"Boss," I repeated. "He owns Durbin Investigations. I'm not even licensed completely yet."

"He treats you like a partner."

"I'm just saying, I work with him. We're friends. I'm not going to screw that up with s.e.x."

"Oh, please," Violet said.

"What about you and Roland? Why were you at his place the morning of the wedding? I know, I know. You dropped by with a gift." Inspiration struck, one of those clear zingers from out of the blue you just know is true. "You didn't just stop in. You spent the night with him."

She didn't answer, and that was an answer in itself.

"Does Melinda know?" I asked. "Did she know then?"

She waved a hand. "They all suspected. How many times do I have to say it? Roland and Melinda weren't together. It's not like I swooped in and stole him away!"

"What were you and he fighting about?"

"Oh, you know." She flapped a hand at me, clearly uncomfortable reliving it. "The usual stuff. You know...what are we doing? Is this going anywhere? Do you love me?" She sighed. "I am so tired of that same scene. I've played it out so many times, I should get a lifetime achievement award."

Our waiter finally returned with the check. He asked me if I was all right and I said I was fine. Violet handed him her credit card, but after he left she didn't pick up the thread of her narrative.

It was hardly a revelation that she and Roland were seeing each other. With Violet, s.e.x seems to always be the crux of the matter. The signs had been there. The pa.s.sion she'd displayed in hitting Roland with the tray. The way she referred to him as her favorite ex-husband. The way she'd dismissed my Rol-Ex nickname. I mean, come on, that's funny.

"Roland's gone," Violet said into the silence that had developed, as if she were still coming to terms with the news. "I've been asking myself, 'what now?' What's next? How many chances do you get? It wasn't perfect between us, but it was good."

I hadn't credited her with really caring about him, I realized, which was maybe unfair.

"I called him. Looked him up to say h.e.l.lo." Her smile was ironic. "I'd been asking myself where I could meet men. It gets harder as you get older."

"It's always hard," I said.

"Yeah, well, you've got yours."

We left the restaurant in silence. I did remember my roast beef and Havarti sandwich from Dottie's as Violet dropped me at my car, which made me happy. I drove home lost in thought. Contrary to Violet's conviction, I did not have Dwayne.

As I headed up Iron Mountain Boulevard I nearly missed recognizing the pod of hooded teenage girls walking along the designated pathway. I wouldn't have at all, except two of them were hoodless in the rain. Dawn and a girl with longer hair who looked a lot like her. The sister.

There were several other girls in the group whom I thought I remembered from the evening before, though the cinched hoods worked like a disguise. Most of the girls were engaged in animated conversations, but Dawn and the sister walked along silently.

I drove past them, thinking hard. At the turnaround circle where Iron Mountain divides and sends you either to Lakeview Boulevard or Upper Drive, I circled all the way around to head back the way I'd come. This circle is one of those bright ideas from some transportation expert who crows about its incredible design. But it never quite works the way it's supposed to. n.o.body signals, n.o.body stops, n.o.body knows what the rules are. We all look at each other like hungry dogs, each waiting for the other to make a move. Every time I make it around the circle without incident, I count it as a win.

I drove past the girls again. It was going to take them a while to reach a road or turnoff point, so I zigzagged through the winding streets and screeched to a halt at Dwayne's from the back way. I ran inside. Dwayne was splayed on the couch-his injured leg stretched in front of him. The cowboy hat was off and his blondish brown hair was tousled. Binkster lay beside him and her head popped up when she saw me enter.

"I need Binkster. Quick," I said, ignoring my own reaction to Dwayne's unconscious s.e.xuality.

Binky leapt to her feet and wagged her tail upon hearing her name. But she didn't jump down from the couch.

"Come on. Come on," I said urgently to her. Reluctantly, giving Dwayne a longing look, she thunked down and toddled over to me. I swooped her up.

"Did you see Violet?"

"Just finished lunch. I'll tell you about it later. Bye."

I tucked Binks in her doggy bed in the Volvo, then drove back toward Iron Mountain like a maniac, slowing down before I approached the area I expected to find the girls. The girls were still moving as one, keeping close together, like an amoeba that sprouts a leg and then absorbs itself into it.

Driving more sedately, I turned toward Lake Chinook proper and parked on the street. I clipped Binkster's leash to her collar, cursed the rain again as I cinched the hood of my jacket, then headed in the direction they were coming from. Maybe the rain was a plus. With all that water, it was likely they wouldn't notice I was a decade older than they were. At least that's what I was hoping for.

Binkster didn't think much of the rain, either, and the wind lifted her ears from her head a little like the Flying Nun.

It was one h.e.l.l of a nasty day for a walk. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, dog owners head outside in all forms of weather. Dogs need to be walked. Maybe not all dogs. The little teeny ones work off enough energy just being wired and territorial. But big dogs and dogs with weight problems gotta get their daily const.i.tutional or they're just not happy and healthy. Hence, I see dog walkers out when the winds are typhoon force and the rain is a monsoon.

And dogs are a fabulous ice breaker.

