“Winter nights, I sleep warm as toast under his skin. Civil of you to ask—most people won’t even look me in the face. Welcome to the North Country, Mr. Bell. What can I do for you?”

“Why do you suppose they never recovered Marco Celere’s body?”

“Same reason we never find any body that falls in that gorge. It’s a long way down to the bottom, the river’s swift and deep, and there’s plenty of hungry animals, from wolverine to pike. They fall in the North, they’re gone, mister.”

“Were you surprised when you heard that Harry Frost shot Celere?”

“I was.”

“Why? I understand Frost was known to be a violent man. Long before he was sent up for murdering his chauffeur.”

“Early the same morning that Mrs. Frost’s butler reported the shooting, Mr. Frost had already filed a complaint that his rifle had been stolen.”

“Do you think he owned another?”

“He said that one was his favorite.”

“Do you think he reported it falsely, to throw off suspicion?”

“Don’t know.”

“Was the rifle ever found?”

“Boys playing on the railroad tracks found it.”

“When?”

“That same afternoon.”

“Do you suppose Frost might have dropped it if he hopped a freight train to escape?”

“I never heard about rich sports riding the rails like hobos.”

“Harry Frost wasn’t always rich,” said Bell. “He escaped from a Kansas City orphanage when he was eight years old and rode the rails to Philadelphia. He could hop a freight in his sleep.”

“Plenty of trains come through” was all the constable would concede.

Bell changed the subject. “What sort of man was Marco Celere?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did you never see Celere? I understand he arrived last summer.”

“Stuck to himself, up there at the Frost camp.”

Bell looked out the window at North River’s muddy Main Street. It was a warm spring day, but the blackflies were biting, so few people stirred out of doors. It was also what the stationmaster had called “Mud Week,” when the long winter freeze finally melted, leaving the ground knee-deep in mud. The only facts that the closemouthed constable had volunteered concerned being mauled by the bear. Now Hodge waited in silence, and Bell suspected that if he did not ask another question, the taciturn backwoodsman would not speak another word.

“Other than Josephine Frost’s report,” Bell asked, “what proof of the shooting do you have?”

“Celere disappeared. So did Mr. Frost.”

“But no direct evidence?”

Constable Hodge pulled open a drawer, reached inside, and spread five spent brass cartridge shells on the desk. “Found these at the edge of the meadow just where Mrs. Frost said she saw him shooting.”

“May I?”

“Go right ahead.”

Bell picked one up in his handkerchief and examined it. “.45-70.”

“That’s what his Marlin shoots.”

“Why didn’t you give these to the district attorney?”

“He didn’t ask.”