“Norm found Kip and Racer’s bodies a few days later,” he said. “The bodies had been in the trailer a while. I think this is Brink, don’t you?”

We showed the card to Marvin, but not surprisingly, he didn’t recall one summer guest leaving the resort early seven years ago. If it was Brink, he’d come and gone without leaving footprints, which was no doubt exactly what he wanted. Darrell wandered out of the office with the card in hand, and I followed. A grassy slope surrounded the resort and led down to the lake and the guest cabins. Sunlight reflected on the water like orange stars, and dense forestland ringed the shore. The October air was cool.

“Brink comes to town, checks in under a fake name, and pays cash,” Darrell mused out loud, flapping the card as if it would offer up more secrets. “He pays for two weeks, but a few days later, he leaves early. Why? Because Sandra said no to the bribe? There’s got to be more to it than that.”

I shook my head and didn’t say anything. There was nothing I could add.

“Kip and Racer were on the run after robbing that liquor store in Mittel County,” Darrell went on. “They were hiding out in Norm’s trailer. And yet somehow the three of them are connected. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“The trailer is two hours away from here in the middle of nowhere,” I pointed out. “How would Brink have found them? And why?”

“I don’t know, but we’re missing something important,” Darrell insisted. “Brink left the resort early, and based on the timing, he must have left right around the time of the murders. We have nothing to connect him to Kip and Racer, but there has to be a connection.”

“You think Brink killed them?”

“I don’t know, but something happened out there. Either Brink saw it, or he was part of it, or he knew who did it. I think he was running.”

There was no point in asking what Brink was running from. The answer was right there between us, but we left it unspoken.

The Ursulina.

*

Darrell wanted to see the cabin where Jay Smith, a.k.a. Gordon Brink, had stayed seven years earlier. I wasn’t crazy about hiking down the slope to the lake and then having to hike back again, so I let him go by himself while I waited in the car with the passenger door open and my puffy legs dangling outside.

I hadn’t been sitting there five minutes when a yellow Cadillac, as long as a land yacht, pulled up next to me.

“Deputy Rebecca!” Ben Malloy announced happily, rolling down the driver’s window.

“Hello, Ben.”