Charley had made this dried, smoked meat. The retired warden was locally famous for his secret blend of herbs and spices. Hunters would trade him meat in exchange for his dried delicacies. At Christmas he always presented me with pounds of moose jerky, turkey jerky, salmon jerky, even bear jerky. Stacey liked to joke that there wasn’t a game animal in Maine’s North Woods her dad hadn’t jerked.

I thought again of Stacey as I slid sticks of dried meat into the cage for Shadow to swallow.

“What do you think I should do?” I said to him. “You’ve had better luck in love than me.”

In the years he’d run wild in the Boundary Mountains, Shadow had somehow managed to pair up against all odds with a she-wolf, despite wolves having been declared extirpated in Maine for more than a century. Now, only a few lonely wanderers were ever sighted. And Shadow had managed to find a female who wasn’t put off by him having been neutered as a pup. Evidently the need of the two canines to form a pack, even a pack of two, outweighed his problematic lack of hormones.

As a wildlife biologist, it pained Stacey that she had never met Shadow. Nor had she seen my house in Ducktrap, I realized. She had respected my relationship with Dani and stayed away.

To what end though? Dani was in line for a job that would keep us apart more than ever.

“So you don’t have any advice for the lovelorn?” I asked the wolf.

His reply was a belch.

Painful as it was to give her credit, Mariëtte Chamberlain had been right about me. I was like a dog—or a wolf—when I got hold of a bone. The strongest man on earth couldn’t tear it loose from my jaws.

Had Eben Chamberlain’s death been a tragic accident or something else?

The question resonated inside me with the clarity of a struck chord. Everything else that had happened that day was mere noise.

I had started out thinking Mariëtte was one of those desperate people who require closure at all costs and must find meaning in tragic circumstances. Then I had met Jewett who was, if anything, more scurrilous than she had described. Lynda Lynch had seemed positively eager to cast suspicion on Vic Bazinet. And Felice, maybe out of some perverse humor, had sought to incriminate her “friend,” Bibi Chamberlain.

Magicians rely on misdirection to perform their tricks. Con artists use obfuscation to conceal their crimes. In the course of the afternoon I had been subjected to both devious devices, and the same question kept bouncing around my skull.

Why?

To divert me from the truth under my nose?

To use my growing obsession with the Chamberlain case to keep me knocking on doors?

To stop me from leaving?