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cardboard about the size of a credit card with my photo on it. The words “PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR” and a four-digit license number were printed in red, other relevant information (like height, weight, and eye color) in black. The card stated it was good for only two months from date of issue. While it was being laminated, the clerk told me once that I must be awfully “well regarded,” twice that I dare not represent myself as a sworn peace officer, and three times that I was not to carry a concealed weapon.
    By the time I drove back to Lacouture’s office, he was gone for the day, but he’d left the Shea file with Judy, and told her to let me take it to read over that night. She also gave me a handwritten map to the Marseilles Inn.
    I drove west from Augusta on a divided strip like Route 1, then mended roughly northwestward for thirty country miles. At first the topography was drumlin hills and meadows, some with cows, others with swaybacked horses, a few with swaybacked barns, the roofs sagging against the walls. Some hay was still out, for the livestock, I guessed. The Prelude was pretty much the only vehicle going in my direction, and those passing me the other way were mostly pickup trucks Or four-wheel-drives, half of the folks waving to me as though we were neighbors passing on a common driveway.
    A little farther on, the farms became fewer. The road started to climb more steeply and drop more sharply, signs for lakes and chainsaw repair and canoe refitting cropping up. A logging truck came around a bend in front of me, poaching into my lane with two trailered flatbeds of large hardwood trunks and nearly sending me off the road and down a hundred-foot slope. Other than that, the trip was uneventful and pleasant: a hawk soaring fifty feet overhead, a skunk wending its way across a narrow strip of pavement, robins and blue jays and other songbirds I couldn’t identify very audible whenever I passed through stands of trees.
    As I reached the point on Judy’s map where I thought I had to make a turn, the tarmac crested, then descended gracefully to a long expanse of dark water nestled in a valley with a peak behind it. I could make out a few islands in the middle of the water, and just around another bend was a crossroads consisting of a small stone library, an even smaller red-bricked post office, a concrete-block country store, and a large clapboard building with a MARSEILLES INN sign in burned letters on a weathered background.
    The inn was positioned at the intersection so that it stood catercorner from the country store. The inn’s backyard ran down to the lakefront and a large, squarish dock with white chairs on it. The roof sported gingerbread shingles and had a gable at either end above a covered porch with spindled bannister and latticework from the floor to the ground. The clapboards were painted a soft peach, the shutters and other trim a deep orange, creating an unusual but attractive color contrast. A cement boat ramp abutted the inn, entering the water at an angle that suggested it continued down to the bottom of the lake.
    I pulled the car into a lot on the far side of the inn. Maybe twenty buildings, from rambling houses to small cottages, radiated from the intersection before petering out into small, homemade cabins along the lakefront and just plain trees in every other direction. I carried my suitcase in one hand and the Shea file from Lacouture’s office under the other arm.
    The porch steps creaked a little, spooking a calico cat with only one eye that bounded off into the bushes at the end of the porch. At the top of the steps, I could hear an old Rolling Stones tune from behind a screened door.
    I opened the door. A black portable boom box rested on the reception counter, the music much louder inside the foyer. It took me a moment to place the Stones piece. It was “Gimme Shelter.”
    “Helluva song for an innkeeper’s radio, huh?”
    The voice was gruff but friendly, an accent more like