The next morning I stopped by the Hobby House before I headed to the marina. I found sheets of cheap brown cardboard used to back picture in a frame. the sheets were thirty inches by forty inches. I figured i need at least three of them to start.

From the Hobby House I drove to my new almost empty office. The marina had to be the most beautiful spot in the whole damn town. Too bad the view from my office was of the parking lot. It seemed that the lake view was much too valuable for an employee.

I looked out over the parking lot and tried to concentrate on the over night report from Carlton. Carlton was one of those rangers who had been a city cop who retired early. He was putting in time until his Social Security and Medicare kicked in. I learned from Carlton that buying private medical insurance was prohibitive. He informed me that he worked mostly for the city provided insurance. The salary for a ranger was just a little over minimum wage unless you had 18 years in like me. Even then it had required a lateral transfer to keep my salery.

The total of his report was a list of his rounds followed by the short entry, all okay. I would have been worried that he wasn’t doing his job, except that I checked the parking lot tapes from every location he was supposed to visit I found the ranger car pulling into the parking lot on time. He left the car to do his walking rounds just as he was supposed to do.

That took me until noon, what with all the tapes I had to view. After I got back from lunch, I called Jane to ask that she stop by between rounds. She made it in around 1:30.

“What’s up boss?” she asked.

“Nothing really, I just wanted to ask if you remembered the day you guys found Shanon in the lake?”

“Sure, how could anyone forget that. Did anything happen around that time at the campground?”

“Not that I remember. The patrolmen and later the detective asked the same thing. I never could think of a thing.”

“I would go back and read Carlton’s reports, but I know how they would read.”

“Yeah all secure,” she replied. It must have been a well documented fact that Carlton didn’t like to write incident reports.

“If you have some spare time, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to get the
campground logs for that week and make some calls. Verify that all those contact phone numbers are real.”

“Why do you think that she went in from the campground?”

“I don’t really. I mostly want to rule it out before moving on. After all we don’t want to run a refuge for riff raff.” I laughed as i said it. There were two possibilities, even if she were killed at the campground. One was that the killer was just that a killer. If he planned to kill when he checked in, then his sign in info would be worthless. The other and more likely was that something just went terribly wrong and a young girl died during a crime of passion. In which case everything would be in order. So even if Jane found everything in order, I would have learned something.

“Ordinarily during an early fall week there would be very few campground visitors, but it was trade show week. The campground wasn’t full but it was damn close to full,” Jane informed me with an excited look. She had spent the afternoon assembling the list and checking just a couple of the phone numbers. I found her at the spare desk after a couple of hours. I checked on her because I knew her shift would be about to end.

“I got the list ready and made a couple of calls between rounds. At this rate it will take me at least till the weekend to get them all checked.”

“Well don’t make it a top priority just yet. You need to keep your park ranger job as priority one. This is just a diversion. Hell everybody needs one.” I smiled as I returned to my office.

Later that afternoon I stopped at the Food Warehouse, on the way home from work. I filled one of their hand held baskets with frozen dinners. I still had a couple of bags of frozen dinner rolls at home in the freezer, so the only other thing on my list was a dozen eggs.

With my grocery shopping done, I headed home. Home was a very small double wide mobile home. Whoever had owned the beast before me had been a Martha Stewart wannabe. It looked like an average double wide on the outside, except for the house grade vinyl siding and the real stone foundation.

Someone had added a concrete stoop complete with metal awning onto the front. It made for a small porch of sorts. I had sat there with a cup of bad coffee more than a few times. The small lot on which the beast sat was landscaped much better than any of the other double wide lots around it. Almost all my neighbors had no front porch, but they had a rear deck, I had the porch but no real deck. The rear deck was just enough for steps and an uncovered landing. If I tried to enter there during a storm, I got soaked. I had been meaning to add an awning over it for the five years I had owned the place. I just never got around to it. After all it was clear more than it rained, so it just kept slipping my mind.

I used the cardboard panels to create my own Murder Board. I attached the cardboard to the upgrade drywall with push pins. Those I found in my desk drawer where I knew they would be.

My first attachment to the board was a picture of Shanon McDonald on the autopsy table.

The question I wrote on the board was, HOW DID SHE GET IN MY RESERVOIR.

Under that heading, I put the chart from the city’s hydro engineer. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but I had a good idea who could get me an answer. It was way too late to catch my cousin Davie in his office at the University, but I had his home number. I got voice mail so I explained that I needed an expert. I sent him the data I had and asked that he check around the campus for me. Since David owed me, I figured he would find someone.