The girls saw Binkster from a football field away. I heard the excited rise in pitch of their voices. The amoeba moved toward me more swiftly. Only Dawn and her sister lagged behind.

The girls swarmed on. The Binkster, petting her wet head, squealing with delight and horror when she propped her wet and grimy paws on them. But they didn't really care. I was asked tons of questions about her, then heard about every acquaintance, long-distant relative, and celebrity who also owned a pug. I told them her name and pretended I was bored out of my skull with my "dog-sitting" job. While I was dutifully answering, Dawn moved in, her eyes on Binkster. She looked at the dog, her face long, her eyes wet, from rain or tears, I couldn't tell.

Finally, she glanced up, her gaze half meeting mine, then zooming back as if yanked by force. "You're...?"

"Ronnie. How weird. I saw you last night, right?" I pitched my voice faintly higher than normal. It makes me sound younger. I hadn't bothered last night and I kicked myself for that.

"I guess." Dawn's eyes darted around the group, but no one seemed to be paying attention to our conversation except the sister. The rest of them were squatting down and petting the dog. Two were in a debate on who could hold her. I handed over the leash to a girl with short, blondish hair who didn't give a d.a.m.n about her clothes. She grabbed Binky and held her up, "oofing" at the unexpected heft.

"Is he your dog?" Dawn asked.

"I'm just kinda taking care of her," I lied. The less they knew about me, the better.

"Our neighbors have a wolf," the older sister said with a sniff.

"He's not a real wolf," Dawn said.

"He looks like a real wolf."

"Yeah?" I said. "What's his name?"

"Lobo."

Ah. At least now if I ran across the Pilarmos' dog during my investigation, I could yell its name and hope it would respond appropriately.

"So, your dad lives around here?" Dawn asked.

"Over that way," I said, waving my arm vaguely. "Do you have dogs?"

"Nope. We did have a cat but it got in a fight and its eye bugged out. Dad said the vet would charge a thousand dollars to close the eye permanently, so he left it as it was. He said the cat wasn't in any pain."

"Caesar looked like an alien," the sister said with a shudder. "I hoped he would die or run away and he finally did. Run away, anyway. He's been missing for about a year."

"Half a year," Dawn corrected. "He left on my birthday. This is my sister, Dionne," she added for my benefit.

"Hi," Dionne said without much enthusiasm. She ran a hand under her hair and flipped it away from her neck.

"Hi," I answered, tossing a look toward the girls still cooing over Binkster. The dog's gaze was pinned on me. Maybe it was time to rescue her.

"I'm glad Caesar's gone," Dionne said. "I hated that cat."

"Caesar was my cat," Dawn answered. "He's all I had. I miss him."

"You never took care of him."

"Yes, I did."

Dionne regarded her sister for a long moment. She seemed to want to argue the point, but there was some kind of overriding governor on her tongue, like she didn't want to get into a full-scale battle over an issue they were clearly on opposite sides of.

"I better get Binkster home," I said.

"Are you going to be around next weekend?" Dawn asked. "The game's away. I think we play Clackamas. But we always get together afterward."

Dionne's brows formed a line. "You're not going there again," she declared.

"I might be," Dawn retorted.

"Dad said not to make plans."

"No, he didn't."

"You've got things to do," Dionne said meaningfully. "You know you do."

"Oh, thanks. I have things to do, but you get to be with Dylan."

"You know what I mean."

"Whatever." Dawn cut her sister off. Dionne was clearly trying to give her a message, and it was p.i.s.sing her off that Dawn wasn't listening.

"Well, I'm not letting you go there again," Dionne said huffily. To me, she added, "They're all a bunch of delinquents, you know. And Keegan's the worst. I know he's all your big idol, but he's a p.r.i.c.k!"

"You didn't feel that way before he dumped you," Dawn said with a sly look from the corner of her eye.

"Yeah, well, I didn't sleep with him!"

The two girls stared at each other. It was Dawn who looked away first and she seemed utterly wounded and miserable.

"I'm going," she said stubbornly. To me, she said, "Are you?"

"I'll be there," I said, though I kind of wondered what the h.e.l.l I was doing.

Dionne gave me a hard look and I feared she would finally realize I was over a decade older. But she seemed to be responding more to her inner vision than her eyes. That's the great thing about teenagers; they're so self-absorbed you can get away with murder.

"You got a number? I'll text you," Dawn said.

"Okay." I was going to have to get better at it whether I liked it or not. We exchanged cell phone numbers and I inputted hers into my phone under DWDNE, code for Dawn Wilson Do Not Enter. I have this fear of losing my cell phone and having my friends, sources, allies and favorite restaurants discovered by some villain out to do them harm, or order pickup and not follow through. I'm pretty sure I'll be blamed somehow, and besides, I like codes. Sometimes I forget what they mean, but most of the time I'm okay.

I recaptured Binkster and we let the girls move on. Unfortunately, they were heading in the direction I planned to go and I didn't want them to start asking more questions about where my dad's house was, so I continued walking in the sleeting rain in the opposite direction for another quarter mile.

