Two things were suddenly making me uneasy. One, having to wait for Hal, which meant the conversation was going to take a far more serious tone than I’d been mentally prepared for. Two, that Ash wouldn’t look at me directly. He only did that when he knew I wouldn’t like what was about to happen.

“I’m getting a bad feeling about this.” I tucked my hair behind my ears. Rather, I tried to. My way-too-curly hair was unmanageable at the best of times, and now that I’d been out in the rain, it bounced right back out from where I’d put it. “Do you think Hal will be long?”

“He’s with the sheriff.” Ash glanced at the door. “Sorry to make you wait. She called him into her office just as we were heading in here.”

“Uh-oh.” I laughed. “Is Hal in trouble?”

It was hard to imagine. Detective Hal Inwood had retired Up North after a career as a detective in greater Detroit. The story went that after three months of retirement, he and his wife had so little to talk about that he came into the sheriff’s office begging for a job. The second part of the story was the sheriff didn’t hire him at first, saying she didn’t want any bad downstate habits in her people, and that she didn’t hire him until he passed some sort of test.

I wasn’t sure I believed any of that, especially the part about the test. If there had been a test, the entire office would have known about it, because men talk just as much as women do when it comes to something like that. And since no one could tell me what the test had been—and I’d done my best to find out, once I’d heard the rumor—I’d decided it was complete fiction.

“Hal is not in trouble,” the detective himself said, coming into the room. He sat his tall self next to Ash. “Good afternoon, Ms. Hamilton. Or evening, I suppose it is now.”

The small room, with Hal in it, suddenly seemed to be twice as crowded. I swallowed down a faint feeling of claustrophobia. “What’s in that?” I pointed at the closed folder. “Ash said there’s something I need to know.”

“Yes.” Hal, whose long face could look mournful on the sunniest summer day, sighed. “That contains the preliminary findings for Brown Bernier’s death. Though the autopsy has been performed, the full report won’t be available for some days.”

That was all standard information. They wouldn’t have dragged me in here to tell me things I already knew.

So I waited.

“Mr. Bernier was sixty-six years old.” Hal pulled the file toward him but didn’t open it. “The cause of death was from a blow to the head.”