“The Ash Grove” was a pretty song. “Mary Mack” was a fun song. “Molly Bawn” was a song about a bastard who murdered his wife and got away with it. But arguing with someone she wanted to extract information from didn’t seem useful, so she moved the conversation along.

“Cool guitar.”

He lit up with enthusiasm. “She’s pretty awesome. I paid too much for her, but it’s not like these ladies grow on trees.” He nodded his head to the coffee shop. “If you came for coffee, I’m sorry. Dana closes up from two to four.”

“I don’t look like the snow cone type?” she asked.

He glanced at her silk shirt and jacket, shook his head, and laughed, an appreciative male sound. “No.”

So her protective camouflage had worked on him, at least. But honestly, she didn’t want a snow cone, so there was that.

“No,” she told him. “You are right. Excellent snow cone customer sensing. I am not here for coffee, either. I’m here to talk to you. A friend told me that you’d spent some time up at Wild Sign last fall.”

His face closed down, all the warmth gone.

“There’s no one there now,” he said.

“I know that,” she told him. “I was just up there. The land they were on is owned by my family. We’re trying to figure out what happened. Why the people abandoned Wild Sign and where they went.”

“You hiked all the way in?” he asked.

“The day before yesterday,” she confirmed.

“The day before yesterday,” he said, then gave her a sweet smile, as friendly as if he’d never shut down.

She didn’t know what about that made him change his mind about talking to her, but she was willing to run with it.

“Yes. And found a place that people put a lot of work into—and then abandoned. We—I feel responsible. It is our land. I need to find out what happened to them.”

“I can’t tell you that,” he warned her.

“I didn’t expect that you could solve the mystery for us. For me,” she told him. “But the more information we can get, the more likely we are to discover what happened, how a whole town of people just disappeared. To that end, I’d like to know a little about what folks up there were like.”

“People,” he said after strumming a few bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” Anna knew guitarists (especially guitarists who had worked in music stores) who would run screaming at the sound of the opening bars to that song.

“They were just people,” he told his guitar strings.

Anna, who had learned to listen from her mate, waited.