“ ‘Now, I will personally pay,’ said Aunt Queen, ‘for the bagging and collecting of these chains and the black residue which Quinn has described. I will pay to have it thoroughly and completely analyzed as to its substance, and will go so far as to run DNA tests on it to determine, among other things, whether or not only one person perished in this spot, or more than one, and whether or not Rebecca Stanford—whose hair we have conveniently in a hairbrush in the attic—did indeed die in this place.’ She paused for effect, her eyes narrowing.

“ ‘All I ask of you, Sheriff,’ she continued in a high matriarchal fashion, ‘is that you go back out there and you look for these mysterious bodies. I assume you and Pops can go by motorized pirogue in the morning.’

“ ‘The motors will never make it,’ I piped up. ‘We’ll have to take the small pirogue, same as I did. The cypresses are just too dense.’

“ ‘Very well then, Pops knows how to handle the pole and I assume you do too, Sheriff Bobby Jeanfreau! So you take care of that, and consider yourself solemnly charged to find those bodies, while the labwork I will handle through my own personal physician, assuming that Ruby River City doesn’t have a medical examiner on its payroll who is qualified in the field.’

“At this point, the sheriff, having been laughed at by me, very smoothly smiled and asked:

“ ‘And may I deputize Goblin, ma’am, so he can show Pops and me the way to the island?’

“Now it was Pops who became riled, though his tone was low and pretty much apathetic, given the state of things.

“ ‘We don’t need for you to deputize Goblin,’ he said. ‘But I do think that you need a real team of people out there, not just to find those bodies but to examine this death scene with the chains, this residue as we’re calling it; you need somebody to look to that in an official way.’

“ ‘Now, Pops, you know there’s nothing to all this—’ the sheriff countered. He was as stubborn as I’d ever seen him, and as ignorant, too.

“But Pops pressed on, his tone never changing except in terms of the contents of what he said. ‘Now you listen to me, Sheriff,’ he stated calmly. ‘A body out there even on the second floor of a house could decompose within a few years. And it is possible that Quinn has stumbled upon the scene of a crime, and he might have stumbled on the criminal himself. I’m insisting you take a team of men out there, and if you don’t I’ll call in the FBI.’