Thirst joined my hunger. To take my mind off my dry mouth and empty stomach, I thought about the drawings. If I read Mae’s sketches correctly, she’d tried to tell Roy, then the sheriff, about the mine accident. Could she have drawn their unequal faces to show their hidden reaction? Roy was too defeated to be of help? The sheriff worried about something?

The thought that had drifted in the back of my head crystallized. What happened to the bodies of the miners? Did Mae give up on getting help? Did she return and bury them? Maybe that square of dead grass wasn’t a tent site. Maybe it was a grave.

We’d reached a small gulch with a brook, sulfur-laden steam rising from it, and a cattail-lined pond. The mule carefully picked his way around ground squirrel holes, pausing at the pond where he and the dogs took a drink. I was thirsty, but this could easily be the home of a bevy of beavers.

If Mae did bury . . . No, she disappeared in March. At this altitude there would still be snow on the frozen ground.

One rather nasty thought emerged. Mae had two dogs, and dogs . . . well, she’d need to do something about their bodies. There was no way the dogs would leave them alone. Maybe she dragged their scalded bodies out of the mine and to a snowbank to keep them frozen until—

Scalded.

Just like the men who died in the arson fire. That would mean that in a county of thirteen thousand people, four different men were scalded to death around the same time. Coincidence? Right.

What if the appearance of Mae at Mule Shoe and possibly the sheriff’s department alerted someone that something had gone wrong?

The story of an exploding hot water tank had sounded hinky from the start. But what if the two men hadn’t died that way? What if they were already dead? Fremont County usually didn’t perform autopsies, Bram had said, which would have established time of death.

What if someone decided to hide the bodies by staging a fire in the middle of a series of fires? I pictured sitting at the table with Bram, arson notes in front of me. I’d shown him one of the notes and told him it was different. He’d identified it as the fire where the bodies were found.

Why go to the trouble of dragging two stinking corpses into town, setting it up to look like one of the arson fires, even writing the note? So their bodies were burned . . . because . . . because . . .

I was too tired to think, to figure out the answer. Even if the ground were frozen, the chances of someone finding their bodies, outside of someone like Mae, would be remote. People disappear all the time in the wilderness.

The mule finished drinking and started forward. A densely forested hillside was directly ahead.