Emma went upstairs to Wayne’s room and set the basket down in the hall. She tried three keys before she found the right one. Silently scolding herself for what she was about to do, but determined nonetheless, she opened the door and stepped into Wayne’s private domain.

Emma sat the basket on the bed and looked around, wondering if she would have gone to Wayne’s rescue as quickly as she had Ben’s. She snorted. Not likely. She had never had a teenage crush on Wayne Poulin. She’d taken his measure the first night he had come to the house to pick up Kelly. She hadn’t liked what she had seen then, and she still didn’t.

There was something calculated about Wayne. His beady little brown eyes ruined his otherwise handsome face. He was short, with straight brown hair, and he had a wiry body. He was a forester for one of the larger mills just north of here, and he spent a great deal of his time in the woods. He reminded Emma of a pit bull.

Wayne’s room showed all the signs of a man who had spent fifteen years living in a boardinghouse. It was cluttered with books and trade magazines and outdoor equipment. There was a gun rack on one wall sporting a shotgun, two high-powered rifles, and a compound bow.

The ring of keys bit into her hand, and Emma realized she had a death grip on them. Well, she was here, Wayne was not, and she knew where the key to his desk was. She was going to look for Kelly’s letters.

She heard a garage door open and looked out the window. Mikey was carefully backing out Greta’s classic 1956 Henry J. Emma shook her head. That car was the pride of both Greta and Mikey, and he was the only one she would let drive it. For two years now, Mikey had been driving Greta to appointments, the grocery store, and the library in Greenville.

They had been stopped by a deputy once, and there had been quite a ruckus over there being a thirteen-year-old at the wheel. But Amos Ramsey, the county sheriff, also boarded at Greta’s, and after a week of burnt meals and gritty bedsheets, all the deputies suddenly went blind when Mikey was driving the Henry J on the back roads of the county.

Greta and Mikey pulled out of the driveway and the house took on an eerie silence. Emma quickly found the key sitting behind the picture on the dresser, right where Greta had said it would be. She turned back to Wayne’s desk. It was on old rolltop without a speck of dust on it—which meant Greta had all but told Emma to snoop.

Which she fully intended to do. And even if she didn’t find Kelly’s letters, she would see what Wayne used for stationery. Then she would ask Ben what his letter had looked like. Maybe Wayne was the one who had lured Ben here. Emma wouldn’t put it past the man; he was bitter enough to want to stir up any trouble he could. Maybe he even thought that if Kelly found out Ben had come back, she would return also.

Yeah, that made sense. Wayne had never moved on from Kelly’s abandonment. He had received pitying looks from people at first, but now he was the recipient of laughter. After ten years, he was starting to look more like a fool than a pining boyfriend.

Wayne blamed Ben for the whole mess. And it had been Wayne who had first suggested Ben and his group of environmentalists had blown up the dam and killed her dad.

The old desk creaked as she raised the top, and the inside was much more stark and far more organized than the room. In this one place, Wayne was a professional, it seemed. His paycheck stubs were all filed by date in one of the cubbyholes.

She found some writing paper and envelopes, and stole one of each. Then she searched all the drawers and every nook and cranny, finding no letters from Kelly. But under the blotter, written in bold, harsh lines, were some numbers. Studying them, Emma realized they were map coordinates in longitude and latitude. It wasn’t a range of parallels or minutes, like a tract of land that Wayne’s company might be planning to harvest, but one particular spot.

They could mean anything. With a Global Positioning System, Wayne could have marked any spot for future reference when he had been in the field. The coordinates could be a start-off point for cruising timber. It could be a logging camp. Or a freshwater spring he had found. She tucked the paper back under the blotter and sighed, looking around the room for anyplace else Wayne might hide a letter.

Emma was just closing the rolltop when she spotted the corner of the paper sticking out from under the blotter. She pushed it fully under the blotter to hide her snooping, but was drawn back to it for some reason. The coordinates made her curious. She had a GPS in the Cessna, as well as a handheld device, and she knew the exact coordinates of Medicine Creek Camps. These numbers were northwest of her camps, less than one day’s walk.

She also knew there was nothing in that general area. The mills hadn’t cut that land in nearly forty years.

She pulled out the stationery she’d stolen and quickly copied down the coordinates. Then she shoved the scrap of paper back under the blotter and closed the desk and locked it. She took the laundry out of the basket, and instead of putting it in his bureau, she set the clothes on Wayne’s bed. The jerk could rotate his own socks.

She was going home, taking a long, relaxing bath, and then dressing up for an evening of certain disaster.

“What are you doing? We’re going to be late.”

Emma looked up at Ben and frowned. “I’m creating ammunition for the coming battle with Mikey. This is a game timer. Here. Take this string and tie it to that porch post over there.”

“What in hell is a game timer?”

Emma straightened and made sure her coat was buttoned up to her chin. “It’s a clock with a string attached. You stretch the string across a game trail and set it. When a deer comes walking along, it trips the string, stopping the clock. That way you know what time the deer are walking that particular area. Most animals are creatures of habit.”

“And we are setting this up on your porch … why?”

“So I know exactly what time your soncomes home. This gives me the ammunition to catch him in his lie.”

“Why do you think Mike’s going to lie to you?”

“It seems to be a newly acquired habit of his, ever since his father told him to go out and have a little fun.”

“Now, Em, you know I was right.”

“I know that it’s dangerous to let an overintelligent teenager loose on society. Sheriff Ramsey drove out here yesterday to warn me that Michael was seen in town with an unsavory group of kids.”

“How unsavory can kids get in Medicine Gore, Em?”

“Unsavory enough to harass some environmentalist when no one is looking. Most of the kids’ parents make their living off the forest one way or another, and this political war has filtered down to the children.”

“Mike wouldn’t do anything stupid.”

Emma hunched down to set the timer, nearly falling off the steps as her high heels wobbled. “Mikey is probably their ringleader. Their latest prank has all the earmark of his handiwork.”

Ben pulled her away from the edge of the steps. He took the timer and hunched down to secure it to the post. “What prank?”

Emma sat down beside him on the top step, and set the clock and tested the string, making sure Mikey wouldn’t see it but would still trip it. “Somebody built a fort of logs around an environmentalist’s truck two nights ago.”

Ben grinned, his teeth white and his eyes glistening in the moonlight. “That wasn’t so bad. It’s kind of brilliant.”

“Very brilliant. As for being bad, there was no way to dismantle the logs without caving them in on the truck. Which is precisely what happened.”

“Any number of kids around here must have access to a truck full of logs and a pulp loader. What makes you think it was Mike?”

“Because only Mikey would realize he could commit a crime without actually doing anything wrong. After all, they didn’t touch any property, they simply built a log cabin. It wasn’t their fault the truck was damaged. The environmentalists did that themselves when they tried to free the truck. What crime could the kids possibly be charged with?”