence cocked his head. “A plastic drum?”
Grace nodded. “Well, we noticed one missing. Can’t say for sure it was taken that night, but we had five of them out back, fifty-five-gallon ones, and now there’s only four.”
“Did you tell the police about that?” he asked.
“What would be the point? I mean, so we lost a drum. You think Orville’s really going to care about that?”
Back in the car, Lawrence asked me to direct him to the mayor’s house.
“What was that about the drum?” I asked.
“If you’re going to make a bomb out of fertilizer and diesel fuel, you need something to put it in,” Lawrence said.
I said nothing.
A few minutes later, we were sitting where I’d been the day before, Alice Holland on the couch, her black husband, George, leaning up against the wall. I thought George and Lawrence exchanged some sort of glance as we walked inside, a shared-history thing, I don’t know.
“I understand,” the mayor said, “that the fishing-resort proposal is no longer on the table.”
“You heard about Leonard Colebert,” I said.
“Another bear attack. I heard about it on the radio. It’s a terrible tragedy. It’s really quite astonishing. All the years I’ve lived here, I’ve never known anyone to be killed by a bear. And now, two in a week.”
“Technically speaking,” I said, “the bear didn’t kill him. But the fall running away from it did.”
George Holland said, “That resort would have been a terrible thing for that lake. And how long would it have taken, once it had been built, for that lake to have been totally fished out? Who’d come up to the resort then?”
Alice Holland said, “I would never have wished the man dead, and I think we could have somehow stopped that project, but Braynor’s certainly better off without it. What do you suppose it is, this bear? A grizzly?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t really know my bears, but the man who saw it, Bob Spooner—he’s a friend of my father’s and a guest at his camp—didn’t give me the impression that it was as large as a grizzly. It looked to him like the bear that we’d heard about earlier. Similar markings.”
“I suppose I’ll have to speak to Chief Thorne. He may need to organize some hunters, go in and kill this bear before it strikes again.”
“He’s ahead of you there. He was out in the woods this morning, brought two men with him who looked like they’d just come from a casting call for Elmer Fudd, the Movie. They were looking for the bear when the incident happened, but they were in a different part of the woods.”
The mayor shook her head sadly, then studied us. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”
“No,” I said.
“This is the friend you mentioned yesterday.”
Lawrence said, “I used to be a cop. Now I’m private.”
Alice leaned forward on the couch. “Interesting.”