Johannson nodded sadly, like he’d heard it all before.

Deputy Rovick watched Johannson’s retreating back for a moment, and then she turned and studied me carefully. There was no hostility in her eyes. Just interest.

“I should have listened to my mother,” I admitted. “She was forever telling me to mind my own business.”

“She was right.”

“That old guy, he likes to roughhouse.”

“Johnny’s all right,” she assured me, leading me up the street. “Measures a man by how hard he throws a punch is the problem.”

“Problem is the kid had a switchblade.”

“Classic sociopath,” she said in reply. “He was busted last year in Minneapolis for cutting a prostitute. Some shyster got him off.” The deputy sighed audibly and looked back at the saloon. She knew she was going to have to deal with Johannson’s boy sooner or later. But not today. Not alone. “Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”

“Yes, I’m hungry,” I told her.

“Good, you can buy,” she said, leading me across the street to a restaurant called The Height.

“The height of what?” I asked sarcastically.

“The height of fine cuisine,” the deputy replied. “People in the Cities aren’t the only ones who like to eat well.”

The restaurant was spacious and brightly lit. The furniture was obviously well cared for, and there was nary a deer rack in sight. The deputy led us to a table in the corner from where she could watch the door, the bar, and the stage. A rugged-looking thirty-something playing a twelve-string acoustic guitar rehearsed a Blind Lemon Jefferson song from a stool on the stage. I was fairly amazed to hear the blues in Deer Lake and told the deputy so.

“We have music, too,” she informed me.

I listened to him pick, a Native-American so far removed from his ancestors, from Crazy Horse and Red Cloud and Roman Nose and all those other badass warriors who would have pushed the White Eyes back into the sea if only they had better weaponry, that he could have dropped the Native, hyphen and all, and no one would have noticed. Except him. His name was Lonnie Cavander, and Deputy Rovick informed me that his greatest disappointment in life was that he was not allowed to carry a feathered war lance wherever he went. Instead, he settled for a buck knife the size of a buffalo horn.

“A blues-playing Sioux,” I marveled.

“Dakota,” Rovick corrected me. “Dakota means friend or ally. Sioux is what the Europeans called the Dakota. I don’t know what it means. Snake or something like that. Anyway, Lonnie isn’t a Dakota. He’s an Ojibwa. Chippewa to the uninformed.”

I listened to Lonnie Cavander practice, and when he finished the song I applauded. He smiled at me and nodded.

“Do you know any T-Bone Walker?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You have to be electrified to play Walker. Only way to get those wails. How about this?” he said and started playing a complicated riff that danced on the edge of my memory until I shouted out, “Charlie Patton!”

“Man knows his blues!” Lonnie shouted back.

I was so engrossed in the song that I didn’t notice the waitress until she was at the table and Deputy Rovick said, “Hello, Ingrid.” I looked up to find a woman with shoulder-length blond hair that had the effect of motion, sunset blue eyes, and skin the color of buttermilk. Of course her name was Ingrid. What else could it be?

Ingrid reminded us that The Height wasn’t open for dinner yet but would be in a half hour if we cared to wait. We did, and she suggested the walleye special in a warm, pleasing manner that made her seem even more physically attractive than she really was, which is saying quite a lot. If she had recommended roadkill and a side of tree bark, I would have gobbled it up.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Leaded or unleaded?”

“Leaded.”

“Good for you,” Ingrid said. “We take the fun out of everything these days. We take the caffeine out of our coffee and the sugar out of our chocolate and the alcohol out of our beer and then pretend we enjoy it. If something is unhealthy, we should stop using it altogether, not ruin it.”

“I agree,” I said a little too enthusiastically.

“Well, of course you do,” Ingrid told me and smiled. I watched her as she walked across the restaurant, pausing first at the stage to give Lonnie a listen, her eyes closed to the music. I believe we all eventually reach a peak, a time in our lives when we are as smart and quick and strong and beautiful as we will ever be. Some of us reach it when we are in high school or college, others in middle age, still others just before they are ready to give it up. If we’re lucky the peak will last a year or two. If not, only a few fleeting moments. I suspect mine had come and gone long ago. And as I watched the woman swaying gently to Lonnie Cavander’s music, I wondered if this was hers.

“The most beautiful woman in Kreel County,” Deputy Rovick informed me.

“Most beautiful woman in any county,” I said, then caught myself. I hadn’t realized I was going to say that. After a few embarrassed moments I said, “At the risk of demonstrating my ignorance yet again, what is she doing in Deer Lake, Wisconsin?”

“Ingrid owns the place.”

“The whole town?”

“Just the part you’re sitting in.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You were expecting a bunch of inbred hicks dressed in overalls and sucking on jugs of mash, weren’t you?”

“You have to admit that pretty much describes the clientele over at The Last Chance.”

“Do I?”

“Perhaps it’s my imagination, but your speech did seem to contain certain countrified colloquialisms that magically disappeared once you crossed the street.”

“You’ve got me there,” the deputy said and then presented her hand. “I’m Gretchen Rovick,” she said as if we had just met.

“Holland Taylor,” I answered, accepting the charade. Now we could start over.

We discussed Alison for an hour or more, Gretchen contributing extended anecdotes—like the time Alison embarrassed an American history teacher who couldn’t see how the rivalry between Andrew Jackson and his southern-born vice president over Jackson’s mistress, Peggy O’Neal, had contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. Or the time she purposely answered all one hundred questions in a true-false test wrong to see how her teacher would react. (Alison argued it was impossible to get one hundred percent wrong unless you knew all the correct answers. The teacher gave her an F anyway.)

Often Gretchen would slip into the present tense. “I still can’t believe Alison’s gone,” she’d say when she caught herself.

Gretchen and Alison had been childhood friends, growing up across the street from each other. Occasionally Alison would accompany the Rovick family on weekend retreats to Deer Lake, where they kept a cabin. And when Alison’s other friends began to shun her after she was certified a genius, Gretchen remained steadfast and true.

“It wasn’t her fault she was smarter than everyone else,” Gretchen declared as if intelligence was a handicap.

The two friends didn’t drift apart until the age of nineteen. Alison was at the University of Minnesota, completing work on her master’s. Gretchen had enrolled in the Law Enforcement program at Minnesota State University in Mankato. After graduation, Gretchen moved to Deer Lake and took a job with the Kreel County Sheriff’s Department. Still, the two women spoke at least three times a week by telephone. Inexplicably, Alison’s last call, according to her phone records, was placed one whole month before she disappeared. About the same time Marie Audette had lost track of her.

“We spoke every other day,” Gretchen said. “Our phone bills were outrageous. Then one day she stopped calling me, and when I called her, all I got was her machine.”

I told her about the harassing phone calls and suggested that that was the reason Alison refused to answer the telephone.