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Kate tossed her head. “You don’t have to sound so much like a librarian.”

Since I was a librarian, I figured everything I said made me sound like one, but for once I was smart enough to keep my thoughts inside. “He’ll be fine.” The risk of theft out here on this deserted road felt so low as to be nonexistent. “The car is locked and the windows are rolled down to allow for airflow. I don’t see how even Eddie will be able to find a way to damage anything in the short time we’ll be gone, do you?”

She shrugged, but didn’t say anything, so I considered that a win for Minnie. Not that it was a contest, of course.

I looked in at Eddie through the slightly opened window. “See you later, pal. We won’t be—”

“MRR!!”

“Yes, I’ll miss you, too,” I said soothingly. “I’m so glad we have this kind of bond. Back soon, okay?”

“Is he going to be okay?” Kate asked, looking backward as we walked down the side of the gravel road, listening to the sound of Eddie’s unhappiness.

“He’s fine,” I said. Eddie’s howls could be prodigious, but as James Herriot might have said if the Yorkshire veterinarian had found himself with Eddie as a patient, if he could howl that loudly for no real reason, he probably didn’t have anything wrong with him except recalcitrance. “He’ll get tired soon. When we get back, I bet he’s sound asleep.”

Kate didn’t look convinced, but she kept walking alongside me, and by the time we reached the part of the road that was bounded by trees on both sides, we could barely hear him at all.

“Oh, no!” Kate slapped the pockets of her tight shorts. “I forgot my cell phone.”

“You can live without it for a few minutes, can’t you?”

“What if we need to contact someone? You have yours, but what if it breaks? What if the battery runs down?”

Sighing, I knelt down, untied my car key, and handed it over, because some things aren’t worth arguing over. Her light feet ran off, the car door opened, there was a pause, the car door shut, and she hurried back. I took the proffered key and tied it back on my shoe. At least she’d come back. Some kids might have driven off, leaving their poor aunt stranded.

We started walking again. Fifty yards later, the road took a slight turn and we couldn’t hear a thing except the sough of wind in the leaves and our own footsteps. It was quiet and peaceful, and I was just beginning to enjoy myself when Kate said, “So this is where that Courtney drove that day?”

I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

My niece sighed heavily. “Really? I can hear, remember?”

“But . . .” I tried to recall what conversations I’d had with whom that she might have overheard and quickly came to the conclusion that I hadn’t a snowball’s chance of pinning down anything specific.

“I. Was. In. The. Room,” Kate said, loud enough to startle any nearby wildlife. “Just because I don’t say anything doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”

“Well, sure, but . . .” I stopped talking, because my brain was catching up to the circumstances. At some point Kate would realize she might have been better off keeping that tidbit to herself. I, however, wasn’t going to be the one to bring it to her attention. That sounded like a sibling’s job.

“So this is where she went?” Kate asked.

I blinked, pulling out of my mini-reverie. “Has to be,” I said. “This road doesn’t connect to anything. It dead-ends just up ahead.” I’d confirmed this by peering at the county’s aerial photography and Google Earth. The road proper petered out quickly, narrowed to a two-track, then faded into a vanishing trail.

Kate swiveled her head, looking left and right and left and right. “And there was a second car?”

“A truck. It was ahead of Courtney’s.”

“Is this like a hangout place? For kids.” She paused. “You know. For . . . stuff some of them like to do?”

I laughed. “Kate, I know what kind of stuff teenagers get up to. I was one once, remember?” Not that I’d been invited to those kinds of parties, but I’d known who went, where they were, and what happened. “And if you’re thinking Courtney and whomever came out here to do whatever, they didn’t need to. Courtney has an apartment of her own.”

Kate managed to shove her hands in her shorts pockets. “There are still good reasons she could be meeting someone out here. The guy could be married and doesn’t want to be seen going into her apartment. Or maybe she’s meeting another woman. Maybe her family will disown her if they find out she’s not straight, and her grandmother is dying and the last thing Courtney wants to do is disappoint her granny, so she’s hiding her true self for now.”

Staring at my niece, I said, “Kate, that’s—”

“Dumb?” she cut in, her chin up. “Stupid? No, wait. Melodramatic?” She drew the word out long.

“What I was going to say is that both of those sound plausible.”

“I figured you’d say that, and . . .” She paused. “Wait, what?”

“Both of those scenarios are reasonable and possible.” Kate continued to look at me blankly, so I went on. “As possibilities, they’re sound. The next step is to find a causal link. Some concrete fact,” I hastened to add, since I’d heard myself lapse into jargon that some might call librarian-y, “that gives credence . . . that makes a good case for one of those theories being true.”

“Or both.” Kate almost grinned. “Don’t you see? Courtney could be hiding her lesbian self from her family, and her lover could be married.”

Another possibility I hadn’t considered. Still, if I’d given a nod to the separate theories, it wasn’t going to go well if I put the brakes on now.

“Lots of could be’s,” I agreed. “But to get the sheriff’s department to take any of this seriously, we have to come up with something more than a theory.” Due to my prior interactions with personnel from said department, this was something I understood at a bone-deep level. “How about . . .” I mentally tacked over to another point of view. “What do you think we should do next?”

“If you seek a pleasant motive, look about you,” Kate said.

Her statement was amazing in two ways; one, that my Florida-bred-and-born niece knew that Michigan had a state motto, and two, that she could misquote it so aptly. I made a mental note to look up Florida’s state motto. “There are lots of trees about us, but not much else.”

“We’re not at the end of the road yet,” Kate said, striding forward. “Courtney and whoever came out here for a reason. All we have to do is find it.”

She made it sound easy. But since I’d been thinking pretty much the same thing when I’d decided to drag her out here, I shouldn’t be harboring so churlish a thought. “Bad aunt,” I muttered, hurrying to catch up with Kate’s longer legs. I was, however, thrilled that Kate was finally enthusiastic about something while in my presence.

“What’s that?” Kate asked. “Do you see something?”

“Nope.” I fast-walked to her side. “Do you?”

“Not yet. But it has to be here.”

She spoke so confidently that I didn’t have the heart to tell her the harsh truth: that it was possible—even likely—that we wouldn’t find a thing other than old tire tracks, which weren’t proof of anything other than an extended stint of parking.

We walked through the dappled sunlight, looking down at the road, looking deep into the forest, even looking overhead. But all we saw were trees, trees, and more trees. All pretty, of course, in their various stages of growth, but none of it could be interpreted as a clue.

Just as my research had indicated, as we walked, the road became two tracks of dirt bisected by a low grassy hump. Though we studied the gravel and dirt, too much time had passed to see anything more than the vague outlines of vehicle traffic, and even those disappeared as the two-track became a narrow meandering trail, then a deer-wide trail, and eventually there was no trail at all.