“No, but we think you’re right; there must be some. We have Xerox copies of letters on the sewer scam, and there’s information in them that must be based on other letters, or files, or books. You know what I mean? You can infer the existence of the books from what these letters contain

“

“Gotcha,” I said. “When will I get the letters?”

“I gave them to John this morning. He was going back to Memphis, and he said Bobby would scan them in and ship them to you, whatever that means.”

“I read an article in the Longstreet paper about the bridge. You mentioned it when I was down there. Tell me again

“

She told me about the bridge. The bridge, she said, was the only reason the town hadn’t blown away fifty years earlier. Now that it was gone, the city might go with it.

“Sounds serious.”

“For people down here, it’s desperate.”

LuEllen caught me staring at the ceiling that night, chewing the eraser off a pencil.

“You have something?”

“What?”

“A plan?”

“Yeah. Maybe. An edge of one.”

LuEllen found a thirty-six-foot Samson houseboat docked on the St. Croix River and took me down to see it.

“It’s a fucking tub.” I paced off its length along the dock. A huge tub, a shiny white, plastic behemoth, ugly, ungainly, and slow. Just what we’d need to catch the eye of a small river town. A diminutive American flag hung dispiritedly from a bent stainless steel rod on the peak of the cabin, to one side of a radar antenna. I looked under the stern and found the name Fanny inscribed in gold paint.

“Wait till you see the bedroom,” LuEllen said.

“The sleeping cabin,” I said, correcting her.

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “I mean the bedroom. The guy who rents it said you don’t use nautical terms for a houseboat. It’s bedroom and kitchen and bathroom, instead of cabin and galley and head.”

“Why’s that?”

“Marketing,” she said wisely. Everything she knew about marketing you could have written on the back of a postage stamp with a Magic Marker. “They didn’t want houseboats to sound like submarines. They don’t want the customers to think about sinking.”

“Where’s the owner?”

“Skiing. In Chile. He won’t be back before the first of September.”

We went aboard. The forward six feet of the lower deck were open, with a rail to keep drunken passengers from going overboard. Inside, the cabin was divided into halves. The front half was the general living area, with built-in bench seats along the walls, a television cabinet with a stereo, and a general-purpose dining-and worktable. At the very front was a set of boat controls with a pilot’s chair, looking out through windows over the bow.