“This town is festering with secrets,” I explained to Peppy once we were alone: golden retrievers are so honest and trusting that you have to tell them when you’ve been ironic. “There’s the whole business of Sonia and Dr. Kiel’s dead or missing graduate student. Gertrude Perec’s dead daughter. The identity of Cady’s father. And no one on this side of the river knows anything about the lives of people on the other side.”

Peppy gave a little bark: she understood.

Even though I would not have found Doris McKinnon—or whoever the dead person turned out to be—without Peppy, I would have to find doggy day care for her tomorrow. It wasn’t fair to keep her in my car for such long stretches. As it was, I was going to tuck her back into the Mustang while I ate dinner: the Oregon Trail Hotel downtown, which advertised itself as a meeting place for the original Free State settlers, had a restaurant that was open late.

It wasn’t until I was leaning back in my booth, head against the padded upholstery, that I realized how tired I was. I’d been up a good chunk of the previous night. I’d spent the day with people ranging from Sonia Kiel’s raging parents to the sheriff of Douglas County. I’d interviewed an old woman who’d had to be rushed to the hospital, before driving out to the middle of nowhere to find vermin nibbling on a dead person.

I took off my muddy hiking boots and sat cross-legged, surreptitiously massaging my sore toes under cover of the tablecloth. A glass of zinfandel gave me an illusion of warmth and home. I couldn’t remember if you were supposed to load carbs or eat lean fish when you were too tired to function, so I compromised: pasta with squid, vodka-tomato sauce, extra mushrooms, romaine salad.

Nell Albritten’s anxiety when I left her had been nudging the back of my mind since I’d found the dead body. When she was semiconscious, she wanted to know what she’d said to me about Doris McKinnon. She’d been relieved to hear she’d said only that McKinnon was a white woman she didn’t often see.

When Albritten had started to say, “Someone would have told me if—” she’d fainted in midsentence. If McKinnon had died, was how I’d have completed the sentence. Albritten struck me as the kind of woman with a rigorous honesty: she’d fainted rather than tell a lie.

Albritten’s story of the flood, its massive devastation followed by the brutal indifference of the landlords, had made me acutely uncomfortable. I shut my eyes, trying to re-create not just what Albritten had said but her body language.