Rough Country

nice-looking place.”
    The lodge was set on a grassy hump that looked out over the lake; two stories tall, built of cut stone, logs, and glass, it fit in the landscape like a hand in a glove. The cabins scattered down the shoreline were as carefully built and sited as the lodge, each with a screened porch facing the water, and a sundeck above each porch. An expensive architect had been at work, Virgil thought, but not recently: the lodge had a feeling of well-tended age.
    There were no cars at the cabins. As they rolled down toward the lodge, the road jogged left and dipped into a hollow, where they found a parking lot, screened from the lodge and the cabins by a fifteen-foot-tall evergreen hedge. Four sheriff’s cars were parked in the lot, along with twenty or so civilian vehicles, and a hearse. There were no cops in sight; a lodge employee was loading luggage into a Mercedes-Benz station wagon from a Yamaha Rhino.
    Deeper in the woods, on the other side of the parking lot, Virgil saw the corner of a green metalwork building, probably the shop. Neither the parking lot nor the shop would be visible from the lodge or the cabins. Nice.
    “Where’re the boats?” Johnson asked, as Virgil pulled into a parking space.
    “I don’t know. Must be on the other side of the lodge,” Virgil said.
     
     
     
    AS THEY CLIMBED out of the truck, the lodge worker, a middle-aged woman in a red-and-blue uniform, stepped over and asked, “Can I help you, gentlemen?”
    “Where’s the lodge?” Virgil asked.
    “Up the path,” she said, and, “Do you know this is ladies only?”
    “We’re cops,” Johnson said.
    “Ah. Okay. There are more deputies up there now.” To Virgil: “Are you a policeman, too?”
    Johnson laughed and said, “Yeah. He is,” and they walked over to stairs that led to a flagstone path through the woods, out of the parking lot to the lodge.
     
     
     
    THE LODGE and its grassy knoll sat at the apex of a natural shoreline notch. The notch was filled with docks and a variety of boats, mostly metal outboards, but also a few canoes, kayaks, and paddleboats. A hundred yards down to the right, two women walked hand in hand down a narrow sand beach that looked out at a floating swimming dock.
    Twenty women in outdoor shirts and jeans were scattered at tables around the deck, with cups of coffee and the remnants of crois sants and apple salads, and looked them over as they went to the railing. Down below them, two uniformed sheriff’s deputies were standing on the dock, chatting with each other.
    A waiter hurried over: a thin, pale boy with dark hair, he had a side-biased haircut that he thought made him look like Johnny Depp. “Can I help you?”
    Virgil said, “I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. How do we get down to the dock?”
    The waiter said, “Ah. Come along.”
    He took them inside, down an interior stairway, through double doors under the deck, and pointed at a flagstone walkway. “Follow that.”
    The flagstone path curled around the stone ledge, right at the waterside, and emerged at the dock. Two women, who’d been out of sight from the deck, were standing at the end of the path, arms crossed, talking and watching the deputies. Johnson muttered, “I’ve only been detecting for ten minutes, but check out the short one. And she’s wearing a fishing shirt.”
    Virgil said, quietly as he could, “Johnson, try to stay out of the way for a few minutes, okay?”
    “You didn’t talk that way when you needed my truck, you bitch.”
    “Johnson . . .”

    THE WOMEN TURNED and looked at them as they came along, and Virgil nodded and said, “Hi. I’m Virgil Flowers, with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’m looking for Sheriff Sanders.”
    “He’s out at the pond,” said the older of the two. A bluff, no-nonsense, heavyset woman with tired eyes, she stuck out a hand and said, “I’m Margery Stanhope. I own the lodge.”
    “I need to talk to you when I get back,” Virgil said. “I noticed that somebody was checking out when we were coming—a lady was loading luggage. I’ll have to know who has left since the . . . incident.”
    “Not a problem,” she said. “Anything we can do.”
    The younger woman was a small, auburn-haired thirty-something, pretty, with a sprinkling of freckles on her tidy nose; the kind of woman that might cause Johnson to get drunk and recite poetry, including the complete “Cremation of Sam McGee.” Virgil had seen it