“Yeah, I hate to bug you, so if I am, just tell me to go to hell.”

“You’re not.” I gave him the rundown.

“The detective could be a problem. Is he giving you a rough time?”

“He asked me to dinner.”

“Seriously? Did you zap him with an energy bolt?”

“Oh, he’s not really asking me out. He wants to pick my brain and steal my leads. So I accepted. Should be fun.”

“You’ve obviously got it under control. About those lab and coroner’s reports, any chance I can take a look?”

“I’ll fax them over.”

I ended the call with Jesse only to find that I’d gotten a message in the meantime. If only I’d been this popular in high school, I might have shown up more often. Speaking of school, the message was from a retired history teacher, Mr. Mulligan. Lorraine at the diner had told him about me, and he was wondering if I’d gotten all the local information I’d needed. If not, he’d be happy to provide more background. He’d taught Paula, Ginny, Brandi, even coached Kayla with her homeschooling.

My first impulse was to call back and say “thanks but no thanks.” I had plenty of leads to follow up on and no time to waste sitting in some old guy’s parlor, sipping instant coffee and listening to a lecture on town history. If the guy had been a friend of Ginny’s and Brandi’s, sure. But their teacher? Something told me that compared to those two, my attendance record would be exemplary.

And yet ... Maybe I was a little more anxious about my first case than I was admitting. Maybe I couldn’t help thinking, What if this is the guy with information that’ll solve the case, and I blew him off? Or maybe it was just those damned voices in my head, Paige and Lucas telling me never to ignore a potential source. I called back and asked if I could stop by in the next hour.

NEXT, I HAD files to fax to Jesse. Easier said than done. While I didn’t expect a small-town motel to have a business center, I thought they’d at least have a fax machine in the office. They didn’t. Nor did the town have a copy center.

I remembered the library and arrived there to find it had closed at four and wouldn’t reopen for two days. Someone was kind enough to suggest the real estate office—apparently they ran an unofficial copy shop on the side. But it had closed at four, too. In fact, except for the diner, the whole town seemed to have shut down.

When I called Jesse, he said that was fine—he’d pop by tomorrow on his way home from Portland. Next stop, Mr. Mulligan, retired teacher.