“So do I,” I replied, making a notation on my own pad. “When did Alison begin working for the health-care organization?” I asked.

“About a year after she earned her master’s. First, though, she took a job with an advertising agency that had a public relations department. She was a junior account executive—or something like that—and the health-care company was her primary client. A year later she left the agency and began working full time for the health-care place. It upset a lot of people, too.”

“How so?”

“First thing she did was fire the ad agency and hire someone else.”

“Burning bridges,” I suggested.

“She was like that.”

“How did your relationship hold up?”

“Fine,” Marie answered, shrugging. “We started to drift apart; she was doing her thing and I was doing mine. We stayed in touch, though; met a couple times a month for lunch.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“About a month before she disappeared.”

“What did you talk about?”

“I can’t even remember, it was so unimportant. She certainly didn’t confide in me about what was happening in her life if that’s what you’re asking,” Marie shook her head sadly. “I was supposed to be her friend—one of her best friends—yet she didn’t confide in me. Now I wonder if we were friends at all. Sometimes it seems to me that we were only two people who knew each other for a long time.”

I appreciated Marie’s confusion. I am continually impressed by how little we truly know about each other, by how much we conceal. We often remain strangers even to those we’re the most intimate with. I’ve known widows who learn more about their dearly departed husbands in the first week after they’re dead than in forty years of married life. It makes one yearn for that lost age of formal introductions, that time in our society’s evolution when our character was well known and even guaranteed by mutual friends, accepted customs, and shared institutions. Of course, there wasn’t much call for private investigators back then.

“How did she meet Stephen Emerton?” I asked, nudging Marie slowly toward the question I most wanted to ask.

“I introduced them,” she replied. “Stephen and I were seeing each other. Nothing serious, though. One day I introduced them over lunch. A week later Alison called and said Stephen had asked her out, did I mind? I said no.”

“You didn’t mind that your best friend was stealing away your boyfriend?”

Marie smiled. “Stealing him away? More like I was giving him away. And good riddance. Stephen’s a good-looking guy, I admit. But I’ve seen kiddie pools with more depth. ‘An idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’” she added, quoting Macbeth.

“Did you tell that to Alison?”

“‘Friendship is constant in all other things, save in the office and affairs of love; therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues; let every heart negotiate for itself,’” she replied. I couldn’t place the line.

“I recognized Macbeth,” I told the actress. “The last quote?”

“That was Shakespeare, too. Much Ado About Nothing. Sorry. I know I can be annoying, quoting playwrights. Sometimes I can’t help showing off.”

“Forget it,” I told the actress. “I’ve been known to show off on occasion myself.” Then I asked, “Was Alison working for the health-care organization when she and Stephen met?”

“Yes.”

“Did Alison see anyone else while she worked there?”

“Before Stephen? Probably. Alison was pretty enough; she could have had all the male companionship she wanted.”

“Any names?”

“No,” Marie answered. “None that I can remember.”

“How about after she married Stephen?”

There it was—the high, hard one. Marie swatted it like it was a beach ball.

“I doubt it,” she said. “I think you can tell if a woman cheats, and Alison just wasn’t the type.”

Alison wasn’t the type: I was happy to hear Marie say it. Happy and relieved. So much for not getting emotionally involved in a case, so much for keeping an open mind. Alison wasn’t the type. I wrote it down in my notebook.

“Although if she was cheating on Stephen, I would have been the last person she’d tell,” Marie added. “Alison was very big on appearances. If she thought someone would disapprove of something she did, she’d have kept it to herself. I guess I know that much about her.”

“Would you have disapproved?”

“Absolutely. You want to sleep around when you’re single, go ahead, who cares—although these days I figure you’re taking your life in your hands. But not when you’re married. You have to be honest when you’re married. Otherwise, why bother?”

“If Alison was cheating on Stephen and didn’t confide in you, would she have confided in Gretchen Rovick?”

“The cop?”

“The sheriff’s deputy,” I corrected her.

“Maybe. She and Gretchen grew up together, went to the same high school. I met Gretchen only once, the weekend Alison was married. She was maid of honor, I was a bridesmaid. We were the only two standing up for Alison.”

ten

Deer Lake. Wisconsin was A GOOD NATURED TOWN. It said so on the hand-lettered sign that marked the city limits. The sign listed the community’s population at 1,557. It seemed larger than that. The parking lots of two supermarkets located across the blacktop from each other were packed with cars, and a considerable amount of traffic was moving in and out of King Boats, which I later discovered not only sold recreational boats but built them, too. Along the main drag a visitor could find a drugstore, bank, real-estate office, hardware store, several gift shops, two restaurants, a service station, a clothing store, a movie rental shop, an appliance dealer, a store that specialized in personal computers, and six—count ’em, six—taverns.

Gretchen Rovick was a Kreel County deputy sheriff, and apparently her beat included Deer Lake. She agreed to meet me at the Deer Lake Cafe after she finished her shift. I was an hour early, and it had been thirsty work driving three hours northeast from the Twin Cities—although I was familiar with the terrain since my wife’s parents lived about forty miles south—so I stopped for a taste, parking in front of The Last Chance Saloon. The Last Chance Saloon was next door to The Next to Last Chance Saloon. It turned out to be the same bar with two entrances; a hokey gag, but I liked it.

All bars give off vibrations; you can tell what kind of joint it is just by walking through the door, and The Last Chance felt like a place where you’d best keep your wits about you. It was dimly lit and furnished with cheap Formica tables and metal chairs with torn cushions—the kind my mother had in her kitchen before Dad got his raise. The floor was grubby with sawdust that might have come from Washington’s chopped-down cherry tree, and the remains of what must have been an impressive herd of deer hung from all four walls. A portly man wearing both belt and suspenders sat on a high stool behind a terribly nicked and battered bar, supporting his considerable bulk with his elbows, ready to speak but only if spoken to. He scrutinized my rate of consumption with a practiced eye, waiting for the opportunity to offer me another beer.

Had this been his life’s ambition, this man who looked as though he had drunk too much of the profits over the years? Had he always wanted to run a broken-down beer joint in a one-horse Wisconsin town? I wondered what he thought of the idea now. What do you do when your dreams come horribly, hopelessly true?

I drained the glass, pushed it toward him. He refilled it, set it back in front of me, took my five-dollar bill, brought back the change. “Eldon,” a voice called at the end of the bar, and he followed it. He did not speak to me. Didn’t look like he intended to.

It was nearing four in the afternoon, and the bar was half filled with men—no women—who tossed rough jokes from one table to another, jokes that were politically incorrect to the extreme and fairly funny—jokes that they would never tell their wives and daughters. I was wearing a blue sports coat over my white button-down shirt and faded jeans, which meant I was overdressed for The Last Chance and therefore a figure of some suspicion. Several regulars regarded me carefully with the narrow squint of rural folk accustomed to strangers who talked fast and said little. I pretended not to notice.