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chairman of the Loon Lake school board, she knew people. Better than that, she knew women. It was Erin who had commented to Osborne after watching Lew during a county commission meeting when she was being grilled on her annual budget that she considered Chief Ferris one of the few women she knew to be “happy in her skin.”
    Osborne was not sure exactly what that meant, but he knew he was happy when she waved to him if their vehicles happened to pass going in opposite directions, when she invited him to share a trout stream on a calm summer night and, at the moment, he was doubly happy that she was inhaling coffee in his kitchen. At the same time, he was refusing to think how deeply pleased he would be if she drafted him to be a deputy on this case.
    “Just as I was leaving the office after Marlene’s call,” Lew was saying, “Phil Herre stopped in to tell me he and Georgia haven’t been able to reach their daughter, Sandy, for a couple days now. She’s got her own place, so they didn’t worry too much at first, but when she didn’t show up for a nephew’s baptism yesterday, they got concerned. And she hasn’t been answering any phone calls. He asked me to go with him to her town house on my way out here, which I was happy to do….”
    The kitchen was quiet as Lew took a long sip of her coffee. “No sign of the woman. She’s got a bassett hound, and the poor dog was left in the house the entire weekend. Phil said it was not like Sandy to leave him with no food or water, having accidents all over the place—”
    “Sandy Herre?” Osborne interrupted. Bracing both hands on the kitchen counter where he stood, he dropped his head, thinking hard. That mouth, the crowded teeth on the lower jaw … it had looked so familiar. “Sandy Herre,” he repeated himself. “Excuse me a minute.”
    Osborne hurried around the garage to the little room off the back where he cleaned fish. Using his shoulder, he shoved at an inside door that opened reluctantly to a narrow storage area running across the rear of the garage. Here he had hidden the old oak files that held all the dental records from his practice. Mary Lee had insisted that he throw them out. Instead, when she was out playing bridge one night, he had enlisted Ray to help him hide them back in here. Fortunately, she had never thought to look in this musty, cobwebbed room.
    The files were meticulously organized. He had separated his thirty-five years of dentistry into decades, then alphabetically within each decade—a system that had evolved from his habit of making up new files for each patient every ten years or so.
    He loved these files. They spoke to him of his pride in his work and his affection for almost all the people that had needed him. He and Ray often joked that the dental file was to Osborne what the headstone was to Ray: a point of departure for a good story. And if Ray insisted that the inscription on a headstone was a clue to character, Osborne could argue that what he found in a mouth was a metaphor for a life: sparkling clean or crummy with unnecessary plaque; teeth broken and left unrepaired or strong from healthy habits; every space accounted for or gaping holes where teeth should have been, holes left open for reasons beyond the owner’s control.
    To find Sandy Herre, he had to go back only seven years. He was lucky she was there. Anything more recent than five had been left with the young dentist who took over his practice.
    Osborne pulled the file and opened it to find a set of full-mouth X rays taken when she was sixteen. Turning toward the light from the doorway, he held up the narrow strip of white cardboard with its small gray black inserts. As he studied the X rays, he could recall Phil Herre’s voice as he, a man of modest means, and his daughter had decided she could live with the slightly crooked lower teeth because the bill for orthodontics would have crippled the family’s finances.
    Lew rose from her chair as Osborne returned to