But lingering guilt stayed my hand. Also, I didn’t have the first piece of evidence that my late-night maybe-would-be intruder had anything to do with this case. Hell, we didn’t even know whether it was a case yet.

So I settled for splitting the difference. Treating it as a possibility, I used my phone to take photos of the dented Dumpster lid and the dusty boot print.

“Good enough?” I asked Mogwai.

Mogwai answered with a low, distressed howl followed by a gagging sound, his sides heaving as he hunched over in the alley, opened his jaws, and barfed a prodigious mixture of kibble and rich cream all over the boot print. Distancing himself from the mess, he shot me an embarrassed look.

I’d had a feeling that bowl of cream was a bad idea, but so is refusing a brownie’s hospitality.

Oh, well.

“Never mind,” I said to him. “At least you puked outside, big guy. C’mon; let’s go back to bed.”

Approximately two hours later, my alarm rousted me from the warm confines of my bed, Creedence Clearwater Revival informing me that there was, in fact, a bad moon on the rise.

“No shit,” I mumbled, slapping at the snooze alarm. “Tell me something I don’t know, huh?”

Seven minutes later, Mick Jagger told me that while he was so hot for me, I was so cold, like an ice-cream cone.

“As if.” This time I turned the alarm off and hauled myself upright. “You’re an old man, Mick Jagger. When’s the last time you had an ice-cream cone?”

The clock radio remained silent. Nestled into a tangle of sheets and blanket, Mogwai purred obliviously.

It was a bit after five o’clock in the morning and still dark outside. Yawning, I dragged myself into presentable clothing. Naiads are particular about appearances. A short skirt of summer-weight gray wool, check. A sleeveless white cotton shirt, check. Freshwater pearls looped around my neck, check. Given the hike ahead of me, I opted for sensible footwear, shoving my feet into a pair of white Keds and hoping the naiads would overlook them.

My old Honda Civic hadn’t been driven for a couple of days, and it whined in protest when I turned the key in the ignition before catching. It wasn’t that far to the nature preserve, but after last night, I didn’t feel like walking the streets alone.

Even in the car, I found myself glancing nervously in the rearview mirror, but the town was empty.

Five minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of the Ellsworth Nature Preserve. It, too, was empty. You might think that would be a given at this hour, but the preserve was a favorite haunt of birdwatchers, and those people are crazy.