Dolly marched ahead of me through the deep, yellow sand. The morning sky, reflected on the still surface of Sandy Lake, was streaked blood red and mauve. One of those “sailor take warning” skies, which always seemed to prove true. Probably rain by evening. I looked up at the clouds, their overhead direction and speed. Maybe a woods-cleaning, spring storm out of the west coming. The kind that brought old trees crashing down and wiped out my electricity for days. Everything part of that gigantic cycle, I had learned. Ebbs and flows. Nothing personal in the storm that took out my electricity. Just the old cosmic swing; events working toward a bigger goal than I would ever understand.

Dolly muttered over her shoulder at me, complaining that I was too slow. “Stop all that thinking and move,” she ordered. “Got to get around to the other side. We’ll comb the woods up the slope. Look hard at the shore. If anybody lived out here there’s gotta be something left of ’em.”

“Probably had the wrong lake. Nobody knew where this Mary really lived.”

“Yeah, well, all signs point to this one. Otherwise why sink ’em here?” She stopped, turned back, and let me get within ten feet of her before taking off again, throwing little bursts of sand back at me as the heels of her boots lifted and fell.

“What about a boyfriend of Mary’s?” I called after her. “If we’re looking for someone mad at both of them, makes sense it would be a jealous man.”

“Sounded like Chet was her one true love, from what Lena said.” Dolly shook her head as she went around the first cove, then moved beyond where we’d found the skeletons, toward an area of deep woods.

I trudged along at a slower pace. If she wanted help searching the woods on the other side of the lake, she’d have to let me go at my own speed. The one thing Dolly Wakowski would have to learn is not to push the unpaid help too far. Still, the distance between us grew as she marched on, head down, arms swinging, shoulders bent forward. She looked like a blue-backed gnome on a mission. I glanced at my own feet, in sandals, and wondered what the heck I was doing out here. Maybe I’d get a story—if we found anything. More than likely it was another of Dolly’s wild goose chases—like that abortive trip to Detroit.

The air cooled fast. My sandals filled with damp sand. I had to stop every so often to take them off, bang them together, slip back into them, and be off again.

It took half an hour to reach the wilder side of the lake where hummocks of grasses grew, and the thick trees blocked the uphill slope. I looked at the lake, a deeper mauve and purple mix of storm warning.

I caught up with Dolly where the trees grew thickest. The forest must have stretched for miles, out from the sand’s edge to I had no idea where. This was typical of land the oil companies owned up here. Hundreds of miles of forest crisscrossed by two tracks. Every once in a while there would be a pumping station or shed filled with equipment. At times men manned the various stations. Most were self-operated, the thick arm of a pump going up and down, throbbing, sucking oil and sending it along pipelines to the next station.

Dolly scanned the ground, walking slower. Her hands were caught together behind her back as she took small steps up into the woods, then down, leaving no area unsearched. I moved ahead of her, into the thick woods, and assumed her stance: hands at my back, head bent forward, feet shuffling through weeds and broken tree limbs.

In an open space among the trees, I came on what looked to be a cement pad for a garage or a shed. The grasses growing around it and through the large, crooked cracks were dull, almost blue in color. Everything looked much drier and sandier here. Beyond the cement pad, milkweed grew, and here and there a browned trillium. I thought about collecting the young milkweed pods and sticking them into my jacket pocket. I ran my fingers over one of the small, silky feeling pods and decided: no, I wasn’t a backwoods girl after all. I bent and more closely surveyed the ground around me.

“Hey, over here!” Dolly called from up the rise, a little ahead of where I stood. “Found something.”

“Me, too,” I yelled back. “A cement pad. Like maybe it was a garage …”

“Saw that.” Her voice, coming from among the trees, bounced off tree trunks, and got lost in the slight soughing of the pine boughs. “Got something up here.”

She stood next to a long row of vine-covered cinder blocks half buried in the ground. I could follow the line to where it turned a corner, then disappeared underground. We walked the course of blocks, turning with it, following where they disappeared, possibly covered over with sand years before.

“There,” Dolly pointed to a place farther into the trees. It was difficult to make out anything beyond a pile of charred timbers covered with dead vegetation, all dropped into what had once been a rough hole in the ground. I reached in among the burned beams and drew out the rusted remains of a lawn chair. Dolly tugged at what looked like a badly rusted pot. There were other things among the ruins, but nothing truly identifiable.

“This has got to be it. You bring your camera?” Dolly nudged me.

I pulled my digital Nikon out of my jacket pocket and snapped pictures from all angles, though I figured I’d have to come back to get good shots. The sky had already darkened so there was little contrast between trees and ground. And no shadow to differentiate the walls of the foundation from the burned wood. I pushed at a growth of fiddleheads and crouched as low as I could, to get perspective on the ruin. One darkened beam, sticking up from among the others, gave form to what had once been a house. But what did it mean that the place had been destroyed?

Dolly said she’d go to Gaylord and talk to Detective Brent. I handed over my answering machine tape for her to give him. “How about you go to a pumping station and see if you can find anyone who remembers this place, and who lived here?” she said.

I agreed to do that, but not until the morning. There was a storm on the way and I had Jackson coming for dinner. Maybe Dolly didn’t believe in having a life outside her police work, but I did.