By the time I got back to my car my jeans were absolutely soaked. Bink's double coat of fur looked bedraggled, too. When we got back to the cottage I gave her a toweling-off, which is another one of her favorite games. This consists of me rubbing her hard with the towel and her grabbing it with her teeth, growling and trying to shake the life out of it. This is accompanied by much jumping and twisting. Very acrobatic for Binks.

I took a long, hot shower and thought about Violet. Okay, that's a lie. I thought about Dwayne. Violet's perception felt like an invasion of my secret, secret self. Clearly this self wasn't so secret. In fact, I feared this self might be out-and-out overt.

"How do I get over him?" I asked the warm, mist-fogged air.

I didn't want to like Dwayne as more than a friend. I really didn't. I wanted to be cool and in control and remote. That woman who wears only black and sneers and is mysterious, yet beautiful, in an extraordinary way. I wanted to be Ultra-Jane.

My landline rang as I was getting out of the shower, so I let it go to voice mail. My pulse jumped, however, because only three people call me at home anymore: Mom, my twin brother and Dwayne. My thoughts were circling that third possibility, and I felt annoyed at myself enough to refuse to listen to the message for a good ten minutes as a form of punishment.

At the end of the time I swore at myself for being so juvenile, then punched in my voice mail code. This is the same code as the one for my cell phone: 2222. A lot easier than the confusing anagrams I concoct for my friends' names.

But it wasn't Dwayne, it was Booth and his message was terse: "Call me."

Well, okay. Booth wasn't one for keeping in touch on a regular basis, so I found the command interesting, to say the least. I picked up my cell and punched in Booth's number, only to get his voice mail in return. Figured.

"You called?" I asked after the beep, then hung up.

A few minutes later my phone made that strange ring that had brought me awake the other night. Texting. I grabbed my phone and checked the messages, wondering if Dawn was already my new text message buddy. But the missive was from Booth. I was impressed as he's not in love with technology the way Dwayne is. In fact, I'd say he's on a par with my own skills.

need to talk to you. will call later. rbk RBK was for Richard Booth Kelly. There was something urgent in there, something unwritten, that sent worry gathering in the pit of my stomach. My twin and I have an uneasy relations.h.i.+p though we're connected deeply. I try to deny it, or minimize it, or laugh it off, but it's a true phenomenon, that twin thing. Booth and I aren't connected to the same degree shared by identical twins. I mean, those people are from the same egg and sperm, like the same person in two bodies, and therefore I figure it's like they share one brain. They're bound to have extra abilities, you know? Booth and I aren't like that, but we seem to have an awareness of each other that defies explanation. We understand each other, even if we don't each always like what the other one's about. It's that I know you thing that some people never seem to experience.

But for Booth and me, it sometimes works against us, like we're both battling for our own ident.i.ty.

I decided not to dwell on it. Whatever it was, he would explain all soon enough.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon making more phone calls. I didn't always leave messages. Don't want to freak my would-be sources out, like I'm a stalker or something.

I hit the jackpot late in the afternoon when Melinda suddenly answered the phone and agreed to my stammering request to meet with her. She couldn't make a date till later in the week, however, as Sunday wasn't going to work and she had the bake sale on Monday. Questions hung over my head. Bake sale? When I asked, she became wildly animated, telling me about the Lake Chinook Junior League's annual preholiday event. Would I care to come? We could talk afterward...? No problem, I told her, and we made a date for Monday.

I watched TV till midnight with Binkster snoring softly beside me. I fell asleep as if drugged and had trouble getting up the next day. The sky was dark and a light drizzle kept coming down incessantly. November in Oregon. I felt a pang of longing for Southern California weather that held me in its grip all of Sunday. In fact, I didn't leave the house. Binkster ate kiblets and I enjoyed some semistale Wheat Thins and tap water until dinner when I had the second half of my leftover Dottie's sandwich. I ate the first half for breakfast. The bread was a little wet and mushy on one side by then, so I ate it open-faced.

I called my mother. I gotta say, this is almost a first for me, initiating conversation. Usually I'm phoning her back after I've worked up the energy to engage in one of her convoluted conversations. But today the weather was making me blue, so I sent out a message to her and the warmer climate where I grew up.

Mom is all about her landline. She'll use a cell phone if she has to, but it's not her thing. She and I own a fourplex in Venice together, which is where all my money's tied up. The opportunity to purchase this fourplex occurred while I was still living in So Cal, working as a bartender. Through some w.a.n.gling, my mom found a way to horse the deal home. This is the property Dwayne keeps reminding me that I own and could sell, or use somehow, to buy my cottage. What he doesn't, or won't, understand is that I'm in this for the long haul with my mother. I like thinking I have this incredible nest egg. It makes the daily scrounging worthwhile. I'm thrifty-okay, okay, cheap-by nature, but I love knowing I have Mom and renters down South, a solid investment perking right along under my mother's watchful eye.

She picked up on the third ring. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Hi, Mom. It's Jane. How are you?"

A studied pause. "Is everything okay?"

"Everything's fine." I ignored the tacit worry I could hear forming inside her head like a distant roar. "It's really lousy weather here. What's it like down there?"

"Sunny. About seventy-two. Have you heard from your brother lately?"