Indeed, he was thinking. But the white truck had slowed, and now it stopped. Reacting late, Fanta had perhaps drifted too close. He stuffed his brake and skidded on the gravel. The two vehicles idled a few hundred yards apart, Matchbox toys to one another, but Fanta felt enormous and foolish. He should have driven past raising a perfunctory wave. He had given himself away.

Abruptly as he thought so, the white truck jolted forward, cranked right, and blasted through a shallow roadside creek, bucking and spraying, then plunged into weeds so tall that Fanta could only see the top of the cab as the vehicle progressed.

Well.

Had he spooked her?

In another hundred yards, she drove the truck into hardwood forest and disappeared.

Puzzled, Fanta eased forward to see. She had turned onto an old logging road, maybe, a faint suggestion only. But he saw neither a bridge nor a ford across the creek, nor evidence that such an accommodation had ever existed.

As for the land, no ownership was indicated, no posting, no rural address marker. No way did anybody live here. The truck had just blasted off through swells of goldenrod and wild parsnip, leaving only mashed-down parallel tracks that pitched over peak and trough before shanking into the forest.

Fanta sat a while, hearing “Sea of Joy.” Wasn’t it true? Joy was always keen to drown you, mid-rapture?

But, OK. He stopped the cassette. Where was this, exactly?

His joints ached as he reached to sort the heavy book of plat maps from the mess on his backseat. With the tome upon his lap, he flipped pages. This was Town of Leavings. He had stopped in Section 15, facing east. The road she had taken, if it was a road, did not exist on the map. In any case, she had headed north toward Sections 10, 9, and 8, a large property that the plat map identified as owned by Golly Bros.

The name—Golly—snagged in Fanta’s mind.

Then he remembered. The Golly brothers? The twins?

He lit a smoke to think back. His book of maps was old. That had to be the problem. Jim and Jon Golly were long gone, as far as he knew, otherwise that pair would have scored high in his investigative matrix—the dominant twin, Jim, especially.

Fanta’s phone showed a weak 3G signal. He aimed a swollen finger at his saved number for the Bad Axe County Library. He rummaged through his memory while the phone searched. The Golly brothers had looked alike but behaved differently. Jim was the brash and charming know-it-all, while Jon was the taciturn and seemingly pious go-along who kept his brother in the vicinity of reality.

“Library!”

Vigdis Torkelson’s startling bark sounded in his ear over keys clicking lickety-split.