Some adventurer I am. I might as well have stayed at home if I’m going to walk around sulking and hitting things with a stick, Fiji reflected, half smiling at her own foolishness. Fiji had looked forward to the picnic, but now she wasn’t enjoying it as much as she’d hoped. She had the uneasy feeling that things were happening in Midnight that were outside her understanding: the abrupt desertion of Bobo by Aubrey, Bobo’s out-of-character behavior two nights ago, Shoshanna Whitlock’s questions. But those events should not bother her. They didn’t have to be different facets of the same incident.

Trying to think positive thoughts, Fiji stopped at a large clump of yucca. She wondered if she could transplant some to her front yard. She crouched to figure out if the plant could be divided. Fiji never liked to leave a hole in a natural landscape. But now that the air currents were gusting down the riverbed and apparently floating up to hit her nose, she was aware, abruptly, that something had died. That something lay very close to where she knelt.

Fiji pushed awkwardly to her feet and stepped closer to the edge. At this point, the undergrowth was significantly thinner than at any other spot. She noted a broken bush, long dead. She looked down. There was only a slight impression of a tire in the dirt; some rain, some wind, had altered it but left its memory intact. So she was fairly sure the bush had been run over.

She held on to a stunted oak while she leaned out to look down the slope to the partially exposed round rocks of the riverbed. At the moment, the river was more of a small stream that burbled its way across the submerged stones, making them even smoother. After a heavy rain, the water speed would be almost frightening, but right now the sight and sound of the river was playful and delightful.

The thing lying close to the streambed was not. Though she was not a fan of CSI shows or detective novels, Fiji knew a decayed corpse when she saw one. And she knew the corpse was human.

Fiji didn’t know whose name to call first. For a fraction of a second, she was tempted to say nothing at all to anyone, but her sizable conscience would not permit it. Though she’d never predicted the future and she’d never been interested in any of the methods used to do so, for this one moment Fiji could see the futures of all the people present changing at this moment, their lives altering as this body toppled all their pursuits in a domino effect, and she was profoundly sorry that hers was the finger pushing the first tile.