“And risk losing these conditions?” Terry, who’d approached just as Rosalind’s complaint was voiced, gave his granddaughter a one-armed hug. “Buck up, buttercup. You know how changeable the weather is up here. We need to seize these great conditions and wring every last drop of biking out of them.”

“Yeah, I suppose.” She didn’t sound convinced, though, and her grandfather heard her non-conviction.

He twisted around. “Ernie! Get over here and tell Rosalind how good it is to ride first thing in the morning.”

The man Terry summoned was fiftyish, had longish hair, and looked vaguely familiar, although I was sure I hadn’t seen him at either of the rides I’d been on. He ambled over, one hand pushing his bike. “Mornings are good,” he said amiably. “But they’d be even better if they started later in the day.”

This made both Terry and Rosalind laugh. “Both of us were right,” Terry said, smiling. “Don’t you love it when that happens? Say, Ernie. I don’t think you’ve met the newest addition to the club that’s not a club.” He pointed at me. “Minnie Hamilton, bookmobile librarian.” He pointed at Ernie. “Dr. Ernie Carpenter, family doctor extraordinaire.”

At the same time, Ernie and I exclaimed, “Cade!”

Terry glanced back and forth. “You two know each other?”

“Not really,” I said, “but we have a mutual acquaintance.” A couple of years earlier Dr. Carpenter and I had met because of his patient and my friend Russell McCade, known to art lovers the world over as Cade. The famous painter and his wife, Barb, summered on nearby Five Mile Lake and spent their winters in Arizona.

“Haven’t seen Cade or Barb in a month or so,” Ernie said. “What are they up to, do you know?”

I caught him up with the McCade travel plans—exhibitions in Central and South America; twelve countries in fourteen days, which sounded exhausting to me but had thrilled Barb and Cade—and asked oh so casually, “Do you regularly ride with this group?”

By this time, Terry and Rosalind had moved off to chat with other arrivals. Ernie straddled his bike and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his handlebars and resting his chin in his hands. Through a yawn, he said, “Not so much this time of year, with these morning rides. I make most of the weekdays, though. At least the ones that are sunny and warm, but not too warm. And not too windy.”

“Not a die-hard rider, then?” I asked, laughing.

“And proud of it,” he said. “Take this stuff too seriously and you end up . . . well, serious, and I have enough of that in my life already.”

I nodded. “Terry told me this group wasn’t intense. Which is good, because that might have killed me . . .” My voice trailed off. “Oh, sorry. Stupid expression. Did you, um, did you know Brown and Emily?”