I put my thumb to my mouth and bit out the thorn, spitting it off beside me. As my thumb bled, I wiped it along the side of my jeans, upset because it seemed everywhere I turned something worked against me.

I looked down at the stick I’d been holding, then lifted it up from among others, where it lay. Not a piece of underbrush or a dead twig from the jack pine. About six inches long with more thorns along the stem, and at the top a flower head twisted down, the flower brown and brittle.

A dead rose.

I lifted one and then another—six dead roses. Sorrow snuffled at what I held until I pushed his damp nose away and he went flying off. Roses. Maybe Crystalline and the others had brought them to lay where Marjory died. But the roses would never be this dead. These had been here a long time. And they weren’t under the jack pine but where the ground had sunken in and an almost perfect rectangle had formed.

I picked up the dead flowers. I knew I might be disturbing evidence, but I didn’t dare leave them there to disappear, or be carried off.

As I gathered the dead roses, one by one, Sorrow barked his welcoming bark somewhere down the path. I hurried, though I had no place to carry the dead flowers other than in my hands. I looked around, expecting Sorrow at my side, and was startled by a pair of legs standing behind me. I followed the legs up to the reddened face of a big man in his fifties watching me, frowning down through wire-framed glasses. The man was broad, stomach pushing hard at the belt of his chino pants. He wore one of those leather vests fishermen wore, stuck with hooks and flies. Sorrow jumped into wild, black-and-white circles behind where the man stood. It had taken me months to teach him not to jump on people. For a few seconds, as I knelt on the ground grasping a bunch of dead roses to my chest, I thought maybe I’d made a mistake. I could have used a good jumper about then.

“Are you in trouble?” the man, with graying hair sticking out from under a fishing hat replete with different colored flies, asked.

I shook my head. “Just looking into something …” I began then stopped, sighed, and sat back on my knees. I smiled up at the man, who took a few steps away from me.

“Isn’t this where they found that dead woman? I mean, right in here somewhere?” He pointed to the tree. “I read about it in the paper.”

I nodded.

He made a face. “Should you be doing …” He looked down at the ground.

“I’m the one who found her. I … eh … just came out on a hunch …”

“About what?” The man studied me. He had the face of a college professor, or a bank president saying no to a loan. It was one of those male faces that made you feel small: the principal chiding you for kissing a boy in the hall; the editor who wanted to know why your story was late.

“I took photographs when I was out here. There was something …” I reached for the photos on the ground, picked them up, but didn’t offer them to the man standing over me. He seemed about to ask.

“You’re fly fishing,” I said, turning the subject away from Marjory and from me.

He nodded. “May I have your name? This seems … well … odd, what you’re doing.”

“Emily Kincaid. With the Northern Statesman newspaper, out of Traverse City.”

“A reporter. Doing a story, are you?” His thick eyebrows shot up behind the rim of his glasses.

“I’ve been following the murder since she was found …”

“What do you mean, ‘murder’?”

“The woman I found out here, Marjory Otis, was murdered.”

“Yes,” he nodded, then nodded again as if thinking hard.

I picked up the roses. He only watched as I struggled to get off my knees, stand, then brush dirt from my jeans.

“Nice to meet you. Emily Kincaid, is it? You live around here?”

“Outside Leetsville,” I answered, nervous, feeling his presence as too massive. I was suddenly aware of the emptiness between the trees and the silence around us.

He nodded a few times. “Well, it’s back to fishing for me.” He didn’t turn, only stood staring at the ground where I’d been crawling.

“Me too. Gotta get going.” I whistled for Sorrow to get away from a hole where he frantically dug at a chipmunk.

On the way back to the Jeep, I turned from time to time to look over my shoulder. The man hadn’t gone back to the river, but followed me, keeping a short distance away. When I got to the road, I noticed there wasn’t another car along the sand trail I’d followed in. The man must have started upriver somewhere and walked down to Deward, or the other way, from outside Grayling. Here was another person in the woods with no visible means of transportation. I was uneasy, and happy I had Sorrow with me. Maybe he wasn’t a little female cop with a pistol tucked into her belt, but he was noisy and obnoxious enough to keep away all but the most dedicated murderer.

I dug my keys from the pocket of my jeans and glanced over my shoulder at the woods. He stood there, watching me.

I got in and locked the car doors immediately. I wedged the roses against the seat so they wouldn’t fly off, and I glanced up at Sorrow’s eager face in the rearview mirror. I was upset with him. He’d been such a welcoming committee. But that was Sorrow. You either got one that growled and made life hell, or a dog with bright button eyes, a shaggy black-and-white coat of all lengths, and big, splayed feet, who loved everybody.

A fisherman, the man had said. Only then did it register that he’d carried no fishing pole. What fly fisherman would have left his pole wedged under a rock along the river, hoping for a strike he wouldn’t be there to land? What about waders?

And what about a name? I’d never asked. He knew mine.