"Thank you," Anna said but he'd already put her on hold. Minutes later, when she was beginning to think she'd been put on hold to grow old and die, Francine came on the line. Winger had evidently spoken to her firmly. She was businesslike to the point of rudeness. Anna read off her list of names, adding Carl Micou as an afterthought. She was answered by the huffy snicking sound of fingernails on a keyboard.

"No persons by those names have contacted Ms. Van Slyke in her professional capacity," Francine said mimicking an automaton.

Had the sentence with its convoluted precision come from someone else, Anna might have suspected them of hiding something. From Francine it just sounded petty and pompous.

"Thank you," Anna said again and pulled her soul back from the black and voice-filled void of the telephone to Joan's homey office.

No cheese down that hole,Anna remembered one of her field rangers, Barth Dinkins, saying. "No cheese," she said aloud.

Carl G. Micou, registered owner of the abandoned truck and trailer, the man who'd given the Florida motor vehicles department the number of Fetterman's Adventure Trails as his home number, remained a mystery. Anna turned back to her electronics.

Mentally apologizing to Joan for a phone bill she would probably have a devil of a time getting her department reimbursed for, Anna called Information and, throwing caution to the winds, charged the extra fifty cents and let them dial the Tampa Better Business Bureau for her. A pleasant young man, at least he sounded young and handsome and virile but may well have been a nasty old poop with a nice voice, told her Fetterman's Adventure Trails was a licensed business owned and operated by Woody Fetterman. Fetterman's Adventure Trails had operated at the same location for twenty-six years. The only address for Woody was that of Adventure Trails. There had been no complaints against Fetterman's from either the buying public or other businesses. Fetterman's Adventure Trails had recently closed its doors but he did not know why. He suggested she call the Tampa tourism department, as he thought Adventure Trails was a theme park with rides and so forth. They might be able to help her.

The department of tourism could tell her little more. The woman who answered the phone offered to send Anna a brochure, then couldn't find one. They'd gone out of business, Anna said, possibly the brochures had been thrown out. That was probably it, the woman agreed. She wrote down Anna's address at Glacier anyway, promising to send it along if she found it. Anna would have been touched by the desire to please if so long on the phone finding out so little hadn't made her crabby.

An hour's work had provided her with one first name, if "Woody" was legit and not a nickname. Maybe Woodrow. Since Woody had been in business in the same place for twenty-six years he was no fly-by-night. It had been in the back of Anna's mind that Fetterman of Fetterman's Adventure Trails and Bill McCaskil might be one and the same. Twenty-six years, changed that. She couldn't see McCaskil quietly running a business while being indicted and arrested repeatedly for fraud under a handful of other names.

McCaskil was from the Tampa area-or had been there as a teenager. He could've seen the name Fetterman on his way to work or school every day and remembered it when he needed an alias. If it wasn't for the name cropping up again by way of the owner of the abandoned truck, Anna would have chosen to believe that.

"Woody Fetterman." Anna wended her way through the phone lines to the Tampa courthouse, records department. Yes, there was a certificate of death for a Woodrow Fetterman. He had died at age eighty-one of natural causes six weeks before.

Another possibility exhausted. Bill McCaskil a.k.a. Fetterman was not the Fetterman of Adventure Trails. He was not connected with Carolyn Van Slyke by way of divorce. According to Lester, McCaskil hadn't known her before they met at Fifty Mountain Camp.

"Damn," Anna whispered. The truck and the trailer. The name Fetterman. McCaskil and his aliases. Another possibility entered her mind and she went back to the 10343 report. Carl G. Micou was born August 4, 1938, considerably older than McCaskil. Still, "Micou" could he one of McCaskil's aliases. Perhaps it wasn't listed because it was unknown or not yet used at the time William McCaskil was indicted for real estate fraud.

She spent forty more minutes on the phone and eventually ended up back at the records department in Tampa. The search took longer this time but Mr. Micou's death certificate was found. He had died of congestive heart failure in April of 1995, nearly six years ago.

"His truck is still alive," Anna said wearily.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Never mind. Thanks." Dead men, dead ends.

Sprinkled around the edges of Joan's office was all the information that, by any wild stretch of the imagination, could pertain to the death of Carolyn Van Slyke. Anna had already run to ground what little Fetterman, Fetterman and Micou had to offer. She'd verified that Lester's wife was indeed the queen of sluts. Swiveling Joan's chair slowly she let the other bits and pieces slide by: the army jacket with the topo and the file card. Anna rolled over and, without touching it, reread a copy of the card found in the pocket of what would undoubtedly be Bill McCaskil's coat. "B amp; C" was written in a loose hand across the top. Below those initials were numbers, measurements by the look of them: 12 11/16, 17 13/16, 30 12/16. The last, 30 8/19, was underlined in heavy ink.

When they caught McCaskil, if she were around, Anna'd ask him what the numbers meant. Probably nothing. His waist size. Who knew? She examined the photocopy of the topo. It had been reduced in size till it fit on two fourteen-and-a-half-inch sheets of paper taped together. Most of the type was too tiny for eyes that had seen more than forty years. There was nothing new since she'd looked at the original, no nifty clues pencilled in the margins, no big red X where the body had been found.

Anna rotated the chair another quarter turn and glanced briefly at her notes on Rory Van Slyke. Rory's dad was an abuse victim. Rory'd gone missing for thirty-six hours. Rory'd turned up having lost a sweatshirt and gained a water bottle, probably his dead stepmother's. Anna's mind drifted and she let it. No lunch, half a bag of gummi bears, her blood sugar was sufficiently screwed up her mind might actually go someplace interesting. It didn't. It merely cast back to the night on Flattop when Joan had divvied up the scattered remnants of the bear-ravaged camp, the ones she and Anna had stuffed unceremoniously in a sack before jaunting off with Harry in search of the lost boy. It was then Anna'd noted the extraneous water bottle in the bag beside the strange stick she'd picked up just outside the camp.

Rory had denied any knowledge of that stick, Anna remembered, just as he'd denied knowing how the water bottles had proliferated. A foot long, worn smooth, of hardwood, not pine or aspen, unweathered, Anna and Joan had known it was carried in recently so when they'd found it they'd saved it. Rory said he'd never seen it. Anna hadn't thought much about it at the time. It was a stick of wood not a stick of dynamite. Now she worried it around because it fit neatly into her collection of bizarre things that didn't fit.

Anna had kept the stick. Force of habit caused her to pack it out as she would any piece of litter. Unless the house had been burglarized by beavers it was probably on the floor of Joan's spare room, where it had been dumped when she unpacked before the last foray into the wilderness.

Thinking about it, she picked up a ruler, close in length to the mystery stick, though a good deal skinnier, and began to fiddle with it. If Rory had not been lying about the stick then it had been dropped in the little meadow by someone else on or about the time they'd been camped out there. Not more than a day or two prior to their arrival. Wood, even hardwood, weathers quickly out-of-doors.