Their directions involved a confusing number of turns, as well as locating a boat shed, a dead tree, and a boulder somebody named Spike had spray-painted with a peace sign. Fifteen minutes after she left the bar, she was hopelessly lost. She drove aimlessly for a while and eventually managed to get back to the main road, where she stopped at a bait shop that was closing up for the night and got another set of directions, almost equally confusing.

It was getting dark by the time she spotted the battered mailbox with the name REMINGTON faintly visible on the driftwood sign above it. She turned off the road into the potholed drive and parked in front of a double set of garage doors.

The big, rambling beach house had started life as a Dutch Colonial, but over the years, it had been haphazardly expanded with a porch here, a bay there, another porch, a short wing. Its weathered shingles were the color of old driftwood, and twin chimneys poked from its jumbled roofs. She couldn’t believe it belonged to Panda. This was a house designed for families—a place for sunburned kids to chase their cousins up from the beach, for moms to trade family gossip while their husbands fired up the charcoal grill, where grandparents stole naps on a shady porch and dogs lazed in the sun. Panda belonged in a run-down fishing cabin, not at a place like this. But the address checked out, and the men had been clear about the name Remington.

An unimpressive front door stood to the right of a two-car garage. On the landing, a chipped clay flowerpot held some dead soil and a faded American flag from a long-forgotten Fourth of July. The door was locked. She followed an overgrown path around the side toward the water, where she discovered the heart of the house—a sprawling screen porch, an open deck, and rows of windows facing a sheltered cove with Lake Michigan just beyond.

She made her way back around the house looking for a way to get in, but everything was locked. She’d seen a couple of inns while she was driving around, some guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts, so there were plenty of places to stay. But first she wanted to see inside.

She reached through a piece of torn porch screening and unfastened the hook latch on the door. The boards creaked as she wove between some chaise longues with mildewed canvas cushions that had once been a bright marine blue. A broken wind chime made of spoons hung crookedly in one corner, an abandoned cooler sat in another. The door to the house was locked, but that didn’t stop Viper. She broke one of the small glass panes with a rusted garden trowel, reached inside, and opened the lock.