“Because I have warden business, too. A woman in Stratford wants to meet with me. Her father-in-law drowned while duck hunting in the Androscoggin River four years ago. She doesn’t think the case should have been closed so quickly and has issues with how the wardens treated her.”

“And you’re going to go listen to her whine?”

“What can I say? I’m a masochist.”

Shadow growled a few times, but he didn’t make the job of moving him impossible by shifting his weight. The vet had prescribed some medicine to put in his food—Gabapentin and Trazadone—to mellow him out.

I left Billy in the yard while I went inside to fetch my briefcase. Emma was still scrawling away in her little grimoire. She blinked foggily, as if returning from someplace deep.

“Wait!” she said. “Did I miss Shadow?”

“He’s still here. Your dad and I put his crate in the back of my Jeep. You can go talk with him now.”

The junior wizard snatched up her journal and her wand and was out the door with a whoosh of her handmade robe.

On my desk I found the note from the woman I’d told Billy about, three sheets of beautiful blue script, signed by a “Mariëtte Chamberlain (née Van Rooyen).”

Dear Warden Bowditch,

I have read about you in the Sun Journal and the successes you have enjoyed investigating cold cases, and for this reason, I wish to speak with you, in person, about my father-in-law, Professor Eben Chamberlain, whose name you must recognize, but if not, he is the eminent man who died under suspicious circumstances while duck hunting along the Androscoggin River in Stratford four years ago this month. Despite an “exhaustive” investigation, his demise was insufficiently explained by the members of your service about whose commitment, competence, and professionalism I continue to have doubts. I have written to the governor and the attorney general and your own colonel with no result. Because you did not participate in the failed examination of my father-in-law’s death, your reputation remains unsullied in my estimation, and therefore you are my last remaining hope.

The rest of the document was written in the same florid style and provided details of her father-in-law’s initial disappearance and the rescue mission that became a recovery mission, as happens in many such cases. I knew the story better than she thought—I’d followed the search from afar—and saw no way to help her. But she had reached out to me with such desperation, I felt I owed the grieving woman the courtesy of a meeting.

Billy Cronk, it seemed, wasn’t the only softy in Ducktrap.

I dropped the letter along with the Warden Service’s official report into my leather attaché.