The room seemed darker, the pools of light more isolated. The air had grown chilly from the broken window and smelled faintly of spilled beer. The heat from the fireplace barely penetrated the dining area.

“You know,” Bram said, “it was critical that a copter bring someone here. Who could guarantee that would happen unless the pitchfork accident was actually a murder attempt?”

“But how would someone know Riccardo—”

“Exactly. Maybe the trap was for someone who actually should have been in the barn, someone who believed that trapdoor would be shut because it always is closed?”

“Yet another complication.”

Bram seemed deep in thought. “It was Roy who said that Wyatt was going out with the assistant wrangler and handyman to round up the rest of the horses.”

“I know. I came in as he was saying that. But later, Wyatt said that he had caught the horses and that he was going after the missing few.”

“Looks like we need to ask Wyatt about the last time he saw the two victims.”

Pulling the small scraps of paper to me, I arranged the events Bram had been studying. “Got another piece of paper?”

Bram grinned at me before handing me a sheet. I tore it into small pieces and wrote on each piece. Riccardo’s fall/pitchfork/orange fibers, giardia, bear/sardines, contaminated water, vandalism of art room, full refund, Angie paid per head, broken brake handle, busted pipe? mix-up in registration? I thought for a moment, then wrote, slide at Devil’s Keyhole?

“What’s all this?” Bram asked.

“It just occurred to me that Roy isn’t the only person affected by these events. Angie also suffered financially.”

“And she was attacked. But who would want to injure or kill her? And why was Cookie attacked? And why did you write about the slide?”

I let out a sigh of frustration. “I don’t know about Angie or Cookie. The slide just seemed to be awfully . . . convenient and coincidental.”

“That doesn’t make any sense either. Someone causes the slide to . . . what? Isolate the people here? So the killer can pick them off, one at a time? To what end? Motive, Darby—there’s no motive!”

The lodge wheezed and sighed around us as the logs shifted. Bram pushed away from the table, strolled into the lobby, and added a couple more logs to the waning fire. I turned Bram’s list toward me. Even if the killer was the person who got off the helicopter, other events happened before that arrival. Kevin, our missing staffer?

Maybe.

Bram returned and sat down. “Any further ideas?”

I handed him the list of incidents. “I keep thinking we have to look at all this from a number of directions. We’ve been lumping all the events together. If we separate the murders and just look at the two conclusive events—”

“The destruction of the art room and the contaminated water.”