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precedence.”

“But it sounds as if you’re better qualified to handle this scene, this evidence anyway. Doesn’t it look like the police will bungle this?”

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t take a good look at anything we turn up before handing it over, but I would absolutely hand the evidence over. Even to a bungler. That’s the law.”

“Look here, Liz,” the science teacher said. “Here’s the opening to a fox den. No, I don’t see any human bones conveniently sticking out of it. But you should take a look anyway to help you find more animal abodes in the landscape. Do you see how the fox has taken advantage of the protection afforded by the tree stump? From the other side, the opening to its den is invisible.”

“That’s not very encouraging. Does this mean we’ll have to walk in circles around every tree stump?”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“We shouldn’t overestimate the likelihood of finding bones this far from the bodies, in any case,” Cormac cautioned.

The trio combed the woods for some forty minutes in silence. Then, the science teacher announced he would have to head for his classroom. Liz looked up to watch him as he trod reluctantly up the hill, leaving behind the most exciting nature scene he was likely to see in his lifetime.

“Yesterday, you said you expected to see chickadees in the hollow,” Liz called out to him. “Why there and not right here, for instance?”

The bird-lover turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. “The hollow is the site of an ephemeral pond or vernal pool. Dry now, of course, but a few feet deep after the snow melts in springtime.”

Cormac Kinnaird stood stock still. “That changes everything,” he said. “If your photographer has been able to zoom in on that scene, or if I can get into that scene soon, we’ve got an advantage, Liz,” he said. “A big one.” With that, he took Liz’s hand and led her up the hill to their parked cars, whistling an Irish reel all the way.

Since the police on the crime scene would not offer comments, Liz drove to Plymouth Police Headquarters to see if she could get an official statement on the case. It was early in the day and things might change before her afternoon deadline, but it didn’t hurt to be thorough. Plymouth Police Chief Martin Oliver curtailed repeated inquiries by promising a midafternoon press conference. Returning to Forges Field, Liz found police personnel adamant that nothing would be revealed until the press conference, so she drove to the newsroom to find DeZona.

“Your friend the forensics guy said he’d appreciate having copies of these,” the photographer said. “Not that they show much of anything.” The eight-by-ten photos taken from the telephone pole perch showed the bent backs of police officers gathered around what looked like some dark sticks. Presumably, they were pieces of the discolored skeleton. Much was obscured by branches of trees located between the photographer and his quarry.

DeZona slipped the photos into a manila envelope and handed them to Liz. “See you in Plymouth later?” he asked. “I hear we’re to cover the press conference.”

“You bet,” Liz said. Then, she returned to her desk, called a courier, and arranged for the photos to be delivered to Dr. Kinnaird’s university office.

With hours to kill before the press conference, Liz gave Tom a call, leaving a message on his answering machine. Then, she decided to drive out to the Wellesley College campus, which seemed an ideal place to think things through. Parking her car at the Faculty Club, she took a leisurely walk along Lake Waban in the direction of the Pinetum. This time, she was not alone. About twenty yards ahead of her, two young women walked along, lost in animated conversation about a “hot” professor. As she followed them through the Pinetum and the students emerged into the more open area of the topiary garden, one of the young women turned around to face Liz.

“Would you take a photo of Florrie and I, please?”

Can these be the nation’s best and brightest? Liz asked herself, cringing at the grammar. “‘Of Florrie and me,’ ” she said, realizing even as she said it how schoolmarmish she must sound to them.

But Florrie and her friend were not annoyed.

“My English Comp prof is always telling me the same thing,” the poor grammarian said.

Liz cringed again when the girls arranged themselves on the grass between two topiary trees.

“Don’t you see the sign?” she asked. “It says to stay off the grass.”

“It’s only for a photo,” Florrie said as Liz stepped back into the shade at the edge of the Pinetum to shoot a backlit picture without having direct sunlight on the lens.

Liz heard one of the young women exclaim delightedly, “Look, Ellen! A chocolate Lab, just like my dog at home.”

Liz followed Florrie’s gaze. At the far end of the topiary garden, Olga Swenson froze in the act of throwing a toy to her dog, Hershey. At the sound of her daughter’s name on another’s lips, her face collapsed into an expression of excruciating pain. Deciding that Olga did not need the intrusion of a reporter at that moment, Liz handed back the camera, turned around in the shade of the conifer collection, and walked back to her car.

At Plymouth Police Headquarters later that afternoon, the press conference offered little new information. Police Chief Martin Oliver reiterated how the remains had been found and declared that the skeletons appeared to be those of a male and a female whose bones had lain in the hollow for some years. Although no flesh remained on the bones, strands of hair found there indicated both victims were dark-haired. Pressed by Liz and her colleagues, he said there was dentition under examination, but it did not match any dental records for unsolved crimes currently in the database. Asked specifically if the remains could be those of the missing Newton mom, he said the apparent age of the bones, the hair color, and the lack of a dental match made it look extremely unlikely.

After the press conference, Liz decided to heed her hunger pangs, but not before purchasing a postcard for Nadia. Fortunately, in this vacation haven “gifte shoppes” were located cheek-by-jowl with restaurants. After buying a postcard picturing a cranberry bog in a shop called “Plymouth Rocks!”, she took a window seat in a waterfront eatery called the Mayflower Cafe. There, she ordered a special called Pilgrim’s Progress: a turkey and cranberry sauce sandwich followed by a bowl of Indian pudding a la mode. While looking out the window at the tourist- magnet Mayflower II sailing ship, she took out the postcard.

“Dear Nadia,” she wrote on it. “Here I am in Plymouth, Massachusetts, covering a crime in cranberry bog country. There are two victims, but the age of the remains seems to eliminate Ellen.”

What a strange thing to write on a postcard! Liz shook her head.

She changed the period at the end of the second sentence to a comma and added, “fortunately, your pen pal remains much on my mind.” She turned over the card and examined it, then turned it over again. “On this card,” she continued, “you can see the bright red cranberries, as well as the colored leaves typical of an autumn landscape in eastern Massachu— ”

Abruptly, Liz stopped writing. She wished she had not sent DeZona’s photos to Cormac Kinnaird before studying them better, for suddenly she called to mind something in the wrong color family that appeared in the foreground of a couple of the photographs. Now she realized that when she had scrutinized the pictures to get a glimpse of the remains, she had not looked carefully at the out-of-focus elements in the photos’ foregrounds.

Signaling the waitress, Liz paid her bill and made haste to Forges Field Recreational Area. By the time she arrived there, she had to phone in the press conference story to the city desk, cursing the fading afternoon light all the while. With the story filed, she strode over to DeZona’s telephone pole. Standing at the base of it, she realized she needed to climb the pole to get the correct angle on the scene. The pole must be climbable if DeZona had managed it. But Liz was not so skilled, nor did she have the telephone company–issue climbing belt that had helped DeZona clamber up the pole. Giving up on scaling the pole, she moved her car next to it and stood on its roof. She saw nothing out of place in the scene. That was not surprising, since the car’s roof was nowhere near as high as DeZona’s perch had been.

If she could not look down on the scene from above, there was one more option: walk into the scene and look up. But how would she ensure that she did not get lost as dusk fell completely while she was in the hollow? Returning to the car, Liz grabbed an extra reporter’s notebook and a flashlight. Then, she stepped into the woods. When her car was nearly out of sight, she attached a page from the notebook to the branch of a tree at eye level. She marked more trees and shrubs this way as she worked her way into the depression from which the police had so recently removed the remains.

Liz made it to the base of the hollow—the place where the deer had taken their rest so close to those human bones—without seeing anything out of the ordinary on the way down. In the heart of the hollow, she paused and